How hard is it to be transparent with voters about public documents and spending tax dollars?
If you’re the current leadership of the Orange Unified School District, the answer is apparently: pretty hard.
Take, for example, the matter of mysteriously exploding litigation costs associated with a law firm, Tao Rossini, that the district contracts with.
Villa Park Councilmember and OUSD school board candidate Crystal Miles noticed a consent calendar item on the Board’s May 7 meeting agenda, giving another $400,000 to Tao Rossini on top of the $800,000 already spent on the firm in less than a year.
READ: Editorial: OUSD Board Again Shows Contempt For the Public
Miles went up during public comment and asked the Board members to pull the item for discussion and publicly explain the nature of the litigation and why the associated costs were ballooning.
Her request was ignored, and the Board approved the $400,000 without discussion.
In the meantime, Miles submitted a California Public Records Act request due to concern the agenda item description was changed after the vote; she wanted to obtain the language used in the agenda on the day of the meeting. Her CPRA was elaborate and extensive by design to ensure the district didn’t pull any shenanigans to avoid providing any incriminating information.
Typically, responses to Public Records Act requests are provided by Julie Robles, an executive assistant in the Superintendent’s Office.
Instead, Miles received a letter from the law firm of Fagen, Friedman & Fulfrost (F3 Law):
“Our firm has been retained by the Orange Unified School District (“District”) to respond to your request for records pursuant to the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”; Gov. Code §7920.000 et seq.).
Wow. That’s a lot of legal firepower for a PRA. In an e-mail to the OC Independent, the OUSD defended bringing in F3 Law, contending Ms. Miles’s PRA request was “broad and complex” and “specifically demands internal drafts, metadata, and communications between the Board, Cabinet, and legal counsel regarding contract strategy and pending legal matters…”, among other complaints.
Granted — but that begs the question of why Ms. Miles felt it necessary to file a “broad and complex” PRA? The obvious answer: she doesn’t trust the district’s leadership to be forthcoming.
The district’s criticism of Ms. Miles’s PRA is also threadbare. On May 27, OC Independent submitted a very simple and straightforward PRA: “Please provide for me the language of the agenda item description for Agenda item 11R for the May 7, 2026 OUSD Board meeting – as that agenda item description appeared on Monday, May 6, 2026.”
Basically, all we asked for was a PDF of a piece of paper – a request that could have been fulfilled in a day.
Instead, we got slow-rolled.
The district acknowledged our PRA within hours of getting it but then burned the legally allowed 10 business days to respond. On June 9 we got this email:
Regarding your public records request dated 5/27/26, the District is currently identifying all responsive documents.
Pursuant to Government Code § 7922.535, the District is exercising its right to an extension of time to respond to your request. This extension is necessary due to the need to search for, collect, and appropriately examine a voluminous amount of separate and distinct records as defined in Education Code § 35250 and related records retention policies.
The District requires this additional time to ensure a complete determination and to protect the privacy rights of students and staff where applicable.
We anticipate providing a further update or a production of records by June 22, 2026.
What? The district needs more time “due to the need to search for, collect, and appropriately examine a voluminous amount of separate and distinct records“? We asked for a single, recent, public agenda document!
It took nine business days for the district to tell us it was going to take them at least another nine business days to come up with a document they could produce in an afternoon.
Sure enough, at 3:50 p.m. on June 22, an e-mail arrived with a single document attached – from the supposed ocean of documents the district had to wade through. Here it is: the agenda packet for the May 7, 2026 Board meeting.
It took the district nearly a month to cough that up that.
So yeah – Ms. Miles’s mistrust wasn’t and isn’t misplaced.
And while this PRA foot-dragging was going on, yet another $400,000 for Tao Rossini was placed on the consent calendar for the June 4th Board meeting agenda.
Again, Ms. Miles took to the dais during public comments to forcefully ask the Board to please finally provide an explanation for the exploding legal bills from F3 Law.
“This is a large sum of money that is on the consent calendar for a specific legal expense,” Miles said, “So I am going to ask again if one of you would please pull this so that we can have an understanding – it is now up to $1.6 million.”
“I know that you all know that I know that you can pull this without breaking any kind of attorney-client privilege…there is stuff you can say and let us know what is going on within the realm and the scope of the law without doing anything that’s going to jeopardize or limit the ability to continue whatever is going on,” Miles continued.
“I don’t know why you guys want to keep this on the consent [calendar] but $1.6 million within a year is a lot of money,” Miles told the Board. “And I don’t know why none of you would hold each other accountable and say, you know, we should pull this.”
“You’ve now increased this four-fold.” said Miles. “Please pull this item and have it explained, because if something is happening in the district then we have a right to know.”
In response to this growing public pressure, the district leadership finally relented and pulled the item.
But listening to Superintendent Rachel Monarrez’s explanation, one would think they were being forced to disclose atomic secrets.
Monarrez acknowledged the significant costs and said it was necessitated by litigation stemming from 2020 in which the contractor is alleging the district caused a delay in completing a building project.
Then she launched into a monologue claiming that even this grudging bit of transparency could jeopardize the District’s legal position in this litigation.
“We share this information with the public solely in the interests of transparency, and without waiving any privileges and confidentiality” said Monarrez. “We’re walking a fine line because generally when legal matters remain pending and active like this current matter, information such as law firm billing, invoices, and cost is confidential due to the attorney-client privilege and because such revelation could reveal or provide insight into the district’s strategy.”
That was the big secret: the litigation has been going on for years, but now it has reached the trial phase so Tao Rossini’s billable hours are increasing.
Why was that so hard to say? Why didn’t the Board or Monarrez disclose that weeks earlier when questions arose, instead of adopting a bunker mentality? All they accomplished was feeding the perception the District had something to hide.
Furthermore, it’s difficult to take seriously her concerns that disclosing this information would tip off the other side to the OUSD’s “legal strategies.” Since the case is entering the trial phase, both sides’ legal bills are going up – and disclosing that fact to OUSD constituents doesn’t provide the district’s courtroom opponents any special insight into the OUSD’s legal strategies.
This foot-dragging and stonewalling is part of a pattern exhibited by the current district leadership.
This is the same district that basically conducted a rigged hiring last summer when it brought Jacqueline Perez in as “Chief Communications and Strategy Officer” – posting the job opening only briefly and then scheduling interviews a single business day after the job posting closed. The fix was in from the beginning and no other applicant had a shot.
This is the same district that just created a brand-new “Deputy Superintendent for Business Operations and Communications Strategy” out of thin air and appointed Perez-Chaidez to the position – despite the fact she’s been with the district for less than a year and doesn’t have a business operations background.
There was no competitive job search. No explanation to the public for creating the position. No discussion by the Board.
This is the same Board that refused to explain to the public why they gave themselves a 400% pay raise earlier this year – a silence they have steadfastly maintained.
Think about it. Think about the effort it took to push the District to disgorge a simple agenda packet. If the district leadership makes it so difficult to obtain something so simple, what else are they hiding?
Only Board President Dr. Stephen Glass showed an interest in ensuring this kind of stonewalling doesn’t occur in the future.
“In the interest of transparency, I think it would be appropriate to develop a Board policy to address matters similar to these – not exact, but similar – so that in the future when matters like this come up, we can have a description of what’s happening so that there isn’t public interest without an explanation,” Glass suggested to Monarrez, who agreed and will bring a draft policy back in September.
Then Kris Erickson chimed in.
“Just to reiterate, this is an item that goes back years, it’s gone through multiple boards,” she said in that trademark condescending drone.
“It’s also the way that every Board that I’ve ever been a part of has handled these,” she continued in an irritated tone, as if she was bugged about having to explain these petty details. “They’re always in consent. If we want to change that, that’s fine. But this is the way it’s always been handled for precisely the reason you’re talking about – this is existing litigation. Obviously those discussions happen in closed session, so at the risk of making sure that we’re complying with the law, and ensuring that we’re not over-sharing — it’s always been done this way. If we want to change it – great – but this is nothing different than what’s been different in the past,” she smarmed.
“Just to be clear about that,” Erickson concluded.
What is crystal clear is that Erickson had nothing to say about this easily explained issue until public pressure forced the matter to the surface. Then, she had a lot to say about why she doesn’t think the Board needs to explain things like this to the public.
And being lectured by Erickson about the Board’s duty to keep closed session confidential and not “over-share” is a little much since it was Erickson who was called out by the OC District Attorney three years ago for disclosing closed session conversations. Or maybe that was OK because she was trying to embarrass her conservative Board colleagues.
At any time during the last couple of months, Erickson – who is no shrinking violet – could have easily addressed this issue without jeopardizing whatever the District’s legal strategy is in this matter. But she chose not to – as did her Board colleagues, with the late but welcome exception of Dr. Glass.
Again, it shouldn’t be this hard to pry information out of a Board that prides itself on being “transparent.”
