A new report from the San Diego County Grand Jury slams the controversial decision by the Grossmont Union High School District’s board not to renew a contract with a nonprofit that provided mental health services to students.
The Grand Jury found the decision was “not based on performance concerns or misconduct,” but intended to restrict services for LGBTQ kids. The watchdog group also found the move was potentially harmful to kids, among other findings.
The report is just the latest bump in what’s been a wild couple of years for the district that have included lawsuits alleging discrimination against staff, fishy hires followed by rapid resignations, raucous pushback against layoffs and more. The board has been at the center of many of the swirling controversies.
Let’s rewind: In 2023, Grossmont Union’s school board decided to ditch San Diego Youth Services, a nonprofit whose mental health clinicians were embedded in the district’s campuses and who provided suicide prevention services to district students.
The contract was relatively uncontroversial, at least for a while. Then during the public comment period at a July 2023 Grossmont Union board meeting, a school board member from another district named Anthony Carnevale showed up to rail against San Diego Youth Services.
Carnevale, a trustee for Cajon Valley Union School District, has made a name for himself as a conservative firebrand who trashes organizations like San Diego Youth Services, which he’s referred to as part a so-called “groomer cartel.”
The program he objected to is called Our Safe Place and, as the name suggests, is meant to be a safe space for trans or questioning youth to consult with health providers or seek mental health support. Grossmont Union had not contracted with San Diego Youth Services to provide that program in its schools. But that didn’t stop Carnevale from suggesting the program could expose students to information about “top surgery” and “transitioning.”
Later at that same meeting, the district board voted to reject the renewal of the contracts with San Diego Youth Services.
The Grand Jury found that the board ditched the contract “solely due to a misrepresentation about referrals for services to transgender students.” They also found that Carnevale’s contention that another program offered by the nonprofit was not evidence based was “easily disproven with minimal fact-finding.”
In a Facebook post, Carnevale called the report a “partisan hit piece.”
“This is how Western values are subverted in America – by appointed panels of mostly former government employees, who use theatrics, selective outrage, and taxpayer-funded lawyers to bully representatives voters actually chose,” Carnevale wrote.
The findings: The decision not to renew the contract with San Diego Youth Services left Grossmont Union students without mental health services or a suicide prevention program for months, the Grand Jury found. That gap likely caused student harm and compromised the district’s ability to achieve the goals laid out in its own accountability plan. That plan specifically called for more mental health supports.
The report lays out nearly a dozen steps the district should take. They include recommendations that the board actually follow its own policies – from ones that call on officials to ensure equal opportunities for all students to others that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Grandy Jury advised the board create a Citizen Advisory Committees that can solicit stakeholder input and help rebuild trust. It also recommended the board participate in annual ethics and governance trainings.
Grand Jury reports are not binding documents, but the agencies that get investigated are required to issue a response within 90 days. District spokesperson Collin McGlashen told the Union-Tribune the district would.
He also downplayed the report, telling the paper it represented differing opinions on the board’s decisions rather than evidence of wrongdoing.
“Reasonable people may disagree with those decisions. However, disagreement with a board decision is not, in and of itself, evidence that board policies, bylaws, or the Education Code were violated,” McGlashen wrote in an email.
Einstein Supe Resigns, Fired Principal Sues
Longtime Albert Einstein Academies Superintendent David Sciarretta resigned last week. Sciarretta’s resignation caps off more than a year of turmoil, during which a series of controversies – ranging from the abrupt firing of one of the charter chain’s principals to allegations of improper use of funds – fueled calls for his removal.
Still, the hits keep coming.
Yesterday, Einstein was hit with a lawsuit filed by the elementary school principal Sciarretta fired last year, Margaretta Bouterse. It accuses Sciarretta and the charter school of retaliating against a whistleblower and wrongful termination.
Bouterse’s firing hit the Einstein community hard: Over the course of her more than two decades at the school, she had developed close relationships with many of the staff and families. For many in the community, her unceremonious firing over Thanksgiving break was one more reason to rally for Sciarretta’s removal.
At the time, Sciarretta claimed Bouterse was fired because she did not hold an administrator credential. He also claimed the school had somehow not realized this fact in the nearly 12 years she’d been employed as a principal – during all of which he served as either executive director or superintendent.
In the lawsuit, Bouterse tells a very different story: She claims the fact that she did not have an administrative credential was common knowledge and that during her tenure no one had ever asked her to obtain one.
Instead, Bouterse alleges, Sciarretta fired her because she was unwilling to go along with his efforts to bust Einstein’s newly-formed teachers union. The efforts began even before the union was certified, with Sciaretta pressuring her to “talk to [her] people” and tell him which teachers could be convinced to oppose the union, Bouterse writes.
After the union was certified, Bouterse claims that Sciarretta’s pressuring escalated – now with the intent to decertify the union. Bouterse writes that she chose not to go along with Sciarretta’s efforts out of fear they may constitute “unlawful de-unionization activities.”
During this period, which stretched into fall 2025, the community’s pushback against Sciarretta continued to grow. Board meetings began to turn into raucous affairs filled with public commenters ripping into Sciarretta. Bouterse alleges that during this period Sciarretta became more agitated and said he was tired of “getting his ass handed to him” at board meetings. He pressured “leadership team members to write letters publicly supporting him,” the lawsuit alleges.
In the days following a particularly tense meeting with Sciarretta, Bouterse writes that she was contacted by Einstein’s human resources representative who asked whether she had a credential. She claims she “understood the call as an attempt to manufacture a basis to terminate her.”
Over the following weeks, Bouterse claims that Sciarretta pressured her to resign, which she refused to do. Ultimately, he fired her.
One detail in this part of the lawsuit caught my eye: Bouterse writes that during Sciarretta’s efforts to persuade her to resign he “attempted to intimidate plaintiff into compliance, warning her that a journalist at the Voice of San Diego would ‘skewer’ her if the credential matter became public and that parents would come after her regarding her salary.”
On a personal note, I will say it’s pretty unexpected to see a lawsuit allege that my reporting was used as a threat against someone. It’s especially unexpected because this seems like such a ham-fisted bluff by Sciarretta. Ultimately, as the many stories I’ve written about Einstein show, Sciarretta is the one who ended up over the coals.
Can we please let the schools get back to teaching, and leave the social services to the organizations that are actually decent at providing them? The majority of our kids can’t read or do math at grade level, even in our best schools. Fix that first, and then we can talk about adding extra services back in.