EL CAJON, CALF. – Dehesa is one of the smaller school districts in San Diego County. But for a district with barely a few dozen students on campus that are not affiliated with charter schools, the amount of power concentrated in one family is anything but small.
Three of Dehesa’s five trustees are members of the White family: Board President Cindy White, her husband Richard White, and their son Dustin White. Now the board is poised to vote on a key new position – Student Information and Compliance Specialist – and, according to multiple sources, the leading candidate is alleged to be Cindy’s daughter, Richard’s step-daughter, and Dustin’s sister: Stacey Howe.
Sources familiar with the district describe Howe as underqualified for the job on paper, struggling in her current role, and heavily reliant on trainings the district has to keep paying for. Several say bluntly that this hire looks like a job being delivered by a board majority to a family member who would never have made the cut in a fair, competitive process.
East of 52 is publishing this story to lay out the records, the job description, and what people who have worked with Howe say about her performance, and to ask: is Dehesa’s board about to hand one of the district’s most sensitive data jobs to the board president’s daughter – over better-qualified candidates – simply because she’s family?
The Job: Dehesa’s Data Backbone
The position the board is now considering is not a playground aide or part-time helper. The Student Information and Compliance Specialist is, by the district’s own description, the person responsible for the accuracy of almost every critical student-level data point Dehesa sends to the state, to charter partners, and to auditors.
According to the official job description approved July 28 and board-approved November 12, 2025, the Specialist is responsible for:
Collecting, maintaining, and reporting student data across multiple systems, including the Student Information System Synergy, CALPADS, SEIS, enrollment, attendance, and student records.
Entering and verifying data for state-mandated reporting including CBEDS, CALPADS, PFT, SEIS, and reports “for affiliated charter schools.”
Monitoring chronic absenteeism, preparing attendance letters, and processing independent study agreements in compliance with state regulations.
Maintaining district immunization records and health documentation.
Supporting grant-funded programs with documentation and compliance reporting.
Ensuring “full compliance with local, state, and federal reporting mandates” and maintaining “high standards of data integrity and timely reporting.”
Required knowledge and skills include:
Hands-on experience with student information systems (Synergy, Aeries, PowerSchool, etc.).
Understanding of CALPADS, CBEDS, SEIS, and other state reporting requirements.
Knowledge of enrollment/attendance regulations and independent study rules.
Familiarity with FERPA and student-data confidentiality.
The ability to interpret rules, regulations, laws, and district policies and to communicate effectively with families and staff.
The district also lists a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent combination of education and experience in student data management, school operations, or related administrative work) as a requirement.
In plain language: this is the person who keeps Dehesa’s student records lawful, accurate, and audit-proof. If they fail, the fallout lands on students, on special-education services, and on the district’s budget.
Who Is Stacey Howe?
Stacey Howe is not a new face on campus. According to multiple people familiar with her work history, Howe previously worked in student care at Dehesa for barely a year. One former employee, and supervisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they would not recommend her for a job at a school based on that performance and her performance reviews.
After stepping away from the workforce for a time to have children, Howe returned to Dehesa as an temporary substitute instructional aide around October 2024. Sometime after March 2025, Howe was then placed in the position of a temporary District Administrative Assistant. That is title appears in her email signature in a August 2025 enrollment exchange reviewed by East of 52. Although, according recent statements, it has been asserted Howe was placed in the position of substitute Student Information and Compliance Specialist in April 2025.
In that email chain, a parent new to East County wrote to the district after attending a tense Dehesa board meeting. The parent asked detailed, specific questions:
Who is the best contact for new enrollments?
What documents are required?
How long does the process take and is there space available?
What supports exist for children with FASD and ASD?
Who to talk to about special education, IEP transfers, evaluations, and related services?
Whether what they saw at the board meeting – being admonished mid-meeting for asking about enrollment – was “typical” or just “a tense night.”
According to the parent, Howe took five days to respond and, when she did, replied with a brief message containing a generic link to the online registration form and a single follow-up question about district boundaries. The email did not address the outlined questions about services, supports, timelines, or how to avoid inadvertently disrupting a meeting again. It did not acknowledge the parent’s concern about how they had been treated in the boardroom.
“It was just a brush-off,” the parent said. “I asked all these questions because I have kids with extra needs. I got a link and a question about my address. Especially as a foster parent, my concerns come with huge accountability for me, while attempting to finalize an adoption, I am accountable to this process, and if I a not doing my part to make sure that my kiddos will have a good placement, that could affect my ability to further the adoption process.”
For a frontline administrative role that is supposed to welcome families and help them navigate enrollment and services, multiple sources describe that style of response as typical: slow, incomplete, and often deflective rather than helpful.
“She Has Nothing”: What Colleagues Say About Her Fit for the Specialist Role
Current and former staff who have worked alongside Howe say the gap between the job Dehesa has advertised and the skills Howe actually brings is stark.
One source with direct knowledge of Howe’s day-to-day work compared her abilities to the official job description and concluded:
“She has nothing. In the first set of job requirements she can only do 6, 8, and 11. The rest she has no experience doing and 3 I know she isn’t doing – IT is. Skills she has none; they have to keep paying for trainings. The bachelor thing is new – that was never needed in prior years. That is probably the only thing she has that gets her in.”
Looking back at the district’s own list of Principal Duties and Responsibilities, that comment is pointed:
Item 6 is “Processes student enrollments, transfers, withdrawals, and changes.”
Item 8 is operating standard office equipment (copiers, phones, etc.).
Item 11 is using standard computer programs like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
Left out of that, according to the source, is almost everything that actually makes this a specialized, compliance-heavy role:
Managing Synergy or other SIS platforms at a systems level.
Handling CALPADS, CBEDS, SEIS, and other state reporting.
Monitoring chronic absenteeism and independent study compliance.
Maintaining cross-district and charter data accurately.
Understanding FERPA and student-data confidentiality beyond a basic training.
Multiple people familiar with Howe’s work say she has been heavily reliant on outside trainings and back-end support from IT and other staff to perform even portions of her current administrative job – and that shifting her into the Specialist role would require “a significant amount of training just to get her to baseline.”
None of those sources question that Howe likely meets the bachelor’s degree checkbox – they believe she holds a degree in accounting or a related field. Their concern is that Dehesa appears ready to treat “has a bachelor’s” and “is the board president’s daughter” as substitutes for the hands-on, technical experience the district itself says is needed to keep its data accurate and legal.
A Family-Run Board, A Family Member’s Job
In most districts, a hire like this would still raise questions: Was the process fair? Was the best candidate selected? At Dehesa, the situation is more extreme.
The board that will vote on the Student Information and Compliance Specialist position is:
Cindy White – Board President and Howe’s mother.
Richard White – Cindy’s husband, Howe’s step-father.
Dustin White – Cindy’s son, Howe’s brother.
And two members of the Pham family, a husband and wife duo:
Sharon Pham
Christopher Pham.
That means a majority of the board is allegedly immediate family to the candidate.
Dehesa’s own conflict-of-interest bylaw, Board Bylaw 9270, requires trustees to abstain from personnel matters that uniquely affect their relatives. Children, spouses, and siblings fall squarely within that definition. If the policy is followed, Cindy, Richard, and Dustin should publicly disclose their alleged relationship to Howe and recuse from any discussion or vote on her hire.
Whether they will do that is an open question. In practice, the same family has already exerted tight control over Dehesa’s governance, finances, and personnel decisions – pushing out or sidelining staff who questioned district practices, according to multiple sources who spoke with East of 52.
Those sources describe a pattern: experienced employees are removed or made to feel unwelcome, positions are restructured, and then, quietly, roles open up that align with the skills (or aspirations) of White family members or their allies. In that context, Howe’s candidacy for this specialized data position looks less like a coincidence and more like a culmination.
Dehesa’s Own Nepotism Policy Says This Isn’t Supposed to Happen
What makes this hire more than just bad optics is that Dehesa already has a written Employment of Relatives policy on the books – and the board is now poised to drive straight through it.
Board Policy 4112.8/4212.8/4312.8 – Employment of Relatives states that the Governing Board “desires to maximize staff and community confidence in district hiring, promotion, and other employment decisions by promoting practices that are free of conflicts of interest or the appearance of impropriety.” It then lays down a bright-line rule:
“The Board prohibits the appointment of any person to a position for which his/her relative maintains management, supervisory, evaluation, or promotion responsibilities and prohibits an employee from participating in any decision that singularly applies to any of his/her relatives.”
For this policy, “relative” expressly includes an individual’s children and brothers and sisters, as well as the equivalent family of a spouse or domestic partner.
Applied to Dehesa’s current board, that means:
Board President Cindy White is barred from participating in any decision that “singularly applies” to her daughter, Stacey Howe.
Trustee Richard White is barred from participating in any decision that singularly applies to his step-daughter.
Trustee Dustin White is barred from participating in any decision that singularly applies to his sister.
And more fundamentally, the Board is not supposed to appoint anyone into a position where their relatives have supervisory or evaluation power – exactly what happens when the board majority is the candidate’s immediate family, sitting at the top of the district’s management chain.
If the White family majority moves ahead with approving Howe’s job despite this policy, they won’t just be ignoring community expectations about nepotism. They’ll be acting in direct tension with Dehesa’s own rules, adopted in 2018, that were written to prevent exactly this scenario.
The Process: Who Else Applied?
The EdJoin posting for the Student Information and Compliance Specialist job went live on October 31, 2025, with a November 14 deadline and a listed salary of $58,009–$70,568 for a twelve-month, full-time position. The posting explicitly stated that the job description was “pending Board approval.”
By November 12, the board had approved that description. On the November 25th special meeting agenda it has listed an item to approve an offer of employment for the position.
What the public still does not know:
How many people applied for the job.
Whether any current staff with stronger SIS/CALPADS experience were passed over.
How the candidates were ranked and what criteria were used.
Whether interview panels raised concerns about Howe’s lack of direct experience.
Whether references — including supervisors who say they would not recommend her — were contacted or ignored.
If the White family majority proceeds to vote on Howe’s hire despite the conflict-of-interest policy, the public will also not know whether any trustee pushed back internally or whether the board simply closed ranks around the president’s daughter.
Why It Matters
On paper, this is about a single job in a tiny district. In reality, it is about something larger:
Whether Dehesa’s governance is about students or about the White family.
Whether staff who work hard, gain expertise, and follow the rules will ever have a fair shot at advancement when they are competing against blood relatives of the board majority.
Whether the district’s own conflict-of-interest rules mean anything when they collide with the interests of the people who wrote them.
The Student Information and Compliance Specialist will handle the data that drives funding, accountability, special-education services, and compliance across Dehesa’s programs and affiliated charters. If that work is mishandled, it’s not a private matter – it affects public money and vulnerable students.
Putting someone in that role who, according to multiple colleagues, lacks the required skills and is already struggling in a simpler administrative post is not just a bad HR call. When that someone is the board president’s daughter and the decision is being made by her mother, step-father, and brother, it becomes a test of whether Dehesa still functions as a public institution at all.
Ongoing Records Requests
East of 52 is currently pursuing answers about how this hire was made. We have filed a California Public Records Act request seeking the total number of applicants for the Student Information and Compliance Specialist position, the anonymized scoring sheets or rating rubrics used to evaluate candidates, and records showing the minimum qualifications and experience of each candidate, with all personal identifiers appropriately redacted. Once those records are produced, this article will be updated to reflect what the documents show about the competitiveness and fairness of the process.
Call for Information
East of 52 is continuing to investigate this potential hire and the broader pattern of family control over Dehesa’s governance and staffing.
If you:
Applied for the Student Information and Compliance Specialist position,
Interviewed for it,
Served on an interview panel, or
Have first-hand knowledge of how this hiring decision was made,
we want to hear from you. Current and former employees, parents, and community members can reach the newsroom confidentially to share documents, emails, or other records relevant to this story.
The public deserves to know whether Dehesa is filling critical jobs based on merit – or whether, in the smallest school district in the county, who you’re related to now matters more than whether you can do the job.
