Thirteen Points of Spin: How Dehesa’s Superintendent Tried to Rewrite the Record

EL CAJON, CALF. – If you’re trying to make critical reporting disappear, sending a thirteen-point threat letter on district letterhead is a strange way to do it. That’s what Dehesa School District Superintendent Bradley Johnson chose to do—accusing my coverage of being “false” and “defamatory,” not as a private citizen, but as the top official of a public agency, invoking the weight of the district itself. That letter is now a public record. Like everything else in this story, it deserves to be read, line by line.

The article he wants to discredit examines how one of California’s smallest elementary districts has built and sustained an enormous charter footprint, how that model operates financially, what its oversight really looks like from the outside, and how its governance choices square with Dehesa’s documented A3 charter history. His response attempts to relabel that analysis as defamation. It doesn’t succeed. What it does do is prove a familiar point: when public officials try to swat away criticism instead of addressing it, they don’t bury the story—they trigger the Streisand effect and guarantee a closer look.

I have already answered his letter formally under California Civil Code section 48a, point by point. This “equal prominence” article walks through the same ground in plain language. It shows where I tightened phrasing for technical precision, and where I declined to move an inch because the substance of the reporting is supported by Dehesa’s own records, the California School Dashboard, land-deal documents, tax filings, and what parents and community members have lived on the ground.

Clarification is not concession. Updating a term to match the exact funding mechanism, or sharpening a description so it tracks the record even more closely, doesn’t mean the original concern was wrong. It means I’m willing to be exact. Johnson’s letter tries to spin those refinements into an admission that the article itself was flawed. It wasn’t. If anything, his attempt to rewrite the record has only underscored the core problem: once you lay Dehesa’s own numbers, decisions, and history side by side, the story tells on itself.

Issue No. 1: The Money Question: ADA, In-Lieu Taxes, and Oversight Fees

If you read Superintendent Bradley Johnson’s demand letter, you’d think the whole case turns on a single word: ADA.

In my original article, I wrote that Dehesa “took in ADA funding for roughly over 13,000 students—more than 98% of whom were not enrolled in its local school.” Johnson now insists this is “false” because, technically, Dehesa does not retain charter ADA; it routes in-lieu property tax payments and collects a statutory oversight fee. In his telling, the district is just a neutral pass-through, pushing numbers across a ledger with no real financial stake in the charter headcount.

That framing is convenient. It is also beside the point.

At no point did I claim Dehesa was scooping up every dollar of charter ADA or that Method and the other charters had simply handed over their operating budgets to a tiny K–8 district in East County. No one who understands even the basics of California school finance believes a charter gives “all their money” to its authorizer; that would be absurd. What I described—accurately—is the financial reality of the arrangement: Dehesa’s charter-related revenue is keyed to charter ADA. The more charter students are run through Dehesa’s books, the more public money touches the district, and the more it earns in statutory oversight fees.

Whether you call that money “ADA funding,” “in-lieu property tax,” or “a portion of in-lieu property tax calculated off ADA,” it is still public education funding generated by those charter students, and Dehesa still benefits from that volume. You don’t build a portfolio of roughly 13,000 charter students off a resident base of fewer than a hundred children out of pure civic charity. You do it because there is a financial upside to authorizing and keeping those charters under your umbrella.

Johnson’s letter tries to narrow the discussion down to the plumbing: the exact pipe label on the money as it flows through. But for families and taxpayers, the mechanics are secondary to the structure. The structure is simple: each charter student brings with them an ADA-based allocation, those students are attached to Dehesa as the authorizing district, and Dehesa is paid—by percentage—for the privilege of supervising them on paper. The district does not educate the overwhelming majority of those students in its own classrooms, but their existence in Dehesa’s charter universe still generates revenue and justifies land deals, joint-use projects, and a sprawling remote footprint that would be unthinkable for a neighborhood elementary school of this size.

Put bluntly: Dehesa and its charter partners have a symbiotic financial relationship. Charters get an authorizer willing to carry a massive, geographically diffuse enrollment with relatively thin public-facing scrutiny. Dehesa gets a stream of oversight-fee income and the political cover to pursue facilities and land acquisitions far beyond what eighty on-campus students would ever require. That was true before Johnson sent a demand letter, and it is still true after he has tried to relabel the revenue.

If Johnson wants the record to reflect that the dollars are routed as in-lieu property taxes and that Dehesa retains an oversight fee rather than a full ADA allotment, that clarification is easy to grant. It does not change the underlying fact that the district’s finances rise with charter ADA for thousands of students it will never teach in its own building. The incentive is baked in. That is the point of the reporting, and no amount of semantic hair-splitting in a threat letter alters that reality.

Issue No. 2 – SoCal Scholars, Method Sports Academy, and what that enrollment paragraph was actually doing

Johnson’s second objection is built on a misreading of a paragraph that was doing something very different from what he now claims.

The original line he quotes is:

“And that number is conservative. When adjusting for charters and programs that were shifted or rebranded to create the appearance of increased in-seat enrollment—including ‘programs’ like the Method Sports Academy and SoCal Scholars Virtual—the real ratio is closer to 13,377 charter students to 80 local resident students.”

In his letter, he recasts this as if I had accused Dehesa of falsely reporting “butt-in-seat” ADA for independent-study and virtual programs. That is not what I wrote, and it is not what the records show.

What that paragraph was doing was separating out Dehesa’s actual neighborhood school from the charter-aligned pipeline that now carries the Dehesa name.

On Dehesa’s own November 12, 2025 enrollment report, the district breaks out enrollment into three buckets:

• Dehesa Elementary & Middle School – the traditional brick-and-mortar campus.
• SoCal Scholars Academy – a Dehesa-branded virtual program, operated in partnership with charter-affiliated schools.
• Dehesa Method Sports Academy – a flex-based program on the Dehesa campus, tied into the Method charter ecosystem.

The bottom table, “Enrollment of all Programs,” rolls those together into a single district total. That is useful for accounting. It is also exactly how a tiny elementary district ends up telling a story about “hundreds” of students, when its actual neighborhood school – the Dehesa Elementary & Middle column – still shows roughly eighty kids.

That is what my “80 local resident students” figure refers to: the children enrolled in Dehesa’s traditional school program (including interdistrict transfers), not the hundreds of additional students in SoCal Scholars Academy and Dehesa Method Sports Academy. The entire point of that sentence was to control for the pipeline programs and say, in plain English: if you remove the charter-aligned programs and feeder arrangements from the enrollment report, the core brick-and-mortar school is still only serving about eighty students.

Within that context:

• SoCal Scholars Academy is a Dehesa virtual program. I originally mis-named it “SoCal Scholars Virtual” and corrected that name. It is not an on-campus ADA program; it is part of a charter-linked virtual pipeline that now lives under the Dehesa umbrella and counts toward district enrollment.
• Dehesa Method Sports Academy is different. It is a flex-based program on the Dehesa campus; some of that enrollment is, in fact, “butt-in-seat” ADA. It was originally presented in public records as a CDE school site that would open under the name “Method Sports Academy.” Just before that opening, the listing shifts: “Method Sports Academy” as a school site is replaced on paper by Method Summit Academy, while “Method Sports Academy” survives as a Dehesa-branded program instead of a stand-alone school.

What I described as programs “shifted or rebranded to create the appearance of increased in-seat enrollment” is that exact maneuver: a last-minute name change that allows a CDE-listed school to surface as Method Summit Academy while preserving “Dehesa Method Sports Academy” as a program on the Dehesa campus – all folded into Dehesa’s enrollment tables alongside SoCal Scholars Academy.

That structure does three things at once:

1. It expands Dehesa’s practical charter footprint – more Method-aligned activity on or through a campus serving a very small neighborhood population.
2. It ties those programs and students into Dehesa’s books, whether through ADA, in-lieu property tax routing, or percentage-based oversight fees.
3. It makes a failing, undersubscribed neighborhood school look busier on paper than it actually is, because the district can point to total “enrollment” that includes hundreds of virtual and program students whose day-to-day experience is not that of a traditional Dehesa K–8 student.

That was the point of the paragraph Johnson now attacks. I did not say Dehesa codes every Method-related student as on-campus ADA. I did not say SoCal Scholars Academy is a physical, on-site program; it is not. What I said – and what the district’s own November enrollment report confirms – is that once you strip away the SoCal Scholars and Method Sports program numbers, Dehesa’s brick-and-mortar school is still only serving about eighty kids, and yet its charter-aligned pipeline and rebranding decisions continue to grow.

Johnson’s letter tries to convert that into a different claim: that I accused Dehesa of inventing “butt-in-seat” ADA that does not exist. That is his spin, not my language. The article, as clarified, accurately describes:

• the existence of SoCal Scholars Academy as a virtual Dehesa program embedded in a charter network;
• the on-campus nature of Dehesa Method Sports Academy;
• the last-minute rebranding of “Method Sports Academy” as a CDE school into “Method Summit Academy”; and
• the fact that, without those charter-aligned pipelines, Dehesa’s actual neighborhood school remains a tiny, low-performing campus with roughly eighty students.

Readers are entitled to see that structure for what it is and to decide for themselves whether it looks like a district serving its local kids first, or a tiny district staying financially relevant by anchoring a much larger charter machine.

Issue No. 3 – “Overrunning,” displacement, and what I actually meant

Johnson’s third complaint lifts a single sentence out of an earlier draft and tries to turn it into an accusation that Dehesa is housing children in unsafe, illegal structures:

“The upcoming census data from October 1, 2025 has been requested via Public Record Request, and once those numbers are available, an article will be drafted to reflect the true numbers for the 2025–2026 school year, including the brand new charter school Method Summit Academy, which also utilizes Dehesa’s school campus for their education, overrunning and displacing resident students out of their own classrooms, into makeshift classrooms.”

In his letter, he insists that resident students have not been “displaced,” that no one is being taught in “makeshift” spaces, and that my wording suggests unsafe or unlawful conditions and violations of student rights. That is not what I was alleging, and it is not how the article now reads.

I am using “displaced” in its ordinary, Merriam-Webster sense: “moved from the usual or proper place”—not as a technical term from the Education Code. In other words, I am describing kids being shifted out of core spaces that historically belonged to them, and a campus being reconfigured around charter-aligned programs, not asserting that Dehesa has violated a specific facilities statute.

After reviewing Johnson’s objection, I removed the forward-looking reference to future census data and the word “makeshift,” and rewrote the passage to say exactly what is happening and who is saying it. The article now states:

“Parents report the campus is being repurposed for additional instruction—citing the media center and other non-traditional rooms—amid the charter presence on site. They say the resident student population feels ‘displaced,’ crowded out of core spaces, and deprioritized on their own campus.

In a separate clarification, Superintendent Bradley Johnson stated that the current on-campus count of approximately 80 Dehesa-enrolled students includes interdistrict transfer students, not solely children who lawfully reside within Dehesa’s boundaries. That admission leaves the number of true resident students unclear and, in parents’ view, reinforces their concern that a very small resident population is bearing the brunt of on-site charter activity.”

That is a precise reflection of what families have described in interviews and public comment: not children stuffed into unsafe sheds, but children losing access to the heart of their school as the campus is carved up to accommodate additional programs and charter-related instruction. Libraries, media centers, and other shared spaces are being pressed into service as instructional rooms; parents see their kids moved out of what they considered “their” spaces and into secondary locations, while charter-affiliated activity grows around them. They use the word “displaced.” My job is to report that experience, not to retrofit it to Johnson’s preferred legal framing.

Johnson’s own clarification actually deepens the concern. When he confirms that the approximately 80 on-campus Dehesa students include interdistrict transfers—not just children who lawfully reside inside the district’s boundaries—he shrinks the core resident population even further. That means an even smaller number of true neighborhood kids are sharing their school with an expanding charter ecosystem and the on-site Method programs. In parents’ view, and in mine, that makes the displacement they describe more serious, not less: a tiny resident population is bearing the brunt of co-location decisions it did not make.

The disagreement here is simple. Johnson wants to treat any description of “displacement” as an accusation of formal eviction or a facilities code violation. I am using the word the way ordinary English speakers do: students being moved from their usual or proper spaces, and families feeling that their children have been pushed to the margins of their own campus. The law does not require that a child be taught in an illegal structure before a parent is allowed to say, “My kid feels displaced.”

For purposes of equal prominence, the record is now clear: the loaded shorthand “makeshift classrooms” has been removed; the revised passage attributes the sense of displacement explicitly to parents and ties it to specific, checkable facts about how campus space is being used; and I state exactly what Johnson confirmed about the 80-student count and why that matters. What I have not done, and will not do, is rewrite the story to say resident families are perfectly content and on-site charter expansion has no impact on their children’s day-to-day school experience. That would be false.

Issue 4 – Eighty Kids, Hair-Splitting, and the Non-Flex of the Year

Johnson spends an entire numbered issue on one word: “resident.”

In the original piece, I wrote that Dehesa “operates a fully functional school site that adequately serves its resident student population — now just 80 students (as of 10/8/2025 enrollment report).” His demand letter pounces on that, insisting the 80-student figure includes interdistrict transfers as well as resident kids, and therefore my wording is supposedly “false” and “misleading.”

Let’s be very clear about what just happened there.

A superintendent of a public school district, authorizing charters for roughly thirteen thousand students, devoted an entire section of a legal threat to the distinction between:

• “about 80 resident students,” and
• “about 80 total brick-and-mortar students, some resident, some interdistrict.”

That’s the “gotcha.”

When he raised that point, I did what responsible journalists do: I went back to the actual enrollment report, confirmed the breakdown, and tightened the line in the article. It now says what his own letter insists on:

Dehesa currently operates a single campus serving approximately eighty total brick-and-mortar students who are not affiliated with Method Sports Academy or Method Schools, and the superintendent confirms that this number includes interdistrict transfers.

That is not a retraction. That is me handing him his own sentence and stapling it into the story.

And once it’s in, the picture gets worse for him, not better. Because now the math isn’t just “a tiny district with 80 on-campus students.” It’s:

• Eighty kids in the traditional Dehesa program, total;
• Some unknown subset of those are actual Dehesa residents;
• Yet the district is structuring land deals and expansion as if it were bursting at the seams.

If your best correction is, essentially, “Actually, not all 80 kids even live here,” that is not the exonerating moment you think it is.

The entire point of the original line was to anchor the scale: when you strip away the charters, pipelines, and branded programs—SoCal Scholars, Dehesa Method Sports Academy, the Method Summit rebrand—what you’re left with at Dehesa’s brick-and-mortar campus is a very small traditional school. Roughly eighty children show up in person who are not enrolled in Method/charter-aligned programs. That’s it. That’s the core.

Johnson’s “correction” doesn’t touch that core. It just forces him to admit, on paper, that even that already tiny number includes kids imported on interdistrict transfers. In other words: the true resident base is smaller still.

And that goes straight to the real question he keeps tiptoeing around:

Why is a district with fewer than a hundred on-campus students, some of whom don’t even live in the district, behaving like a growth district in desperate need of more land—while simultaneously hosting and partnering with charter operations serving more than thirteen thousand students?

You can swap “resident” for “total brick-and-mortar.” You can underline “includes interdistrict transfers” three times. None of that changes the substance:

• Dehesa’s neighborhood school is tiny.
• Its charter footprint is massive.
• The facilities narrative makes sense for the charter ecosystem, not for eighty kids and a handful of transfers.

So yes, I adjusted the sentence to spell out exactly what Johnson wanted readers to know: that even his cherished “80” is padded with non-residents. If anything, that clarification tightens my original point. It doesn’t rescue his argument; it exposes how weak it was to begin with.

Issue 5 – The “Facilities Need” That Magically Appears When Method Walks In

On paper, this one looks simple: Dehesa has about 80 brick-and-mortar students on its campus, a number that includes interdistrict transfers. That’s not my estimate; that’s from the district’s own enrollment reporting as of 10/8/2025, and Johnson himself confirmed that those ~80 students are not all residents but a mix of local kids and transfers.

Eighty students. One fully functional elementary campus. No public facilities study showing overcrowding, no formal finding that the existing site cannot serve that population. On its face, there is no organic facilities “need” here. A district with 80 students does not suddenly wake up and discover that it must acquire more land unless something else is driving that decision.

That “something else” is Method and the charter ecosystem Dehesa has chosen to wrap around itself.

When you look at the actual sequence of decisions, the pattern is hard to miss. On one side, you have a tiny brick-and-mortar student body that easily fits on the existing campus. On the other, you have Method Sports Academy operating on campus, Method Summit Academy standing up as a rebranded CDE charter under Dehesa, and additional programming and joint-use concepts layered onto the same footprint. Then, conveniently, land acquisition and “joint-use” expansion steps appear—steps that make very little sense for a neighborhood school of 80 but make perfect sense if your real growth engine is charter-affiliated programming.

And this isn’t just vibes or speculation; the cost-sharing paperwork says the quiet part out loud. Under the site-acquisition agreement, Method front-loads the money for the new campus—covering 100% of the land purchase and Phase 1 build as an interest-free advance. Once Dehesa taps state School Facility Program money or other financing, the district reimburses Method for half of those costs and moves into a permanent 50/50 ownership and cost-sharing position going forward. Phase 1 alone is budgeted in the seven-figure range. In other words, a district with roughly eighty non-Method students and declining enrollment is signing up to finance half of a brand-new athletics campus whose stated purpose is to house the “Athletics Programs” that bundle Method’s charter students together with a sliver of Dehesa kids. The growth they’re building for is charter growth. The bill, however, is shared fifty–fifty.

Johnson’s letter tries to smooth this over with the line that facilities expansion “serves a combined and growing population” of interdistrict students and charter students, and suggests I should acknowledge that it “addresses both the district’s growing interdistrict and charter student populations.” Read that carefully. That’s not a refutation of my point; it’s proof of it. He is admitting, in his own framing, that facilities decisions are now being justified by a blended population in which charter-affiliated students are a central piece of the equation. That is exactly what “charter-driven” looks like in practice.

Strip away the Method relationship and its feeder programs and ask a basic question: if Dehesa had only its traditional brick-and-mortar students—including the interdistrict transfers it already educates on site—would anyone be talking about buying additional land and building out a second location? There is nothing in the public record—no overcrowding finding, no facilities report, no enrollment surge—that suggests the answer is anything but no. The pressure for expansion shows up only once Method’s programs, charters, and joint-use concepts are layered onto that tiny base.

That is the distinction I’m drawing, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist just because the superintendent prefers a more flattering spin. Legally, Dehesa is allowed to educate interdistrict transfer students and to host programs it chooses to run. No one is disputing that. The issue is one of priorities and incentives: when 80 on-campus students are enough to run a neighborhood elementary on the current site, but the district is chasing land deals and joint-use arrangements that make sense only in the context of a charter pipeline, it is fair to say the “growth pressure” is charter-driven, not neighborhood-driven.

You can call that “a combined population” if you like. I’m going to call it what it is: a small rural district hitching its facilities agenda to a charter machine, then insisting the resulting expansion is somehow about the needs of 80 kids who already fit in the building they have.

Issue 6 – “Footing the Bill” While the Dashboard Slides into the Red

Johnson’s sixth complaint is basically: How dare you say residents are footing the bill or that education is declining; we’re LCFF-funded and the data don’t show that.

Let’s walk through what’s actually happening.

Who pays, and for what

Dehesa is an LCFF state-aid district. That doesn’t mean local families aren’t “footing the bill.” It means their kids are the bill.

Every Dehesa-enrolled student shows up in Sacramento as ADA and generates LCFF dollars. On top of that, charter ADA drives in-lieu property-tax flows and the 1–3% oversight fee. When Dehesa agrees to pick up half the tab on a new joint-use site that exists because of charter growth, it is choosing to spend those LCFF and charter-tied dollars on land and buildings that primarily serve the charter ecosystem, not the 80-ish kids who already fit on the existing campus.

So yes: Dehesa families “foot part of the bill” in two ways at once:

• as state taxpayers funding LCFF and in-lieu streams for this whole experiment, and
• as parents whose children’s per-pupil dollars are being steered into a land deal charter growth demanded, instead of into smaller class sizes, reading intervention, or basic enrichment on the campus those children actually attend.

You can call that “leveraging LCFF.” I’m comfortable calling it exactly what I wrote: residents footing part of the bill for a charter-driven expansion.

“Declining education” isn’t an opinion; it’s the state’s own numbers

Johnson also insists that talking about “declining education” is defamatory because, in his telling, the Dashboard doesn’t back it up. The problem for that argument is the Dashboard.

Look at Dehesa’s performance before and after his tenure starts. In 2019, Dehesa was already below standard, but the numbers were at least in the same ZIP code as recovery:

• ELA: about 38 points below standard, color-coded Orange
• Math: about 39 points below standard, also Orange

Fast-forward through his time as superintendent. Covid wipes out a couple of reporting years, then the Dashboard comes back—and Dehesa’s scores don’t climb, they crater. The most recent reports show:

• English language arts now roughly twice as far below standard as 2019 (around 70-plus points down), in the Red band.
• Mathematics more than 100 points below standard, also deep Red.

That isn’t “holding steady.” That’s a system sliding backwards while the person in charge insists everything is fine.

Layer onto that what families actually see: long-standing traditions pared back or cancelled, a literacy night standing in for the Halloween carnival, and a former special-education director telling parents, point-blank, that “Dehesa kids can’t read.” Put those pieces next to the Dashboard trend and you don’t get a portrait of a school on the rise. You get exactly what I wrote: a declining educational experience for the handful of Dehesa kids still in the building.

Dollars follow charters; consequences land on kids

While those scores sink, Dehesa is busy:

• tying itself more tightly to a charter pipeline,
• agreeing to pay half of a new joint-use campus that exists because of that pipeline, and
• pouring staff attention into managing that ecosystem instead of fixing the fundamentals on a single small campus.

LCFF and in-lieu dollars are finite. When you commit them to a land deal primarily justified by charter growth, you are making a choice about who gets shorted. The students whose reading and math scores have dropped into the red aren’t the ones getting the expansion. They’re the ones absorbing the opportunity cost.

Johnson can litigate wording all he wants, but the combination is straightforward:

• A shrinking neighborhood school population,
• Dashboard indicators moving the wrong direction under his watch, and
• Public dollars and leadership bandwidth flowing toward charter expansion instead of turning those numbers around.

If that’s not “footing the bill” for a “declining education,” I’d love to hear what phrase he thinks the state’s red warning lights are supposed to signal.

Issue 7 – A3, “lack of scrutiny,” and why the comparison lands

Johnson really hates one line in particular: the part where I say that then–San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan attributed A3’s success, in large part, to a lack of regulatory scrutiny, and that the overlap between that scandal and Dehesa’s current situation “appears more than coincidental.” He calls that a “direct link” to criminal fraud and insists Dehesa now has “one of the most rigorous and transparent charter oversight systems among small school districts in California.”

Let’s be clear about what I actually wrote, and what I’m actually comparing.

Summer Stephan did not say A3 was a story about clever pedagogy gone wrong; she said it was a story about thin oversight. Fraud flourished where authorizers were small, documentation was spotty, and nobody with actual authority was asking hard questions in public. That’s the baseline.

Now look at Dehesa’s current charter portfolio through a parent’s eyes, not a press release. For multiple charters and affiliated sites that list Dehesa’s address or use Dehesa facilities, there are many missing or buried documents that are required to be available, audit reports by the same audit company with no checks and balances. Required agendas, minutes, and meeting recordings under Education Code § 47604.1 and SB 126 are often missing from charter sites or buried in ways that require digging through years of PDFs to piece together a paper trail. In some cases, tax filings show up late or not at all in the usual public databases.

That is not what “rigorous and transparent” looks like from the outside. That’s what “trust us, we have processes” looks like.

Johnson’s letter leans heavily on the fact that Dehesa, as a district, gets its own annual audit under § 41020 and has internal oversight procedures. Fine. No one is saying there are literally zero policies in a binder somewhere. The point is that, on the public record, the oversight posture still looks remarkably thin for a district that helped incubate A3 and now sits on a charter footprint that dwarfs its own student body. If you’re going to brag about being a model of transparency, the minimum expectation is that a parent or taxpayer can click a website and actually see the audits, minutes, and recordings that prove it.

So when I say the current situation “appears more than coincidental,” I am not accusing Dehesa of secretly rerunning A3’s billing schemes. I am saying that the conditions the DA flagged—small authorizer, huge remote footprint, gaps in visible scrutiny—are present again, in a district that should know better. That is a comparison about oversight culture, not a charge sheet.

Johnson’s preferred narrative is that any mention of A3 plus Dehesa equals defamation. That’s not how this works. When your district was literally on the A3 organizational chart, when your name shows up in the prosecution’s story of where oversight failed, you don’t get to put that history in a vault and then demand no one ever compares your current practices to the warning signs you ignored the first time. You certainly don’t get to do that while basic public-facing documents for your charter portfolio are still missing, late, or buried.

If Dehesa’s charter oversight is truly “one of the most rigorous and transparent” systems in the state, there is a very simple fix: post every charter audit, every required board agenda, every set of minutes, and every meeting recording in a place where the public can actually find them without a treasure map. Until that happens, the comparison to A3’s lack of scrutiny isn’t just fair—it’s the obvious frame.

Issue 8 – “Meaningful Corrective Action” That Looks a Lot Like Business as Usual

Johnson bristles at my line that Dehesa “appears to have taken no meaningful corrective action” after A3 and insists the district has “enhanced financial controls,” “revised charter oversight protocols,” and “new board policies” to prove it.

Here’s the problem: if those corrective actions are real, they’re hiding in the same place as half the charter audits—because the public still can’t see them in any coherent, accessible way.

From a parent or taxpayer’s perspective, here’s what is visible:

• A tiny elementary district with an extreme charter-to-resident ratio.
• Multiple Dehesa-authorized charters and affiliated sites that either don’t post independent audits at all, or bury them so deeply you have to click through years of agendas and minutes and hope you guess the right meeting.
• Required agendas, minutes, and recordings under Ed. Code § 47604.1 and SB 126 that are spotty, hard to locate, or only discoverable if you already know exactly what you’re looking for.
• Tax filings that are late or missing in the usual public databases.
• The same audit firm serving both the district and multiple charters it authorizes, which may be legal but does nothing to reassure anyone that the “checker” is truly checking the people who pay the bill.

Layer on top of that what actually happens at the board table: day-of agenda edits, key backup documents dropped shortly before a vote, parents filing Brown Act complaints, and community members having to file Public Records Act requests just to obtain material that should have been straightforwardly posted in the first place. I’ve sat through those meetings. I’ve done the scavenger hunts. That’s not what a clean break from an A3-era failure looks like.

Johnson’s answer is basically: trust us, we’ve got policies. My answer is: if “meaningful corrective action” happened, it somehow skipped the part where the public can tell.

And that goes straight to the heart of the disagreement. In his telling, any tweak to an internal procedure counts as “corrective.” In mine, meaningful corrective action for a district that helped incubate one of the largest charter frauds in state history would look like:

• freezing or dramatically scaling back charter authorizing, not expanding it;
• stepping away from the authorizer-as-revenue-engine model, not doubling down with more charters and joint-use land deals;
• cleaning up Brown Act practices so parents aren’t catching agenda changes the afternoon of the meeting;
• publishing every audit, tax return, agenda, minute, and recording in a way that’s actually navigable to a normal human being.

What Dehesa has done instead is scale up the same basic blueprint: more charter footprint, more shared infrastructure, the same lean, opaque oversight posture, and more pressure placed on the 80-ish brick-and-mortar kids whose LCFF dollars help underwrite it.

Johnson waves around Milkovich and claims that my phrasing—“appears,” “suggests”—turns opinion into defamation. That’s not how Milkovich works. I’m not hinting at secret facts. I am spelling out the record in plain English: missing or buried audits, hard-to-find meeting materials, shared auditors, charter expansion, land acquisition, and my own experience having to chase basic documents after Brown Act violations. From that, I draw a conclusion: read strictly through the public record, Dehesa’s “corrective action” looks ceremonial, not substantive. Readers get the same facts and are free to agree or disagree. That is exactly the kind of opinion based on disclosed facts that is protected.

He also suggests that my failure to call him before publishing shows “reckless disregard.” Again, no. There is no legal duty to give a public official veto power over criticism before you run it, especially when the criticism is based on the district’s own minutes, agendas, contracts, and filings. If anything, his letter confirms the point: every time he defends the model, he does it by describing the same structure I’m criticizing—tiny district, massive charter footprint, thin visible oversight—as if rebranding those choices as “enhanced controls” changes what they are.

So, no, I’m not going to revise this into a story about heroic post-A3 reform just because the superintendent wants a participation trophy for adopting a few new policies while expanding the very system that created the problem. From where the public sits, Dehesa has not taken corrective action commensurate with its A3 exposure. It has scaled up the model and polished the talking points.

If that stings, there is a simple remedy: stop operating like a charter hub, stop playing games with agendas and document access, and start making real, visible changes that prove the oversight culture is different this time. Until then, calling the current posture “meaningful corrective action” is spin. I’m not obligated to repeat it.

Issue 9 – A3, Nick Nichols, and the Comparison Johnson Really Wants to Avoid

Johnson spends a surprising amount of energy on two things in this section of his demand: whether Herbert “Nick” Nichols should be called a “founder,” he founded the charter school networks, and resigned amid the A3 Charter Scandal, and was found to have controlled the finances as the sole vote on multiple charters, as well as  took loans from tax dollars that required repayment, close to $1 Million in loans in total. And secondly, whether saying Dehesa “eerily mirrors” A3’s model means I’m accusing the A3 conspiritors of running a criminal enterprise today.

Let’s untangle what actually matters here.

The A3 prosecutions laid out, in painful detail, how a network of virtual charters used small authorizers with thin oversight to build enormous, far-flung enrollment. The core ingredients were simple:

• a tiny district willing to sign off on multiple charters,
• huge numbers of students who never set foot on that district’s campus, and
• an oversight system that looked fine on paper but, in practice, left big gaps in audits, governance, and public transparency.

Sound familiar? It should.

Dehesa today is a very small district with an outsized charter footprint. It authorizes and hosts programs that serve thousands of students who will never attend its little neighborhood school. Public-facing oversight is thin: audits and tax filings for some Dehesa-authorized charters are missing or hard to locate, board agendas and minutes don’t consistently link to complete records, and the same audit firm appears on both sides of the table. Revenue streams, meanwhile, are tied far more to authorization and oversight fees than to teaching eighty kids in a brick-and-mortar classroom.

Those are facts drawn from Dehesa’s own public record.

That is what I am comparing to A3. Not because I think Johnson is secretly re-running the A3 criminal playbook, but because the structure and incentives look alarmingly familiar:

• a very small authorizer overseeing very large, mostly remote operations;
• gaps and opacity in publicly accessible audits and charter records;
• financial rewards tied to signing, renewing, and managing charters rather than instructing local students.

Johnson’s letter tries to turn this into a debate over job titles. Was Nichols technically a “founder”? Was he merely a “key executive”? Outside of the defamation footnote gymnastics, no one in the community cares. The public remembers A3 as a giant charter fraud case that flourished where oversight was weak. The precise HR label on Nichols’ business card doesn’t change what the state investigation and subsequent charges proved or how they said it happened. Nichols ultimately resigned amid the scandal, and had huge repayment of advances and loans tied to tax dollars. The named key executives, though, did face a criminal trial. Whether Nichols was aware of the full breadth of the A3, is truly between himself and the other key executives, the public will never truly know the answer to that question. However, as the founder of Inspire and the charter network in question, the public has asserted that as a key executive, it isn’t outside of the realm of plausibility that he might have known something.  

So I tightened the language. The article now describes key executives prosecuted in connection with A3, and it strips out the “eerily mirrored” line. What remains is more precise and, frankly, harder for Johnson to dodge:

Dehesa’s current authorizing model—tiny district, vast off-site charter footprint, lean public-facing oversight, program rebrands and co-locations—echoes patterns documented in the A3 charter scandal.

That is not a casual swipe; it is a direct, record-based comparison. And I spell out exactly what I mean so there’s no mystery for Milkovich to chew on:

This is a comparison about structure and incentives, and oversight culture, not an allegation of criminal conduct.

Johnson’s fallback is to say Dehesa “operates within the requirements of California law.” Even if we accept that at face value, it misses the point. A3 also operated for years under the noses of agencies that were, on paper, applying the law. The question for a district with Dehesa’s history is not, “Can you point to a statute you technically meet?” It’s, “Why would you rebuild the same kind of environment—tiny authorizer, massive remote footprint, thin visible oversight—that a major fraud case just taught the entire state to be wary of?”

If Johnson doesn’t like A3 comparisons, there’s an obvious solution: stop constructing a charter empire that looks structurally like the one A3 exploited. Until then, the similarities are newsworthy, they are grounded in his own public record, and I am well within my rights to say so plainly.

Issue 10 – If This Isn’t the A3 Model, It’s Doing a Very Good Impression

Johnson’s tenth complaint is about tone, not truth. He’s upset that I described Dehesa as dusting off the A3 “playbook” and retooling the same model: extreme charter ratios, thin visible oversight, and shared infrastructure with charter partners. According to him, that language “implies unlawful conduct” and ignores what he calls one of the “most rigorous and transparent” oversight systems among small districts in California.

Set the adjectives aside and look at the structure.

Start with the numbers. When I pulled countywide data, Dehesa sat at roughly 98% charter enrollment by percentage—effectively tied with Spencer Valley and above Warner, Borrego Springs, Julian, and even San Diego County Office of Education. I dug into those other high-charter districts. After a lot of research, none of them presented the same combination of red flags Dehesa does: an A3 history, a huge off-site charter footprint run through a tiny elementary district, missing or hard-to-find audits and records for some authorized charters, a shared-auditor setup, a land deal tied to a charter partner, and a home campus Dashboard that has slid backwards under the current superintendent.

In other words: high charter percentage alone isn’t the problem. Dehesa’s particular version of high charter percentage is.

That is where the A3 comparison lives. The A3 prosecutions laid out a simple formula: small authorizers, enormous remote enrollment, revenue tied to authorization rather than instruction, and oversight that was technically present on paper but thin in practice. Dehesa today is a small authorizer with roughly 13,000 charter students attached to its name and fewer than a hundred kids in its own classrooms. It routes large charter-related sums through its books, collects oversight fees, shares facilities and now land costs with its charter partner, and still struggles to keep its own District Dashboard out of the red.

You can call that “fully compliant” if you like. I call it a structural replay.

Johnson’s answer to all of this is essentially: we follow the Education Code, we get audited, therefore stop comparing us to A3. But compliance with the minimum statutory floor is not the standard for meaningful oversight, especially for a district that was already burned once. A3 also filed paperwork, submitted reports, and sat through audits—right up until prosecutors showed the public how little those rituals meant in the face of thin, deferential authorizing.

What has Dehesa done differently in spirit, not just in formatting? It has authorized and renewed charters. It has deepened its relationship with Method. It has moved toward a land deal where an 80-student neighborhood school pays half the cost of a new site whose logic only makes sense in the context of charter growth. It has continued to approve charter items on agendas where supporting documents appear late and discussion is perfunctory. Meanwhile, its own students’ reading and math scores have eroded into the red.

That’s not what “we learned our lesson” looks like. That’s what “we kept the revenue engine and changed the stationery” looks like.

So no, I am not saying Dehesa is currently running A3’s criminal scheme. I am saying that, from any honest public vantage point, the incentive structure and oversight culture now in place look uncomfortably similar to the conditions A3 exploited: tiny district, vast remote footprint, lean public-facing oversight, financial rewards tied to authorizing volume, and local students who increasingly appear to be an afterthought in their own district’s planning.

If Johnson wants to prove this is something fundamentally new, the path is simple: cap the charter footprint, disentangle land and facilities decisions from charter expansion, put Dehesa’s own kids at the center of every major choice, and make every audit, agenda, minute, and recording for every authorized charter easy for the public to find and review.

Until that happens, calling this structure a post-A3 “replay” isn’t reckless. It’s an accurate description of what Dehesa has chosen to build.

Issue 11 – The White Family Supermajority and Why That Matters

Cindy White didn’t just happen to be in the room during the A3 era; she was running the room. She was board president while Dehesa was an A3 authorizer, signing off on charters, contracts, and renewals while one of the largest charter frauds in state history was growing under her watch. When the scandal finally hit daylight, contemporaneous coverage shows her declining comment. There was no public reckoning, no resignation, no acknowledgement that Dehesa’s oversight had failed. She simply stayed in the chair.

Fast-forward to today and nothing about that power structure has meaningfully loosened. Cindy White is still board president. Her son now sits on the same five-member board. Her current husband sits there too. Three votes out of five, all from one family, and the Phams, the other husband and wife duo hold the other two board positions, in a district with a notorious charter history and a charter footprint that dwarfs its own resident enrollment. That isn’t some abstract “appearance of impropriety.” That is a built-in supermajority controlled by a single family name, and the other family duo to boot.

Do I know what is said around their dinner table? No, and I don’t need to. The Brown Act exists precisely because the public is not supposed to have to guess whether a majority has pre-cooked decisions in private. When a single family controls a majority of the votes and parents are already alleging Brown Act complaints, watching same-day agenda edits and late-posted meeting material appear just in time to bless charter moves, it is not “speculation” to say the structure is unsound. It is common sense.

That is why I use the word complicit. Not because Cindy White has been charged in the A3 case, but because she has chosen, repeatedly, to stay at the center of the same model that burned this district once and is now being scaled up: presiding over A3 as board president, declining to step aside afterward, approving charters and land deals, and doing it all while her own family holds a controlling bloc. You do not get to claim clean hands and fresh leadership when you never actually let go of the wheel.

Cindy White has now been on the Dehesa School Board for roughly twenty-three years. The root of the word trustee is trust. After A3, after years of extreme charter ratios, after a board stacked with members from her own family, whatever trust once existed has been steadily eroded. In a district with Dehesa’s history, keeping the same board trustee in place for more than two decades isn’t stability; it’s a warning sign.

To be clear, I am not accusing Cindy White or her family of criminal conduct. I am saying, based on public records, meeting behavior I’ve witnessed, parents’ documented complaints, and the simple math of three votes in one family, that this board is not structured to earn public trust. It is structured to protect its own decisions. In a post-A3 district with Dehesa’s history, that alone makes her a central part of the problem. I just wonder, is it the health insurance or the monthly stipend they get that motivates them to stay on the board?

Issue 12 – “Money With Accountability” That Isn’t

Strip away the acronyms and the spreadsheets and Dehesa’s charter model comes down to this: enormous charter head-counts, tiny home district, and a lot of money moving through a district office that doesn’t educate most of the kids on whose backs that money rides.

California’s structure lets authorizers like Dehesa collect oversight fees and route charter-related dollars through their books for students who will never set foot in Dehesa’s lone elementary school. With roughly 13,000 charter students attached to its name and fewer than a hundred brick-and-mortar kids on its campus, that means a very large financial footprint wrapped around a very small school. On paper, the fees are “for oversight.” In reality, very little of that structure is visible to the public in a way that looks like meaningful accountability.

Yes, the statutes exist. Yes, there are policies, handbooks, and clean independent audits that say “we’re in compliance.” The problem is what anyone outside the building can actually see. Charter approvals, renewals, and major financial actions routinely move through Dehesa’s board agenda on tight timelines, with key backup arriving shortly before a vote. Public meetings often show a short staff presentation, a couple of surface-level questions, and then a unanimous yes on decisions involving millions in long-term obligations. Parents who have filed Brown Act complaints describe the same pattern over and over: minimal discussion, maximum rubber stamp.

That may satisfy the bare minimum of the Brown Act and Ed Code, but “we posted an agenda and took a vote” is not what most people mean by money with accountability—especially in a district that helped incubate A3.

Layer on top of that the concentration of power. A single family holds a voting majority on the board. Administrators and board members cycle through multiple roles in the same tiny ecosystem. Form 700s may technically exist somewhere in a file cabinet or on a county website, but that does not answer the actual question families are asking: who is doing business with whom, who benefits, and who is sitting on both sides of the table when land, contracts, or charter renewals are at stake? Those conflict and disclosure questions are not theoretical; they are concrete enough to warrant their own companion piece, which walks through specific examples.

From where I sit, this is “money with accountability” in branding only. The state routes large sums through Dehesa’s books because of its charter portfolio. Dehesa keeps its statutory slice and trades on the appearance of oversight, while its lone neighborhood school posts worsening Dashboard scores and parents chase down documents that should have been easy to find in the first place. If that is what passes for accountability after A3, then the lesson learned wasn’t “never again.” It was “do the paperwork cleaner, keep the ratios high, and hope no one looks too closely.”

That is my assessment as a journalist looking at public records, meeting behavior, and the district’s own data. You can disagree with the conclusion, but you don’t get to pretend the structure doesn’t exist.

Issue 13 – Who Actually Pays When the Charter Machine Grows

Follow the money long enough and the pattern is always the same: the system says “no one is hurt,” while the people sitting in the remaining neighborhood classrooms can feel the squeeze in real time.

On paper, LCFF and charter pass-through formulas look clean. The state funds students based on ADA, a per-pupil amount is calculated, in-lieu property tax is routed, oversight fees are skimmed for the authorizer, and everyone assures you that no one’s “taking” anything from traditional schools. In practice, it doesn’t work that neatly—especially in a district like Dehesa, where roughly 80 brick-and-mortar students are wrapped in a charter footprint more than 13,000 strong.

Every student who leaves a neighborhood school for a charter takes LCFF dollars with them; the fixed costs at the home district don’t magically vanish. You still have to keep the lights on, maintain the campus, run transportation where it exists, pay base staff, and meet mandates—whether you have 80 students or 280. When a tiny elementary district is underwriting shared infrastructure, negotiating joint-use land deals, and servicing a vast charter portfolio, a larger share of its time, energy, and dollars is inevitably pulled away from the one school that still has actual children in its classrooms.

That is the real fiscal impact local families feel. Not a line item called “misallocation” in an audit report—but a slow attrition of what used to be normal in a neighborhood school: fewer hands on deck, fewer extras, more pressure to do more with less while the adults in charge chase scale on the charter side.

The risk isn’t hypothetical. ADA is a zero-sum game at the student level: a child sitting in a Method-branded program is not sitting in a Dehesa homeroom, and the associated funding follows that choice. Yet the district’s fixed obligations to the campus and to the kids who remain don’t shrink in proportion. What grows instead is the administrative overhead required to manage charters, joint-use agreements, and boutique programming that often serves families with the most flexibility and resources to access it—surf academies, specialty pods, and “choice” menus that look nothing like the bare-bones reality of a small rural elementary school watching its Dashboard scores slide into the red.

Dehesa will point to clean audits and LCFF compliance and say there is no “misallocation.” That misses the point. The question isn’t whether a CPA signed off on the books; it’s whether the structure this board keeps doubling down on steadily diverts attention, energy, and effective buying power away from Dehesa’s own students. When your lone neighborhood campus is shrinking, your outcomes are worsening, and your growth strategy is built around everyone else’s kids, it’s hard to argue that the local children (and transfer students) aren’t the ones ultimately paying the price.

Protected Speech, Public Dollars, and Why I’m Not Backing Down

Then there’s the part Johnson really hates but can’t get around: I meant every word. I corrected wording to make it more precise, but I believe the words I wrote. I don’t find it reckless or malicious to speak hard truths.

Defamation law doesn’t punish people for writing things a public official doesn’t like. It punishes knowing lies and statements tossed out with reckless disregard for whether they’re true—the “actual malice” standard from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. That’s not what’s happening here. I pulled enrollment reports, land-deal sheets, board agendas, California School Dashboard data, tax filings, and audits. I attended meetings, filed CPRA requests, and cross-checked what parents and former staff told me against the district’s own paperwork. Under St. Amant v. Thompson, “reckless disregard” means publishing while seriously doubting your own facts. On this record, I don’t just suspect what I wrote is true—I believe it. That is why I published it.

Johnson’s problem is not that I fabricated facts. His problem is that I’ve taken the facts he would rather bury in PDFs and agenda packets and laid them out plainly, with conclusions he finds politically inconvenient. He’s entitled to his spin; I’m entitled to my analysis. Milkovich v. Lorain Journal makes clear that opinions grounded in disclosed facts are protected, even when they sting. Disagreement is not “malice.” It’s the entire point of a free press—especially when the subject is a public official overseeing a tiny district with a massive charter footprint and a Dashboard sliding deeper into the red.

The First Amendment does not require me to suspend judgment or park my brain at the boardroom door. It protects exactly what I’m doing here: forming opinions from public records, saying what I think about public officials, and inviting the community to look at the same evidence and draw its own conclusions. The California Constitution (art. I, § 2(a)) doubles down on that protection. And California’s anti-SLAPP statute, Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16, exists for precisely this scenario—when a public official tries to dress up an angry response to criticism as a defamation claim and use the threat of litigation to chill coverage of public business. Cases like Briggs v. Eden Council for Hope & Opportunity and Makaeff v. Trump University underline that scrutiny of public conduct and public-facing enterprises sits squarely in anti-SLAPP territory.

This isn’t personal. I don’t know Bradley Johnson socially. I don’t eat dinner with Cindy White or her family. I know their votes, their contracts, their ratios, their Dashboard, their land deals, their charter approvals, and their paper trail. Swap out their names for any other superintendent and board with the same history, the same numbers, and the same behavior, and I would write the same story. The analysis tracks the evidence, not the personalities. That is the opposite of “actual malice” under Sullivan and St. Amant.

I relied on district reports, state dashboards, parent accounts, and statements from former staff—including a special education director who said “Dehesa kids can’t read” while the Dashboard shows ELA and math scores buried in the red. I attended meetings where agendas shifted late and supporting documents appeared at the last minute. I followed the money into joint-use land arrangements that make sense for charter growth and make no sense for 80 brick-and-mortar kids that are not affiliated with charter schools. I may be blunt about what that all adds up to, but bluntness isn’t defamation. It’s clarity.

Public officials do not get a constitutional right to comfort. They get scrutiny. They get criticism. They get voters and parents and journalists looking at how they manage public dollars and public schools and saying, out loud, when it looks wrong. That is not a glitch in American law; it is the design. If Dehesa’s leadership wants less harsh commentary, the remedy isn’t to threaten the person holding the flashlight. The remedy is to change what the light lands on.

Until then, I’ll keep doing what the law allows and the moment demands: reading the records, drawing conclusions, and publishing them. They can improve their Dashboard, their transparency, and their governance. What they don’t get to do is rewrite my reporting because they don’t like where the facts lead.

As a taxpayer and as a reader, I’d ask you to weigh something for yourself: was this really a valid use of public time and resources? A superintendent, on district letterhead, on district time, with district counsel in the background, spending energy drafting a thirteen-point letter to a small independent outlet—because he didn’t like how his own records were assembled and analyzed in public. Did the substance of what I reported actually change in any meaningful way? Did any core fact flip from “false” to “true”? Or did we just trade a few phrases for more precise versions of the same underlying critique?

Meanwhile, my time responding to this gets donated. His does not. I’m not the one drawing a public salary, sitting in closed session, voting on contracts, or signing off on land deals. I’m not the one deciding how to spend LCFF dollars, how many charters to authorize, or whether to threaten a journalist for pointing out what the Dashboard and agendas already show. I’m the one reading the paperwork and writing about it. If there is “reputational damage” here, it flows from choices made in public office, not from the act of describing them.

What I find most ironic is that, in the middle of all this, Johnson tries to lecture me about “ethical journalism.” This from a superintendent whose district history includes the A3 scandal, whose Dashboard has slid into the red under his watch, and whose board regularly pushes major decisions through on compressed timelines with thin public discussion. I don’t need a sermon on ethics from the person in charge of that record. If you knew what I know, you would laugh about his ethical lecture to me, trust me I am nowhere near finished, and this is just the beginning, I have barely scratched the surface with what I know. Stay tuned for more. Thank you for reading this article of equal prominence, and making sure that the public tax dollars spent writing the legal threat letter didn’t go to waste.