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Parent tells Colton Joint Unified board he filed PERB complaint and questions district spending on private lawyers
Summary
At the Aug. 21 school board meeting, parent Adam Angulo said he filed a Public Employment Relations Board complaint after an internal probe cleared district staff and questioned why the district hired a private law firm instead of addressing the matter internally.
A parent told the Colton Joint Unified School District board on Aug. 21 that he is pursuing an outside investigation with the Public Employment Relations Board and questioned the district’s use of taxpayer funds to hire private attorneys.
Adam Angulo told the board he had raised concerns about his treatment at Zimmerman Elementary at the end of the 2024–25 school year, submitted documentation to the district’s internal review and found the district’s internal conclusion “unusable” given the amount of evidence he provided. “I filed with the Public Employment Relations Board for an outside investigation,” Angulo said.
Angulo asked why the district had retained private counsel to represent it in the matter rather than addressing the complaint directly. “Why spend significant district funds on attorneys to fight this instead of addressing it directly?” he asked, adding that such legal spending “takes money away from students, classrooms, and opportunities.”
Board President Bertha Flores thanked Angulo for speaking and said, because the matter is personal and subject to confidentiality, the board would defer to district staff. Flores asked the superintendent’s office to “circle back” with Angulo and his appropriate union representative so they could be kept in the loop.
Angulo said he was not seeking a payout; he described his goal as transparency and accountability. “This is about doing what is right,” he said. “Every dollar spent fighting the truth is a dollar stolen from our children’s future.”
The district did not provide additional comment at the meeting beyond the board president’s statement that staff would follow up. Angulo’s remark that he filed with PERB and the board’s request that staff follow up were the principal public developments recorded at the meeting. Any subsequent legal filings or staff responses were not presented during the session.
The board moved on to other agenda items after closing the public comment period; the meeting later reported closed‑session actions in which the board approved a settlement and personnel appointments, as read into the record at the end of the evening.
What happens next: Board staff said they would contact Angulo and his union representative to follow up; Angulo’s PERB filing status and the district’s use of outside counsel were not resolved on the record at the meeting.
