Financial Trouble, Sexual Assault of SVUSD Students Lawsuits, Teachers Cuts at Simi Valley Unified School District. Dawn Smollen Presided Over It As the President of The SVUSD Board of Trustees. Rancho Simi Valley Parks District Should Not Be Next.

Her own superintendent, Hani Youssef, says Simi Valley Unified faces "very difficult financial challenges." The deficit doubled, the credit rating fell and the reserve fund was cut roughly in half, all while Smollen held the gavel as President of the Simi Valley Unified Board of Trustees. Rancho Simi Valley Park District should not be handed to her next.

OPINIONFEATUREDSIMI VALLEY NEWS

Adam R Loew

8/19/202623 min read

There is a race on the Ventura County ballot this November that deserves more attention than it will probably get.

In Division 2 of the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District, voters will choose between Mary Northrup and Dawn M. Smollen. Both qualified for the ballot on Aug. 7. Ms. Smollen's campaign signs read "Your Children, Our Community. My Commitment." Under her name on the ballot, voters will see the words "Board Trustee, Simi Valley Unified School District."

That line is not just a job title. It is her case for the office. She is asking Rancho Simi Valley Park District voters to judge her by her school board service and to conclude that she can be trusted with public land, public buildings and public money.

Take that invitation seriously, and it becomes the best reason to vote against her.

According to her district biography, Ms. Smollen is the current President of the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees. She served as a trustee for the budget decisions described here, and as President for the votes that matter most.

So look at the condition of the Simi Valley Unified School District she presides over today. An accumulated deficit that doubled in twelve months. A credit downgrade. Fifteen teaching jobs gone. Schools asking parents to chip in for copy paper. Ms. Smollen's record is not an argument for promoting her to oversee the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District. It is the case against it.

A Park District board does three things that really matter. It protects a savings account. It keeps buildings and equipment repaired before small problems turn into emergencies. And it decides how much to pay the one person it hires directly.

Those are not skills that are merely close to what Ms. Smollen has been doing at Simi Valley Unified. They are the same three jobs. And on each one, there is a public record. The savings account was cut to a fraction of what it was. A repair measure the district needed was set aside. Executive pay went up anyway.

Voters in Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District Division 2 do not have to guess how she would govern. They can read what she already did.

The Audited Numbers Paint a Grim Picture of the Finances Dawn Smollen Helped Oversee

An audit is not written to win an argument. Outside accountants write it and have to sign their names to it. Simi Valley Unified School District's latest audit shows the trouble most clearly.

Be precise about what the auditors did and did not say. They issued a clean opinion. The statements "present fairly, in all material respects" the district's financial position, and the auditors reported no material weaknesses in internal control. That is a judgment about the bookkeeping, not a verdict on the district's health. The trouble is in the numbers the auditors certified as accurate.

Start with one number. As of June 30, 2025, the district had run up a deficit of $206,053,283. A year earlier that number was $103,508,213. It doubled in twelve months, according to the audited financial statements.

The audit says what that number is: "the accumulated results of all past years' operations." Put simply, it is the running tab. It is the bill left behind by every decision the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees has made.

Now the reserve. Every public agency keeps one. It is a savings account. It pays for emergencies so the agency does not have to cut services in the middle of the year. Here is what happened to Simi Valley's.

Read the last two rows again. In one budget, the savings account was cut roughly in half. The cushion dropped from almost 11 cents of every dollar spent to about 4 cents. The state and the board's own policy set the floor at 3 cents. The district is now close to a line it is not allowed to cross.

The district also spent more than it brought in. In 2025 the general fund spent $267.2 million and took in $254 million. Transfers from other funds covered part of the gap, and the fund still finished the year $10.2 million smaller than it started.

Here is the part that is hardest to explain. The money got better, and the cuts happened anyway.

State funding rose to nearly $195 million for 2026-27. A cost-of-living increase came in at 4.3 percent instead of the expected 2.3 percent. Special education funding jumped from $918.95 to $1,340 per student, worth more than $6 million a year going forward.

So extra money arrived. The board still passed a budget with a $4.4 million deficit, and still cut 15 teaching jobs, The Simi Valley Acorn reported.

Put the two June votes side by side.

June 9: $77,004 a year in permanent raises for the superintendent and his five top deputies, with Ms. Smollen in the chair. Unanimous.

June 16: a $255 million budget the district's own staff called a placeholder, with a $4.4 million deficit and 15 teaching jobs cut. Unanimous.

Wall Street Reacted Before the Board Did

Outside the district, the finances were already being judged, and that judgment landed before the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees acted. A credit rating is a grade on whether a government can be trusted to pay back what it borrows. A lower grade means borrowing costs more, and taxpayers pay the difference. In July 2024, Fitch Ratings raised Simi Valley Unified's grade to AA-minus, a change Fitch attributed to a revision in its own criteria. On June 2, 2026, less than two years later and one week before the raises, Fitch cut it to A-plus. A downgrade is not a criteria adjustment. It is a call on the borrower.

Rating agencies move slowly, and they hate reversing themselves. Taking back an upgrade within two years is about as blunt as their warnings get. This is not a critic's opinion of how the board governs. It is a professional judgment, paid for by bond investors, that the district had become a worse bet.

The order of events matters. Downgraded on the 2nd. Raises on the 9th. Deficit budget and teacher cuts on the 16th. Dawn Smollen was president of the Board of Trustees for all three.

Now apply that record to a Park District, which has much less room to absorb it.

Rancho Simi Park District runs more than 50 parks. A school district at least has a state funding formula behind it, money that rises with the cost of living when a year goes badly. A Park District has no such backup. Its savings account is the whole safety net. It protects against physical risks: a broken water main, a storm, a lawsuit, a weak year for property taxes. Districts that run out of savings do not get rescued. They put off repairs, then raise fees, then lock the gates.

So the question in Rancho Simi Valley Park District Division 2 election is simple. On the board this candidate sits on now, savings to protect were cut by more than half in a single budget. How a trustee treats a savings account is not an opinion she can update for a new job. It is a habit, and it is on the record.

"Very Difficult Financial Challenges"

The most damaging line in this record did not come from a critic or a rival candidate. It came from the man the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees has appointed to run the district's day-to-day operations, Superintendent Hani Youssef.

Talking about the Simi Valley Unified Board of Trustees' decision not to move ahead with an infrastructure bond measure, Mr. Youssef said it would create "very difficult financial challenges" for keeping up the district's buildings and technology, The Acorn reported.

Think about who said that. Not an outside auditor. Not an unhappy employee. The district's own chief executive, the man the board hires, reviews and had just given an $18,814.55 raise, admitting in public what shape the district is in under Dawn Smoollen's leadership.

Superintendents do not say things like that by accident. Every incentive pushes the other way: sound confident, calm the community, protect the credit rating, protect your position in labor talks. When a sitting superintendent tells the local paper on the record that his district faces very difficult financial challenges, he is not spinning. He is putting it down in writing.

And Superintendent Hani Youssef said it while Ms. Smollen was School Board President.

That is what Smollen carries onto the Rancho Simi Valley Park District ballot. It is not a guess pulled from a spreadsheet or an opinion about her judgment. It is the superintendent of the district she helps govern, describing its finances on the record, while she holds the gavel.

A school board president's main job is to leave the place steadier than she found it. The test is not a campaign slogan. It is what the superintendent says out loud when a reporter asks him how things are going.

That matters for the Rancho Simi Valley Park District, because its board is not a rescue mission. Rancho Simi's parks are one of the few things in this town most residents will say plainly are working. Division 2's job is to protect what already works.

Paper, and Playground Balls

Here is what a $255 million budget looks like from inside a classroom.

The principal of Vista Fundamental Elementary School, one of the district's two fundamental campuses, sent families a letter, a copy of which was provided to The American Federalist. It read: "Due to newly purchased District Xerox Copy machines, we are asking for voluntary monetary donations to purchase approved paper through our District Warehouse. Please make checks out to Vista Elementary. Thank you!"

A public school asking parents to write checks so classrooms can have copy paper.

A retired district teacher described the supply situation to The American Federalist: "I retired last year from an elementary school. We received one case of paper and $100 a year for supplies per class. It should be known at all schools what the teachers receive and how much they have to spend because it is absurd!"

This summer, a special education teacher at Crestview Elementary School showed what those financial challenges look like on the ground. She posted on Facebook. "I'm a teacher at a local elementary school, and we are currently in need of some sports equipment and playground balls for our students," she wrote. "If anyone has new or gently used items they'd be willing to donate, we would be incredibly grateful!"

Her list was not fancy. Basketballs. Soccer balls. Footballs. Kickballs. Volleyballs. Jump ropes. The teacher works in a learning center at Crestview and keeps a public classroom wish list on the charity site ClassroomGiving, where Simi Valley teachers post what their rooms need.

Now set that next to the $77,004 in yearly executive raises approved on June 9. That money would buy 12,833 reams of copy paper, about 6.4 million sheets. Or 77,004 boxes of crayons. Or about $5 in supplies for every student in the district.

The law matters here, and it is what lifts this above bad optics. The district's own school websites spell out the rule: "California law guarantees students a public education free of charge, and all materials, supplies, and equipment necessary for your child's class will be provided without charge," according to one campus's donation page. Schools are allowed to ask for donations. They are not allowed to depend on them.

California law also requires a school board to pass a resolution every year certifying that every student has enough instructional materials. The Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees, like every district board in the state, signs that finding.

So the board certifies there is enough. A school asks parents for paper money. A teacher asks strangers for kickballs. All three cannot be true at once. Either the resolution is a formality nobody checks, or the shortage is real and the certification does not reflect it. Neither answer looks good for the trustees who voted for it.

The employees said this out loud, in public, three weeks before the raises. On May 19, support staff and parents filled a Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting to say health insurance costs had become impossible. Paraeducators said the new premiums would be devastating at their pay. Union representatives asked the board to spread the district's contribution more fairly and rethink its spending.

"A $200 increase to your premiums every month hits a person making $30,000 a year a lot harder," said Nikki LaCrosse, according to a meeting account.

Do the math on that. A paraeducator making $30,000 takes on $2,400 a year in new premiums. The superintendent, at $328,208.68, takes home an $18,814.55 raise. One of those people asked the board for help. The other got money.

Park Districts fail in exactly this way, and it is worth naming how.

A Park District runs on a modest budget with a staff heavy on part-time and seasonal workers. When an agency like that gets squeezed at the top, the cost does not vanish. It slides downhill. Program fees go up. Mowing and repairs get stretched out. Employees and volunteers start quietly buying what the agency will not.

That is the same pattern as a copy-paper letter and an online request for kickballs. An institution protects the people at the top and pushes the shortage onto the people least able to carry it, without ever taking a vote that says so.

When that choice came to Ms. Smollen in a recorded vote, with paraeducators at the microphone three weeks earlier saying they could not afford their premiums, she voted for the raises. Park District employees and the families paying program fees in Division 2 have a right to weigh that.

What the District Keeps Getting Sued Over

The safety question here is not hypothetical. It has a court record and a price tag. What follows are allegations from civil cases that are pending or settled. They are unproven, and the district has denied responsibility in the cases where it has responded.

In Ventura County Superior Court, Case No. 2025CUCR054429, a Simi Valley High School student identified as Jane Doe says the district violated Title IX, the California Education Code and Seth's Law. According to the complaint, she had already survived an assault by an attacker who was later convicted. When her family asked for a Title IX investigation, the complaint says, Assistant Superintendent Jerry Block told them it was "not really a Title IX matter."

On Feb. 8, 2024, the complaint says, about 15 male students surrounded her and one said he wanted to sexually assault her. She hit one of them to get away, the complaint says, and she was the student the school disciplined. "I am feeling super threatened and targeted by him," she wrote to a vice principal. "I just want to feel safe on campus." The complaint says she became suicidal twice and that her family pulled her out and left the district. In February 2026 the district denied responsibility, arguing she was partly at fault and had accepted the risk.

Mr. Block's salary rose to $224,862.70 on June 9.

A complaint filed June 5, 2026, names the district, Assistant Superintendent Sean Goldman, Principal Shawn Rumble and Assistant Principal Mandy Hardin over what happened at Sinaloa Middle School. It says a student was groped under her clothing at least 10 times while sitting in her assigned seat, and had her hair pulled hard enough to leave bald patches. "Essentially, the school day became a war zone for her," the complaint says. Her parents emailed the principal, called the assistant principal and reported it to police, according to the filing. No investigation was ever finished, the complaint says, and a Title IX investigator came to one meeting and then stopped participating without issuing a decision. A formal claim served on Jan. 6, 2026, went unanswered, according to the filing.

Mr. Goldman's salary rose to $245,713.54 four days after that complaint was filed.

In Case No. 2025CUWMV024321, a former paraprofessional named Daisy Alcaraz says she saw special education students at Santa Susana Elementary School treated abusively. She describes staff yelling into a child's face, pulling students by their clothing, mocking children for self-soothing behaviors, and isolating and humiliating them in front of others. She says she was retaliated against and fired after reporting it.

The district settled Case No. 56-2020-00539520-CU-PO-VTA for $1.5 million, resolving the case without any admission of liability. In the account published by the plaintiff's law firm, a 7-year-old girl with autism was sexually assaulted for nearly 10 minutes on a district special-needs bus, and it was captured on video. The boy had been placed on that bus although he was considered a physical danger who needed constant supervision and had a history of unwanted touching, the firm said, and the monitor on board was a substitute paraeducator on her first day who was given no information about him, no training and no warning.

The same firm's account describes an August 2025 deposition of the district's own paid expert witness, a woman with nearly 50 years in special education who has mostly worked for school districts. By that account she said she knew of no warning given to that monitor, agreed the boy should have been kept in his own seat, and when pressed could not name one good reason to skip a seating chart, according to the plaintiff's counsel.

A separate case, involving alleged abuse of special education students at Garden Grove Elementary School, settled for a reported $6.8 million, again with no admission of liability. The settlement, filed as J.B. v. Simi Valley Unified School District, was among the largest personal injury settlements in California that year, according to a published ranking of 2021 settlements. Ron Bamieh, the lawyer for the families, offered this assessment of the district at the time: "The story here is the cover-up. An abusive teacher is an awful thing. The hiding of it exposed other children to horrible abuse. People in the SVUSD need to be held accountable." No court adopted that characterization, and the settlement included no admission that it was accurate.

There is more. A Simi Valley High student assaulted by a coach in 2019 sued the district in 2023, The Star reported. The district also hired an outside investigator to look into a complaint involving its superintendent and its public information officer, The American Federalist reported.

Two things follow from all of this, and both matter in a Park District race.

First, this is a money story. Every settlement dollar is a taxpayer dollar that does not pay for a counselor, a roof or copy paper. A board that does not address the conditions these claims describe is writing checks against savings already budgeted down to 4.45 percent. The finances and the child safety failures are not two separate stories. They are one story.

Second, taken together these accounts describe a pattern rather than a single bad incident. Different schools. Different years. Different administrators. The same reaction alleged each time. In each account, a report comes in and the institution's first move is to manage it rather than investigate it. Whether that is what happened is for the courts to decide. But what a board demands, checks and refuses to accept is set at the top, and it is fair to ask what these trustees demanded.

The Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees, including Smollen, answered by raising the pay of two administrators named in those cases, four days after the newer complaint was filed. Asked about campus safety, Ms. Smollen did not respond to The American Federalist before publication.

A Park District carries this same risk, and more of it than most voters realize. It puts adults in charge of children in places parents cannot watch: camps, youth sports, swim programs, after-school activities, contracted instructors. It maintains equipment where one skipped inspection can mean a serious injury and a lawsuit worth millions. The protections are boring and they all come from the board: background checks, how many adults per child, mandatory-reporter training, and incident reports that actually reach trustees instead of stopping on a supervisor's desk.

But the protection that matters most is not written in a binder. It is what a board does the first time someone complains about a person the institution likes. On that question, Division 2 already has a sample of Ms. Smollen's judgment. It is the vote described above.

How someone governs does not change just because the letterhead does.

Raises, and a District in Financial Trouble, With Dawn Smollen Presiding

The vote that defines this campaign happened on June 9. Dawn Smollen was in the chair.

That night the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees approved new pay agreements for the superintendent and his five top deputies. As board president, Ms. Smollen presided over the meeting that took the item up. Every trustee, including her, voted yes on all six, according to reporting by The American Federalist.

Everything described above was already on the table that night: the doubled deficit, the downgrade seven days earlier, the savings account being cut in half, the employees who could not afford their premiums, the teaching jobs about to go. None of it was a secret. The raises passed anyway.

Superintendent Hani Youssef got an extra $18,814.55. That brought his salary to $328,208.68. His contract runs through June 30, 2030, and raises his pay 4 percent automatically every year, which means the increases will keep coming after the trustees who approved them are gone. Over the four years of the deal, that is about $1.4 million in salary. The contract is posted in the district's own public agenda system, where any resident can read it.

Five more administrators got raises the same night.

Together the raises come to $77,004 a year, and they come every year. This was not a one-time bonus. It is a permanent bill the district now has to pay.

Now the part that makes the vote harder to defend.

Simi Valley Unified is shrinking, and it has been for years. The district now has 15,081 students, according to its own 2025-26 second interim budget. The state-funded data service Ed-Data reports the same figure. Ten years ago it had 18,857 students, according to federal numbers collected by Ballotpedia.

That is about 3,800 fewer children. A drop of roughly 20 percent.

In California, students are money. Almost all school funding comes through a state formula that pays the district for each student who shows up. So fewer students is not just a change in the neighborhood. It means less money, permanently. Trustees hear this at every budget meeting.

The Ventura County Star, measuring from 2014, reported that the district is now 12 percent smaller. Mr. Youssef made a joke about the fix. "Just encourage people to have more babies," he said, according to the newspaper's account.

Sit with that for a second. Superintendent Hani Youssef, the man paid $328,208.68 a year to solve this problem turned it into a punch line in front of a reporter. For families in Simi Valley, it is not funny. Falling enrollment is why class sizes change, why programs get combined, why 15 teaching jobs vanished this summer, and why the board shows up to every budget season with less money than the year before. The people paying his salary do not get to laugh it off. They live with it.

Put Simi Valley Unified School District Superintendent Hani Youssef's pay next to the enrollment numbers. Mr. Youssef made $186,391 in 2021 as an assistant superintendent. He made $270,760 in 2023 as superintendent. He makes $328,208.68 now. That is about $142,000 more than he made five years ago, and 21 percent more than he made in the same job three years ago. Over those same years, students kept leaving.

One way to see what that means is to divide the salary by the number of students.

Comparison, including its enrollment figures, as published by The American Federalist.

Per student, Simi Valley taxpayers pay more than 50 times what New York City taxpayers pay for their schools chief. New York has about 60 times as many children. Using today's enrollment, the Simi Valley number is $21.76 per student. In 2023 it was about $17. Raises pushed it up on one side. Departing students pushed it up on the other.

The obvious answer is that big-city superintendents run much bigger operations. That is true, and it is exactly the point. Size is supposed to cut both ways. A district that has lost a fifth of its students should be spending less on administration per child, not more.

Now move that same decision across town, because Rancho Simi Valley Park District is about to face it.

In July the Park District picked a new district manager out of more than 100 applicants, The Star reported. Reviewing that manager and setting the salary at every renewal after this now falls to the Park District Board that voters seat in November. It is the biggest recurring decision a small district makes, and it happens with almost nobody watching, in a room where the person across the table is the only employee the board hires directly.

This is not a comparison. It is the same decision, in the same setting, that this Smollen made two months ago at another public agency. Smollen's answer was $77,004 in permanent cost and automatic raises through 2030. Whatever a Park District board should ask before it signs a contract like that, Ms. Smollen has already shown Simi Valley her answers.

What Have the Inflated Salaries Bought Simi Valley Unified Students? Not Better Results

So what did the money buy?

On the state tests last spring, 49.8 percent of Simi Valley Unified students did not meet the standard in English. In math, 63.3 percent did not, according to results compiled by EdSource. About half the district's children are not reading at the level the state expects. Close to two-thirds are not doing the math. Those numbers sit almost exactly on the state averages, statewide results show. Simi Valley pays a premium for results the rest of California gets for less.

The direction of those scores matters more than the scores themselves.

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University measures how far ahead or behind a district is, in grade levels, using federal data. Its April 2026 report on Simi Valley Unified covers grades three through eight. The finding, in the report's own words: "Students in Simi Valley Unified performed 0.33 grade levels below the 2019 national average. Test scores in Simi Valley Unified have been changing at a rate of -0.08 grade levels/year since 2022." That is the year Mr. Youssef became superintendent.

Then the comparison. The report picks five California districts that match Simi Valley in income, demographics and size. Those five averaged 0.29 grade levels above the national mark, and they were improving. California as a whole was further behind and improving too. Simi Valley is the one going the wrong way, according to the report.

Some children are falling faster. Hispanic students averaged 1.42 grade levels behind. Low-income students averaged 1.28 grade levels behind. Both groups are still slipping. The report notes that trends can reflect what happens outside school, not just inside it. Fair enough. It does not explain why five similar districts, in the same state, went up while Simi Valley Unified went down.

Put that beside everything else in this record, and the pattern holds. The children were falling behind the whole time, and on June 9 the board's answer was to give Hani Youssef and the District top Executives a pay raise.

A Park District board faces a smaller version of the same question every year. Are the fields playable? Are the restrooms open? Are families paying more for less? Nobody hands a Park District board a report card, so the board has to find one. This trustee sat on a board that was handed one and raised the superintendent's pay anyway.

Smollen's Experience on the School Board May Be the Exact Reason Not to Elect Her to the Park District

This is not an argument that Ms. Smollen acted in bad faith. Nothing in the record suggests that, and she has said she wanted the district to invest in its schools. But voters do not elect intentions. They elect stewardship, and stewardship is measured by what an institution looked like when a trustee arrived and what it looks like now.

So measure it. Savings budgeted down to 4.45 percent of spending. A built-up deficit doubled to $206 million. A credit downgrade less than two years after an upgrade. Fifteen teaching jobs cut. Superintendent Hani Youssef on the record describing very difficult financial challenges. Employees who cannot afford their Insurance premiums. An elementary school asking parents to buy paper and playballs. Students losing ground while similar districts gained it. And a stack of lawsuits alleging the district failed to protect children.

Smollen cast that vote to reward Simi Valley Unified Senior Leadership, knowing all of it, and she cast it in the week between the downgrade and the teaching cuts. She raised the pay of the six people at the top by $77,004 a year and locked the superintendent into automatic 4 percent raises through 2030. That is not a hard call made wrong under pressure. It is a statement of priorities, made in public, with Smollen's name recorded.

Protect the savings. Keep up the property. Set the executive's pay. Those are the three jobs waiting in the park district Division 2, and each has a record. The board will review and pay Rancho Simi's new district manager in November. Its fields, restrooms and play structures wear out on a schedule that does not wait for a good budget year. Its savings account is what stands between a bad year and a closed facility.

Smollen's signs say "Your Children, Our Community. My Commitment." Test that commitment against the record: the savings account cut roughly in half, the accumulated deficit doubled, the credit rating downgraded, 15 teaching jobs gone and children asking strangers for playground balls. All of it while she sat on the Simi Valley Unified Board of Trustees, and much of it with the gavel in her hand.

Ms. Northrup will have to make her own case, and she should be held to a standard just as tough. But the case against handing the parks to the Smollen who has sat on the Simi Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees through this stretch and presides over it now does not have to be built from scratch. It is already written, in the district's own audits and in its superintendent's own words.

Simi Valley's parks still work the way they were promised to, which is more than can be said for most of what government touches here. Keeping them that way is not a ceremonial job.

So put the question the ballot actually asks. What happens if Ms. Smollen oversees the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District the way she has overseen Simi Valley Unified?

The pattern Smollen has established at Simi Valley Unified School District is easy to trace forward. Staff cut while pay at the top rises. A savings account drawn down until there is nothing left for the year a water main breaks. Repairs deferred, then deferred again, until deferral becomes closure. Program fees raised on families with the fewest alternatives. Employees and volunteers quietly buying what the district will not. None of that requires a single vote announcing it. It is what happens when a board protects the top of the organization first and lets the shortage settle on everyone below.

No one can prove in advance what any candidate will do. But Ms. Smollen did not ask Division 2 residents to imagine how she would govern. She put her school board record on the ballot and asked voters to read it. They should read all of it.

The bottom line is that Simi Valley residents on Rancho Simi Valley Park District Division 2 should vote no on Dawn Smollen.

This essay is opinion and commentary. Descriptions of civil litigation are drawn from complaints, court records and published accounts, and are summarized as allegations. Those allegations are unproven, and the Simi Valley Unified School District has denied liability in the filings where it has responded. The settlements described were resolved without any admission of liability by the district or by any individual. Individuals are named only because they are named in the filings or hold public office; no court has made a finding of wrongdoing against any of them, and no wrongdoing is alleged here beyond what appears in those records. Salary figures are taken from public records and the district's own published agenda materials. Ms. Smollen did not respond to prior requests for comment from The American Federalist. Corrections will be published promptly at thesimivalleyledger.com.