The man collecting nearly half a million taxpayer dollars a year to run the nation’s second-largest school district didn’t just cut corners. According to a confidential board letter, he allegedly ordered the tracking device yanked from his district SUV, had staff punch a hole through the firewall for a high-risk messaging app, and treated the district driver like a personal chauffeur for his wife and a female employee.
That is not leadership. That is a man who expected the public to look the other way while he operated beyond oversight.
The June 8 letter from LAUSD Board President Scott Schmerelson laid out the allegations as the board prepared to fire Alberto Carvalho or force his resignation. The letter followed the February FBI raids on his San Pedro home and the district headquarters.
Carvalho resigned in June rather than face a formal termination vote. He has denied wrongdoing. His lawyers insist much of this was authorized or known to the district. The board’s document paints a different picture.
According to the letter obtained and reported by the New York Post, Carvalho directed staff to remove the GPS unit from his district-issued vehicle. No more tracking his movements. He also ordered Telegram unblocked on his LAUSD computer even though the district flagged the app as a high cyber risk commonly used by people who prefer anonymity. Then he demanded his workspace bypass the district firewall entirely. Staff installed a separate, unfiltered network just for his office.
The personal use of the district driver rounds out the picture. The letter states the driver was ordered to take Carvalho’s wife to LAX on multiple occasions and to ferry Carvalho and a female district employee to restaurants, social outings, and her home roughly a dozen times after hours.
Carvalho’s attorneys responded that he believed the vehicle and driver were authorized under his contract and legal guidance, especially given security concerns facing public officials. They said district officials knew he used secure messaging. On the firewall issue, they claimed he needed access to websites required for his duties and that the board was aware.
The letter did not stop at the tech and vehicle games. It also accused Carvalho of accepting gifts from contractors and lobbyists beyond legal limits, failing to report outside income, and taking donor-funded travel that never appeared on the required state disclosure forms.
One of the larger omissions involved executive coaching. Denver Public Schools paid Carvalho at least $107,000 between late 2022 and early 2026 to mentor its superintendent. That income went largely unreported while he was drawing his LAUSD salary. The Denver arrangement ended after the FBI raids put him on leave.
Travel benefits tied to education vendors also went undisclosed. These included trips underwritten by companies that did business with the district, among them the now-collapsed AI firm AllHere. That company paid for Carvalho’s travel to a White House cybersecurity event. AllHere’s chatbot project for LAUSD collapsed after its founder was charged with fraud. The FBI investigation that hit Carvalho’s properties appears connected to those dealings.
None of this is abstract policy debate. Los Angeles Unified is a $20 billion-plus operation responsible for hundreds of thousands of children. When the man at the top allegedly disables tracking, opens high-risk communication channels, and treats public resources as private conveniences, the message is clear. Accountability is for other people.
Carvalho arrived in Los Angeles with a national reputation from Miami-Dade. Test scores improved under his watch. That record does not erase the pattern of undisclosed income, vendor-funded travel, and deliberate efforts to limit district visibility into his activities. Public officials who demand transparency from everyone else while engineering their own opacity forfeit the benefit of the doubt.
Scripture cuts through the spin. “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”
Those words from Luke still apply when the lights finally come on.
The FBI has not charged Carvalho. He continues to deny any criminal conduct. The board letter and the documented side income and travel make one fact unavoidable. The man paid to steward a massive public institution spent considerable energy making sure that institution could not fully see what he was doing.
That is not how faithful stewardship works. Taxpayers and parents deserved better.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
