D. A. Won’t Prosecute Preschool Director

The director of the defunct Academia Quinto Sol preschool, whose records were confiscated in a dramatic raid by state agents in 1984, will not be prosecuted for fraud, the district attorney’s office has confirmed.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert M. Youngdahl, who has directed the investigation since late 1984, said allegations that Academia Executive Director Francisco Sandoval misused $548,000 in state and federal money during an eight-year period could not be proven.

Auditors now estimate that the Academia, which had cared for about 250 mostly low-income Latino youngsters, owes the state as little as $110,000. Almost all the debt was accumulated because of low enrollment during 1976-78 and was declared openly by the preschool, Youngdahl said.

Prosecutors also could not prove informant allegations that Sandoval created a “ghost population” of students or that the preschool fraudulently collected state money for children who were no longer enrolled or did not attend, Youngdahl said.

‘Ghost’ Children Alleged

“We have several teacher witnesses who told us there were ‘ghost’ children and several parents who told us there were ghost children, but with the records we have, we can’t confirm that,” Youngdahl said.

Academia employees who said they knew about ghost children had no direct knowledge and alleged participants would not cooperate with investigators, the prosecutor said.

Five parents said they were certain their children did not attend school on days for which Academia claimed they were present, Youngdahl said. If true, that would amount to a loss of about $1,000 compared to state grants of between $4 million and $5 million for about the same period, he said.

“Assuming we could prove what these five parents said . . . that would be 0.0008% of all the children hours for all the years . . . Then you have the problem of memory. I’d hate to go to trial with just that.”

Also, there was no evidence that Sandoval or his employees enriched themselves at the expense of the youngsters, said Youngdahl, a 19-year prosecutor who added that the Academia allegations were the “most investigated” of any case he has handled.

“It is a fact that the Academia was providing excellent programs. These programs had no hint of skimming or of people driving Cadillacs,” he said.

May End Investigation

Youngdahl’s findings may end the investigation of Sandoval, 44, a former California State University, Long Beach, professor of Mexican-American Studies, who began directing the Academia program in 1974, when it was called the Escuela de la Raza.

“We put great weight in Mr. Youngdahl’s recommendation,” said Robert A. Cervantes, director of the Child Development Division in the state Department of Education, which funded the Academia program.

Still, the case will be reviewed by a state attorney to see if civil action to attempt to recover the owed $110,000 is warranted, Cervantes said. Criminal prosecution is unlikely, he said.

Sandoval, whose program lost its $940,000 state grant in June, 1984--2 1/2 months after armed state agents carted off a truckload of school records--said in an interview this week that he never expected charges would be filed.

The state’s criminal case relied heavily on statements of a fired employee and a bookkeeper who, after leaving Academia, went to work for the rival East Long Beach Neighborhood Center, Sandoval said.

Ownership of Church

The Academia and the rival neighborhood center, once part of the same organization, have been engaged since 1982 in a legal battle for ownership of the church that housed the Academia preschool until July, 1985. (The Academia operated a private program for about 50 preschool children for a year after the state refused to renew its grant in 1984. The court then ruled for the Neighborhood Center and ordered Academia’s eviction.)

“We believe the crux of the whole problem has been the litigation over that property,” Sandoval said. “Somebody had a vendetta against me because of a piece of property and look at what they took down to do it. . . . “

Sandoval said he is considering a lawsuit against Armando Vazquez-Ramos--executive director of the East Long Beach Neighborhood Center, now the Pan-American Community Center--and others “responsible for providing misleading information” to state investigators.

Vazquez-Ramos said Sandoval’s charges are ridiculous. “We had absolutely nothing to do with the determination by the state to raid them and to terminate their contract,” said Vazquez-Ramos. “This and the property ownership are two separate matters.”

Sandoval said he is again seeking a court date to try to wrest ownership of the church building and three adjoining turn-of-the century homes at Cedar Avenue and 7th Street from the Pan-American center. Vazquez-Ramos said Sandoval has previously canceled hearings because he has no case and would be responsible for court costs.

Severe Problems

Both Cervantes and Youngdahl said state records show that the Academia had severe problems with the Department of Education as early as 1976. By the time Cervantes became responsible for the Academia account in October, 1983, the preschool was considered one of the half dozen most troubled programs in the state, he said.

“This administration inherited a number of problems,” Cervantes said. The Academia “was one of the most serious . . . in that we could not find an adequate track record of public dollars or the records that existed were questionable.”

A Department of Education memorandum in 1976 recommended that the preschool’s contract be renewed because that was the only way to recover a $22,000 debt dating back to 1976, Youngdahl said.

“All the memos followed that line all the way into the 80s,” he said. “They said, ‘We can’t shut the program off because we’ll never get our money back.’ ”

Meanwhile, the debt amounted to $123,000 by late 1980, according to one state document. Another document at about same time said the debt was $215,000 and yet another said it was about $250,000, Youngdahl said.

Differing Estimates

Such differing estimates of loss by the state and poor record-keeping by Sandoval made it “very hard to have a trail of figures to make it clear to a jury that there was a specific loss,” Youngdahl said.

Sandoval insists that his biggest problem was trying to convince the state to forgive the Academia’s debt from the 1970s or to work out a way to pay it off without raising a large sum of money at one time.

Sandoval said that politics also figured into the state negotiation. He said that he made no friends during 1979-81, when, as a member of a governor’s education advisory commission, he criticized state preschool efforts and lobbied for more funds for Latino children.

And on several occasions, state legislators intervened on his behalf because the Department of Education was being unreasonable in negotiations with the preschool, he said.

“If you view the record over the last five years, our record was clean,” Sandoval said. “Even though they may not have liked me personally, they still could not deny the children were being taken care of and taken care of well. . . . We were looked at as a model site because of the work we had done.”

State officials, however, saw things differently.

A June, 1982, complaint by a former employee about fraudulent student records led the state Department of Justice to assign two investigators to the case. In 1983 agents spent a week copying Academia files. And by the April, 1984, raid, interviews with 35 past and present employees indicated that Academia had created a population of fictitious children to keep attendance high and payments from the state flowing smoothly, according to court documents.

Menu Tampering Alleged

The Justice Department also claimed that the agency defrauded the state’s Child Nutrition Services by tampering with menus and accounts to pad the number of state-funded meals given to youngsters.

In an interview, Sandoval said he was not personally involved in keeping attendance records but that some children who took vacations, or trips to Mexico, might have been kept on attendance rolls so they would not have to requalify when they returned.

There were also occasions when food listed on menus was not served because of late delivery or other problems. But menus were followed 90% of the time, he said.

“All this is difficult because everything you put your time and energy in for 10 years is gone,” he said. “But the biggest impact is not for me personally. It’s for the children and the impact we were making.”

Cervantes said the state probably spent more than the money owed by the Academia on the investigation. (The state has paid nearly $2,000 a month to store the seized Academia records, he said.)

But both he and Youngdahl said allegations required such an inquiry. And Cervantes said the Academia case has led to new legislation that allows the state to crack down immediately when bookkeeping irregularities are suspected.

“The issue is accountability,” he said. And a less diligent pursuit of the facts in this case could only have sent the wrong message to other agencies, which receive $360 million annually in education grants, he said.