School Auditor Is a Relative of Principal

An auditor sent by the state to struggling Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights is the brother-in-law of the principal, a discovery that has caused teachers to fear their complaints about the principal will get back to him.

As part of a team charged with figuring out how to improve Roosevelt, Al Castillo, the principal of La Puente High School, spent five days earlier this month on the campus, visiting classrooms and interviewing teachers.

On the last day, when asked if they were related, Castillo and Roosevelt Principal Henry Ronquillo said their wives are sisters.

Castillo “would not have been on the team if we had known,” said Maria Reyes, the state Department of Education consultant who led the nine-person group. “We were totally in the dark.”

Roosevelt’s representative to the Los Angeles teachers union said colleagues who talked to Castillo now fear retaliation for criticizing the school and its principal. Some teachers would not have been as frank had they known, Ron Kendrick said.

“If you want an honest perception of what’s going on at your school, you don’t have your relative interview your teachers,” said Kendrick, an English teacher.

Castillo and Ronquillo did not return calls from The Times.

Castillo is no longer on the audit team, and his evaluation of Roosevelt will be purged from the group’s final report, said Joanne Mendoza, the Education Department’s deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

Castillo and Ronquillo are banned from future audit teams, she said, and the state will begin asking auditors in writing, rather than orally, to disclose any potential conflicts of interest before they are assigned to campuses.

“I think when you come to the table on something like this, you need to be neutral and totally objective . . . in order to hold the integrity of the process,” Mendoza said.

Roosevelt is among 14 schools that were visited by state-appointed auditors because they have repeatedly failed to meet goals for improving their test scores. Ten of those schools are in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

If a school does not improve, the state can convert it into a charter school or allow students to transfer.

This was the first time California had used such teams, which evaluate whether schools are effectively using federal money intended to serve disadvantaged students. The teams--volunteers from teaching, school administration and the Education Department--are still preparing their recommendations.

In Roosevelt’s case, having Castillo on the team will not compromise the auditors’ work, Reyes said. “When you have a team that big, you go with the consensus of the group, and to that extent, I think it did not make a difference,” she said.

Roosevelt’s auditors presented some of their findings before they left the campus Nov. 9. Areas that need improvement, they found, include instruction, programs for students not fluent in English, parental involvement and Roosevelt’s leadership, Kendrick said.

Those conclusions are correct, he said. “Our scores are extremely low; I can’t deny it,” he said.

Another teacher, Brian Endo, said the relationship between Castillo and Ronquillo further harms Roosevelt, where about one in four students drops out. “Whether or not something was done improperly is not the point,” Endo said. “The point is it looks improper.”