LOS ANGELES (CNS) – The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education is set to meet behind closed doors Thursday to discuss the future of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho in the wake of FBI raids on Carvalho’s home and office at the district’s downtown headquarters.
On Wednesday officials arranged and posted this new closed-door session of the Board of Education with the only item listed as: “1. Personnel (Government Code Section 54957), Public Employment, General Superintendent of Schools.”
FBI agents served warrants Wednesday morning at the San Pedro home of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, as well as his office at the district’s downtown headquarters.
There was no immediate information on the nature of the investigation, although the Los Angeles Times — citing law enforcement sources — reported it appeared to be tied to a company the district hired in 2024 to develop an AI chatbot, which was never fully implemented.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed to City News Service that law enforcement officials were serving “a judicially approved search warrant,” but declined to provide any additional details. The FBI issued a statement confirming the agency “is serving court-authorized warrants at those locations. However, the affidavit in support of the warrants (has) been sealed by the court and we, therefore, have no further comment.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed to The Times that a property in Miami — where Carvalho previously worked — was also being searched.
The LAUSD issued a statement saying, “We have been informed of law enforcement activity at Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters and at the home of the superintendent. The district is cooperating with the investigation and we do not have further information at this time.”
Carvalho has been superintendent of LAUSD — the nation’s second- largest school district — since February 2022. He was re-appointed to the post in September 2025. He previously served as superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida for 14 years.
According to his district biography, he was named Florida’s 2014 Superintendent of the Year, the 2014 National Superintendent of the Year, the 2016 Magnet Schools of America Superintendent of the Year, the 2016 winner of the Harold W. McGraw Prize in Education, the 2018 National Urban Superintendent of the Year, and the 2019 National Association for Bilingual Education Superintendent of the Year.
Carvalho has openly talked in the past about his impoverished upbringing in Portugal, and how he came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant in the 1980s after graduating high school. Carvalho has been publicly critical of stepped-up federal immigration enforcement activities near LAUSD campuses.
Sources told The Times, the federal probe appears to be linked to an investigation into AllHere, a company the district hired in 2024 to develop a chatbot named “Ed” that was expected to vastly improve communications and information sharing between the district and LAUSD families.
But despite the highly touted rollout of the system in early 2024, the system was never fully implemented and the plug was eventually pulled on the project when the founder of AllHere — Joanna Smith-Griffin — was charged with fraud and identity theft, The Times reported.
The LAUSD did not appear to have been dramatically harmed financially by the failed AI effort, according to The Times. AllHere previously held a contract for other types of services with the Miami-Dade County school system, but Carvalho said previously that he was not involved with that contract and he denied involvement with the selection of the company to develop the chatbot at LAUSD, The Times reported.
Last year, a group of LAUSD students and former district Superintendent Austin Beutner filed a lawsuit accusing the district and Carvalho of misusing $76.7 million in Proposition 28 funds dedicated for arts and music education.
Passed by California voters in 2022 to address longstanding underfunding of arts and music programs, Prop. 28 provides dedicated funding to school districts to hire arts and music teachers and aides at all campuses.
In accepting Prop. 28 funds, school districts are required to use the money to increase and not replace funding for existing arts and music instruction and to allocate at least 80% of the funds to hire arts teachers and aides to provide music and art courses, according to the lawsuit, which alleges the district “failed both requirements.”
The district has denied any wrongdoing, saying in a statement when the lawsuit was filed last year that “we continue to follow implementation guidance as provided by the state of California to ensure that we are fully complying with the requirements of Prop. 28.”
In 2020, while Carvalho was still in Miami, the Miami-Dade school system’s inspector general conducted an investigation into a $1.57 million donation Carvalho solicited from an online education company known as K12. The donation was made to the Foundation for New Education Initiatives, a nonprofit organization Carvalho founded to improve learning opportunities for students from lower-income families. The investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing, but the inspector general recommended that the money be returned.
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