Kelly Gonez | What is reality?

June 28, 2026

Dear Board Member Gonez,

I am writing this letter openly, not because I have run out of private channels, but because I have exhausted them. What follows is a factual account of what happened to me inside a system you help govern. I invite you, and the public, to examine it.

I am a credentialed teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I still hold a valid teaching credential — one that LAUSD attempted to revoke twice and failed both times. I was dismissed based on what the evidence clearly demonstrates were false allegations. Not disputed allegations. Not ambiguous ones. False ones, constructed through a process I witnessed firsthand.

I am not writing to ask you to trust me. I am writing to ask a more basic question: what happens inside LAUSD when a decision affecting a teacher's career is made on the basis of information that is false?

Here is what I know, and what the record shows.

There was not a single complaint about my conduct as a teacher until the day an administrator entered my classroom. What followed was not an independent investigation. It was a directed one. Marc Strassner coached students on the statements they gave about me. I was present. I witnessed what happened. And the documentation I have gathered reflects exactly that.

My credential remains valid. The two-year window during which LAUSD could have pursued formal action has closed. I brought this evidence to your district's Office of the Inspector General — an office that, by its own design, reports directly to the school board you sit on.

Their response, communicated to me directly, was that they had chosen not to act.

Not that the evidence was insufficient. Not that it had been reviewed and found wanting. That they had chosen not to act.

That word matters. A choice implies deliberation. Someone weighed what was at stake — a teacher's livelihood, a public record, the integrity of a district serving more than 400,000 students — and decided the most defensible course was silence.

I understand that institutions make mistakes. I am not writing because I believe LAUSD is uniquely corrupt. I am writing because what I experienced points to something more ordinary and therefore more troubling: a system with no reliable mechanism to correct itself.

QUESTIONS THIS RECORD RAISES

When a dismissal is later shown to rest on false evidence, what is the review process?

Who holds decision-making authority, and to whom are they accountable?

When the Inspector General declines to act, what recourse exists for the individual?

What does accountability look like when there is no external pressure to create it?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am asking you — as an elected official whose name appears on the letter that ended my career at LAUSD — to answer them on the record.

I want to say something directly about legacy, because I believe it is relevant here.

Every person in public life eventually faces a moment when the comfortable choice and the right choice are not the same thing. When the institution around them would prefer silence, and the person standing in front of them is asking for something simple: acknowledgment that what happened was real, and that someone with authority is willing to look at it honestly.

How you respond to this letter, or whether you respond at all, will become part of the public record. It will tell teachers, parents, and students in this district something true about what oversight actually means when it costs something. I do not believe that is the legacy you would choose for yourself. But it will be chosen, one way or another, by what happens next.

Do not take my word for it. Look at the evidence. Then ask what kind of public education system we want to build in California — and whether the one we have is capable of becoming it.

I am prepared to make the relevant documents available for public review. I am prepared to engage with any good-faith inquiry — from this board, from journalists, from community members, or from other educators who have experienced similar silences.

What I am no longer willing to do is remain quiet in the hope that an institution will find its conscience on its own.

I am asking for a public response. Not vengeance. Not special treatment. The basic expectation that when a public institution makes a decision affecting a person's livelihood on the basis of false information, someone in authority is responsible for examining it.

The children in LAUSD classrooms deserve educators who are hired and retained on the merits. The community deserves to know whether that standard is actually being met.

Respectfully and on the record,

Louis A. De BarraicuaCredentialed teacher · Los Angeles, CA