FBI agents descended on the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District on Wednesday, serving search warrants at the nation's second-largest school system and at the home of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. A third location in Florida was also searched as part of what appears to be a sprawling federal investigation.
The nature of the probe remains unknown. Affidavits outlining the basis for the searches are under seal, and the FBI declined to elaborate beyond confirming that the warrants were being served, Newsmax reported. The district and the superintendent's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
That silence is deafening when federal agents are walking through your building.
Agents from the FBI's Los Angeles field office executed warrants at LAUSD headquarters and at Carvalho's home in the San Pedro neighborhood, about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Simultaneously, the bureau's Miami office searched a residence in Southwest Ranches, a community in Broward County west of Fort Lauderdale.
James Marshall, an FBI spokesman in Miami, confirmed that agents had cleared the Florida scene by Wednesday morning but offered no further details. Rukelt Dalberis, a spokesperson for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, confirmed agents were at the properties but declined to comment because the underlying affidavits remain sealed.
Three coordinated searches across two states don't materialize out of thin air. Federal judges don't sign warrants on a whim. Whatever investigators are looking at, they have enough to convince a court that evidence worth seizing existed in multiple locations tied to the leadership of a school district serving more than 500,000 students across more than two dozen cities.
Alberto Carvalho has been superintendent of LAUSD since February 2022. Before that, he oversaw Miami-Dade County Public Schools from 2008 to 2021, a tenure that made him one of the most prominent public school administrators in the country. The Florida search location sits squarely in Broward County, neighboring the Miami-Dade district that Carvalho ran for over a decade.
That geographic detail matters. A federal investigation that spans both Carvalho's current city and his former stomping grounds suggests investigators may be looking at conduct that stretches across his career, not just his current post. Officials with the Miami-Dade school system did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on whether the FBI or other federal agencies have contacted them regarding Carvalho.
No one has been charged. No allegations have been made public. But when the FBI shows up at your house and your office on the same morning, the investigation is not in its early stages.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass's office said it had no information about the search and noted that the school system operates independently of city government. That's technically true. It's also a convenient firewall. America's largest urban school districts function as quasi-independent fiefdoms, commanding billions in taxpayer dollars with layers of bureaucratic insulation that make meaningful oversight difficult and accountability rare.
LAUSD's annual budget dwarfs those of many state agencies. The district spans more than two dozen cities. Its superintendent presides over a sprawling operation where contracts, vendors, construction projects, and administrative spending create endless opportunities for the kind of conduct that eventually attracts federal attention. This is the structural reality of American public education governance: massive budgets, diffuse oversight, and elected boards that too often rubber-stamp the agenda of the very administrators they're supposed to supervise.
Conservatives have warned for years that the sheer scale of public education bureaucracies invites mismanagement at best and corruption at worst. The response from the education establishment is always the same: more money, more trust, fewer questions. Then the FBI shows up.
Until the sealed affidavits are unsealed or charges are filed, the public is left to watch and wait. The facts available are narrow but striking: a coordinated federal operation targeting the headquarters of the country's second-largest school district, the home of its superintendent, and a property in the state where that superintendent built his career.
Parents in Los Angeles deserve answers. Taxpayers funding LAUSD deserve answers. More than 500,000 students whose education depends on the integrity of district leadership deserve answers.
For now, all they have is silence, sealed documents, and the image of FBI agents walking through the front doors of their children's school district.