Desert Sands USD Set to Approve DEI Contract – May Violate DOE Civil Rights Memo

Coachella Valley Unified School District Board Trustee, Trinidad Arredondo, continues to profit off of neighboring school districts through his TA Mentoring Services, LLC. We discussed Arredondo two years ago with his $15,000 contract awarded by the Desert Sands USD (DSUSD) to teach middle-school kids about love and other subjects during school hours.

Now, Arredondo is back with a fresh new contract worth twice as much ($30,000) as the one from 2023. Arredondo’s new contract is up for approval at the DSUSD board meeting on February 18, 2025. The services offered in the current contract are near identical to the one from 2023, although there is no scope of services provided. 

The services currently being offered to DSUSD are to:

“…provide twelve sessions, with up to thirty students served with “Joven Noble” (Noble Youth) curriculum focusing on teaching students about…respect, dignity, love, and trust. The Intervention will improve self confidence and esteem, and raise achievements. Student, parent, and staff informational meetings will be provided, also outreach materials.”

In 2023, the services Arredondo offered to the DSUSD were a bit more detailed. Then, Arredondo called his program “Restorative Practice through Intensive Mentoring,” but still used the “Joven Noble” curriculum that was intended to raise achievement and taught about “respect, dignity, love, and trust.” Students were to “go through 12 district training sessions as part of the curriculum.” The sessions were once a week for 12 weeks during school hours and included “various school visits.” 

In other words, students would miss class, but that was balanced out by Food, bracelets, certificates, and T-shirts which were provided to students as part of the contract.

There is no evidence in the current agreement or on the agenda (which is for La Quinta High School) that the earlier contract (with Jefferson Middle School) succeeded in any of its objectives, let alone the achievement goal. In fact, according to the California School Dashboard, performance in Chronic Absenteeism, English Learner Progress, and Mathematics all declined between 2023 and 2024 for Jefferson Middle.

Thus, it would seem difficult for DSUSD to justify an additional contract with Arredondo, much less one for twice the value. However, DSUSD may have bigger issues on hand, one that could cost the district at least $19.7 million in federal funding. According to the district’s Budget Adoption CDE Forms for 2024-25, DSUSD is expecting at least $19.7 million from the federal government. DSUSD’s total revenue is listed as $479,800,841.00.

Department of Education memo

The Department of Education (DOE) can still do good before Secretary of Education Linda McMahon works herself out of a job. For instance, on February 14, 2025, Craig Trainor, the Acting Assistant Secretary for the DOE Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to all educational institutions of America—a warning to end all aspects of DEI, which includes gender ideology.

Trainor said that “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.” 

Furthermore, the letter gave educational institutions 14 days before the DOE would begin to “take appropriate measures to assess compliance with the applicable statutes and regulations… including antidiscrimination requirements that are a condition of receiving federal funding.”

The letter recommended institutions to:

“(1) ensure that their policies and actions comply with existing civil rights law; (2) cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and (3) cease all reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race.” 

Trainor also had words for American citizens in the letter– that there is a way to inform on our local school district, or any educational institution that ignores federal law. Trainor said anyone “…who believes that a covered entity has unlawfully discriminated may file a complaint with OCR. Information about filing a complaint with OCR, including a link to the online complaint form, is available here.” 

TA Mentoring and “Joven Noble” Puts DSUSD at Risk

The memo was clear, get rid of the DEI, including third-party contractors that are steeped in DEI. Although the memo does not explicitly mention gender ideology, remember that DEI experts themselves admit that gender ideology is a critical component of DEI, so President Trump’s Executive Orders should be taken into consideration as well.

Arredondo’s TA Mentoring Services, LLC, does not have a website, or at least not an easily found one, even though TA Mentoring was incorporated in 2021, according to the California Secretary of State. Luckily the source for the “Joven Noble” curriculum, which Arredondo clearly uses is available. 

“Joven Noble,” or “Noble Youth” is a product of the non-profit National Compadres Network (NCN). NCN is supported by grants and contracts with 21 assorted local government agencies, including CVUSD. The grants come from: W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The California Endowment, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, The California Wellness Foundation, National Philanthropic Trust: 2022 Fund, and the Tides Foundation: Life Comes From It Fund.

The NCN website also lists CVUSD, where Arredondo is a trustee, as a partner organization. Although TA Mentoring Services, LLC is not mentioned, NCN does list the Coachella Valley Youth Leadership (CVYL) as an Anchor Organization. 

According to Bizpedia, Arredondo was the registered agent for CVYL using the same address he uses for his TA Mentoring Services, LLC. In addition, an archived version of the now defunct CVYL website, besides showing a connection to the nefarious Regional Access Project, clearly shows that Arredondo used the NCN curriculum in the past and, in all likelihood, still does. Just so that is clear.

NCN’s Joven Noble, according to their website, offers an “indigenous based… rites of passage,” using “a holistic and culturally rooted process that offers cultural and gender identity development, leadership development, and leadership in action with a youth participatory research component.” 

One needs only to go to NCN’s stated mission and purpose to determine that Arredondo’s contract could violate the DOE Civil Rights memo. From the website, emphasis added:

“The mission of the National Compadres Network is to strengthen and re-root the capacity of individuals, families, and communities to honor, rebalance, and redevelop the authentic identity, values, traditions, and indigenous practices of Chicano, Latino, Native, Raza, and other communities of color as the path to the honoring of all their relations and lifelong well-being.

The National Compadres Network believes re-rooting the generational extended kinship Compadre and Comadre network will have an impact on reducing the incidence of substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, teen pregnancy, gang violence, heterosexism, racial inequity, and other individual, family, community, and societal issues.”

Beside the obvious racial division, that a school district should not be paying for or allowing on school property during school hours… what is “heterosexism?” It sounds kind of scary and something you might not want to be accused of, or even something that could get you sued or jailed. Nope. Well, kind of, if you live in the pretend world of Marxists.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), citing debunked FBI “hate crime” data from 2018, “heterosexism” is… Are you really ready for this?

Here is what the ADL has to say:

“Heterosexism (sometimes referred to as homophobia), is defined as: “the marginalization and/or oppression of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and/or asexual, based on the belief that heterosexuality is the norm.” This means that heterosexism is based on the idea that romantic and/or sexual relationships and feelings between a man and a woman is acceptable, and that all other relationships or feelings are unacceptable or outside the “norm.”

Every day, in school classrooms, hallways and cafeterias, LGBTQ+ students hear biased language, experience harassment and assault and feel the effects of a hostile school environment. According to GLSEN’s 2021 National School Climate Survey, LGBTQ+ students experienced….” 

The list that follows that statement is not important since it is, as everyone knows now thanks to DOGE, all a pretend world propagated by a propaganda press surreptitiously paid for by the DC Uniparty Blob using our tax money.

Related however, is the fact that NCN follows a “transformative health and healing philosophy” known as La Cultura Cura (LCC), which is a “culturally based framework.”  The framework’s description is long, but the important take-away is how the framework is implemented. NCN “…brings together a culturally based cadre of recognized leaders to provide expertise and support in the areas of [not a complete list]: reproductive health, trauma informed services, culturally based health and mental health, juvenile justice, transformative Justice, transformative leadership, transformative healing, and transformative education.”

Naturally, NCN, in true DEI fashion, offers up the following LGBTQ2S Statement of Affirmation: “NCN has continued to build the work of honoring the belief that all people are sacred, by focusing on the affirmation and inclusion of members of our community who identify as being “Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer/Questioning, Transgendered (LGBTQ2S)”.

We now know that Arredondo will focus on racial and LGBTQIA+++ issues—excuse me, LGBTQ2S–during school hours, while excluding certain races–at the cost of $30,000 to the district, with no evidence that the program improves academic achievement for anyone. What the heck is going on in those sessions?

What Now?

DSUSD would be best served by not approving the contract with TA Mentoring Services, LLC, and cancelling any contracts that currently exist with them. In addition, it would be advisable for the DSUSD to update its Nondiscrimination/Harassment board policy 5145.3 to better reflect current Federal Law. And remember, the DOE Office of Civil Rights provided citizens a complaint form should the district approve the contract.

The DSUSD is set to approve this contract (agenda item 25.7 under the consent items-Educational Services) on February 18, 2025, at their regularly scheduled board meeting. You can appear in person or write a comment to be read into the record, but Comments must be in 2 PM of that day. More information can be found on the agenda page. The contract was submitted for approval by Gregg O’Mara, Principal, La Quinta High School, and Marcus Wood, Ed.D., Assistant Superintendent, Educational Services.

If you would like to write to the school board, feel free to include this article or use any information found therein. The school board’s contact information is as follows:

• PRESIDENT
  KAILEE WATSON, OD

Trustee Area 1
Term expires: December 2028

• VICE PRESIDENT/CLERK
  MICHAEL DURAN

Trustee Area 5
Term expires: December 2026

• BOARD MEMBER
  HUMBERTO ALVAREZ

Trustee Area 2
Term expires: December 2026

• BOARD MEMBER
  TRICIA PEARCE

Trustee Area 3
Term expires: December 2028

• BOARD MEMBER
  LINDA PORRAS

Trustee Area 4
Term expires: December 2028