The superintendent of the country’s second-largest school system resigned Sunday, months after the FBI searched his home and school district headquarters, officials said.
Alberto Carvalho had been leading the 520,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District since 2022. He was placed on paid leave two days after the Feb. 25 search.
Andrés Chait, the district’s acting superintendent, will remain in the role until a permanent decision is made, school board officials said Monday morning in a statement.
“The Board remains steadfast in its commitment to ensuring stability, continuity, and continued progress through strong leadership,” the statement said. “Our focus remains unchanged: providing every student with a high-quality education, supporting our dedicated workforce, and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve.”
Carvalho did not immediately return a request for comment.
Law enforcement officers served a search warrant Feb. 25 at LAUSD, as well as at Carvalho’s nearby home and an address in Southwest Ranches, Florida. At the time, the FBI did not provide a reason for the searches.
The Los Angeles school district said in February it was cooperating with the investigation.
In 2024, Carvalho launched an AI chatbot to help students in partnership with AllHere, an educational technology company. Months later, the company collapsed, and its founder and former chief executive was charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and identity theft, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The chatbot never fully got off the ground.
Carvalho also publicly criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Los Angeles. As this school year began, he created “safe zones” designed to protect students traveling to and from school from being stopped by immigration enforcement officers. Agents then briefly and mistakenly detained a teenage LAUSD student.
Carvalho previously spoke out against Trump’s immigration policies during his stint leading Miami-Dade County Public Schools between 2008 and 2022, according to Carvalho’s LinkedIn.
The former schools leader, who emigrated from Portugal as a teen, had overstayed his visa and was in the country illegally for a time, he said during a speech in 2017.
“I came to this country at 17. I overstayed my visa. Put the label on me,” Carvalho said, according to WLRN. “I was poor. I am an immigrant. I was undocumented. I was, in the eyes of some, illegal. I was homeless under the bridge blocks away from where today I work.”
More recently, Carvalho clashed with the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative education group, which sued the LAUSD over a decades-old program that offered benefits to non-White students. The Justice Department moved to join the case, claiming in a news release that it wanted to combat racial discrimination.
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