Fresno County authorities arrested a Raisin City Elementary School District employee for suspected lewd acts with a child, and parents say they weren’t properly notified by the district.
According to Fresno County Jail booking records, Carlos Rivas, 49, was arrested at the Raisin City Elementary School campus on Thursday. He was charged with lewd and laviscious acts with a child under 14 and annoying or molesting a child.
Combined bail for the two charges was $60,000. Rivas was released early Friday morning, according to booking records.
The Raisin City Elementary School District directory lists Rivas as the district’s food service director.
Laura Garcia, a mother with four children in the district, said administrators did not notify parents and community members of Rivas’s arrest. Garcia also accused the school district of not heeding parents’ alleged concerns about Rivas.
“There were always red flags that were reported to the principal, but the principal didn’t believe they were true, so nothing was done,” she said in Spanish.
Garcia said she and about a dozen other parents gathered at the school Friday morning to meet with principal Jessica Juarez and superintendent Orin Hirschkorn, who also leads Caruthers Unified School District. The parents wanted school officials to explain the law enforcement activity at the campus.
“We weren’t asking them to tell us the details of what happened. We wanted them to tell us why they didn’t notify us,” Garcia said. “We weren’t notified about what had happened — that there was police activity there.”
Juarez and Hirschkorn did not respond to a request for comment about the arrest or the parents’ allegations.
Parents who gathered at the campus Friday morning penned a letter, written in Spanish, calling for increased communication and transparency.
“While we respect that investigations must follow due process, we firmly believe that the administration had the responsibility to notify parents that a serious situation involving a student was under investigation, provide reassurance by indicating that immediate measures had been taken, and inform us whether the employee in question had been removed from the school while the investigation was underway,” the parents’ letter reads.
In the letter, written in Spanish, Raisin City School District’s parents state, “We, as a group of concerned parents, are writing to you to formally express our concern regarding a serious incident involving a school employee and a student, as well as the lack of communication and transparency surrounding this situation.” María G. Ortiz-Briones mortizbriones@fresnobee.com
The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office said the case remains under investigation.
Raisin City Elementary School District is a small, one-school district about 20 minutes southwest of downtown Fresno that serves about 250 students between kindergarten through 8th grade, according to the California Department of Education’s school directory.
The Fresno Bee
María G. Ortiz-Briones is a reporter and photographer for McClatchy’s Vida en el Valle publication and the Fresno Bee. She covers issues that impact the Latino community in the Central Valley. She is a regular contributor to La Abeja, The Bee’s free weekly newsletter on Latino issues. | María G. Ortiz-Briones es reportera y fotógrafa de la publicación Vida en el Valle de McClatchy y el Fresno Bee. Ella cubre temas que impactan a la comunidad latina en el Valle Central. Es colaboradora habitual de La Abeja, el boletín semanal gratuito de The Bee sobre temas latinos.
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