This adds a whole other level to the waiver of the penalties for the late fees on severance agreement.
1. When the late fees on the severance agreement with Dr. Horton were waived, the Board which included Sergio Hernandez already knew about the abuse of the p-card but the story on the abuse of it had not been made public yet. That was a couple of weeks later.
2. It turns out that the feds already issued a subpoena for records relating to the kickbacks months earlier and the Board knew about that too.
Despite all this, Sergio and Soo La Kim signed a letter waiving a ton of penalties with a stern warning to not do it again.
There was no reason to waive the penalties, especially since they knew that he had stolen money from the District before they waived the penalties. How much more did he need to steal before they would stand up for the District?
On another note - there is no reason to think that the individual gift cards were used by anyone other than Dr. Horton.
I hadn't considered that. Let me see the timing on this:
- May/June 2023: District claims they became aware of the investigation
- Feb 29, 2024: My story comes out on his defaulting
- March 8, 2024: Sergio and Soo La send him the letter, letting him off the hook
So yeah, they absolutely would've been aware of the investigation and it was absolutely negligent to let the guy under investigation off the hook early given that contractually he owed the entire amount in February 2024. What the hell were they thinking?
Speaking of, here's the last FOIA I did on the repayment agreement:
He was paid up as of February 2025 but the payments are supposed to go through June 2026, so he's not fully paid up yet. I'm guessing we won't be seeing any more of those payments.
This might become a story on its own, this is really negligent. I know it's not a ton of money but he could've been indicted in April 2024 and we'd lose the whole amount!!
It’s appalling that (1) Sergio is still on the board, and (2) that the current board re-elected Sergio as president.
Even if he has no personal responsibility for all of the board’s past bad decisions, his failure to accept accountability for the lapses that occurred under his leadership is glaring.
I agree - so happy to have your words again. As you said, it moves towards closing a chapter.
Beautiful writing as always Tom. Thank you for everything you do in the interest of transparency for our community. I hope the city or school board gives you a medal for your work.
so the investigation started 2 years ago. Any idea who tipped off the feds? I mean someone must have brought the case to them. Or were they reading FOIA Gras?
As to your broader point : the entire legal system relies on trust and everyone doing their part to uphold the norms, regulations, and not simply be lying when convenient. There isn't time to double check every single thing everywhere.
We've seen that good faith and trust have completely broken down over the last decade and it's basically dead at this point at a large scale. But this has been an issue in IL for a long time, at all levels (e.g. Rita Crundwell, all the governors who did time, Madigan).
I don't know how you address the Board members needing to rely on reports without making their job a paid one - and if we were doing that, I'd expect to pay $500k across the 7 jobs - make it similar to legislative pay. That would be ruinous for a lot of smaller districts (Skokies half dozen) but Evanston could afford it so long as the north 4 schools don't split into their own district to keep their schools open.
At the risk of sounding like Elon Musk or like I am insane, but I think AI can have a role in this kind of oversight. FOIAgras wouldn’t exist without my ability to process a lot of documents quickly. While not perfect, these governments spit off an enormous amount of data and paperwork that mostly goes ignored for the reasons you mention. Anyone want to fund an Inspector General Bot?
I'm an avowed AI/LLM hater, but I've seen Matt Bruenig mention its use when trained on specific datasets (in his case, NLRB decisions). So it's certainly possible.
The other idea would be to partner with Northwestern and have their finance undergrads do research each year on D65 finances!
The self driving mode on my car still sends me into oncoming traffic but the AI for document processing is getting very very good. When I started the blog, I used upworkers to do a lot of the processing but over time migrated it all to LLM-based workflows. I can take the last meeting, throw it into an LLM and say “find something wrong” and it works well.
I don’t trust it to author but it’s very good at finding. Northwestern finance kid is just going to throw it into AI anyway 😂😂
Oh my god 🤦 “Over the course of six weeks, Sebring and her lover exchanged at least 40 emails using her district email, according to Local 5’s sister station,”
And also, the guy after her stepped down due to steps taken in response to COVID, which has also been a big part of the critique of superintendents in Evanston. Just wanted to provide context to say that these issues are not uncommon, and it's not just a certain demographic of school leaders who are involved. And so helpful to provide a range of examples when bringing out these points.
Many years ago my purse was stolen right in front of me from a shopping cart in about 5 seconds… they were a team. One person distracted me, one snatched my purse and the other people were outside ready to get away as soon as possible. They went to Target and bought lots of gift cards with different credit cards… maybe a value of 2500 or 3000 total between a few cards. Apparently this is a very common practice when a credit card gets stolen because the thief can very quickly obtain the gift cards, there is less video coverage since it happened so quickly, and then even after the credit card gets cancelled, they still have the gift cards.
I could make a lot of assumptions here. But we can all read between the lines…
Does anyone have any guess at why the feds began their investigation? The board email says it began prior to the Pcard story coming out. I'm clueless on what tipped them off.
Dr. Horton has been indicted, along with his accomplices... good.
Let's go deeper and ask the following question: Who were the District Board Members when all these things happened? Let's start with Sergio Hernandez. Either he was aware of the situation, in which case he is an accomplice, or he didn't know what was going on, which then makes him negligent. Pick your poison.
Respectfully, Tom, I think you might be wrong here. And at a minimum, a number of them used their board seat, their “hiring” of Dr. Horton and the ideals that he wanted to implement within D65 as a way to line their pockets through consulting gigs.
I am genuinely asking: have any of them once apologized for their obvious missteps along the way? I haven’t seen anything of the sort.
are we sure none of the board members past and present were getting any kickbacks or tied to anything else? even when they announced him leaving and they knew about the pcard abuse they still sang his praises. seems fishy.
Never seen any evidence of this. I am working on a story regarding letting him off the hook of $18,000 in fees on his repayment agreement, though. I don’t understand the logic here.
This adds a whole other level to the waiver of the penalties for the late fees on severance agreement.
1. When the late fees on the severance agreement with Dr. Horton were waived, the Board which included Sergio Hernandez already knew about the abuse of the p-card but the story on the abuse of it had not been made public yet. That was a couple of weeks later.
2. It turns out that the feds already issued a subpoena for records relating to the kickbacks months earlier and the Board knew about that too.
Despite all this, Sergio and Soo La Kim signed a letter waiving a ton of penalties with a stern warning to not do it again.
There was no reason to waive the penalties, especially since they knew that he had stolen money from the District before they waived the penalties. How much more did he need to steal before they would stand up for the District?
On another note - there is no reason to think that the individual gift cards were used by anyone other than Dr. Horton.
I hadn't considered that. Let me see the timing on this:
- May/June 2023: District claims they became aware of the investigation
- Feb 29, 2024: My story comes out on his defaulting
- March 8, 2024: Sergio and Soo La send him the letter, letting him off the hook
So yeah, they absolutely would've been aware of the investigation and it was absolutely negligent to let the guy under investigation off the hook early given that contractually he owed the entire amount in February 2024. What the hell were they thinking?
Speaking of, here's the last FOIA I did on the repayment agreement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KagrwsLGBkQcZUqjyWWthhagyn5gzHMq/view?usp=drive_link
He was paid up as of February 2025 but the payments are supposed to go through June 2026, so he's not fully paid up yet. I'm guessing we won't be seeing any more of those payments.
This might become a story on its own, this is really negligent. I know it's not a ton of money but he could've been indicted in April 2024 and we'd lose the whole amount!!
Sergio 100% needs to resign.
It’s appalling that (1) Sergio is still on the board, and (2) that the current board re-elected Sergio as president.
Even if he has no personal responsibility for all of the board’s past bad decisions, his failure to accept accountability for the lapses that occurred under his leadership is glaring.
I’m sure many of us wrote to the board, but there is also a petition: https://www.change.org/p/demand-sergio-hernandez-s-resignation-from-d65-school-board
I agree - so happy to have your words again. As you said, it moves towards closing a chapter.
Beautiful writing as always Tom. Thank you for everything you do in the interest of transparency for our community. I hope the city or school board gives you a medal for your work.
so the investigation started 2 years ago. Any idea who tipped off the feds? I mean someone must have brought the case to them. Or were they reading FOIA Gras?
As to your broader point : the entire legal system relies on trust and everyone doing their part to uphold the norms, regulations, and not simply be lying when convenient. There isn't time to double check every single thing everywhere.
We've seen that good faith and trust have completely broken down over the last decade and it's basically dead at this point at a large scale. But this has been an issue in IL for a long time, at all levels (e.g. Rita Crundwell, all the governors who did time, Madigan).
I don't know how you address the Board members needing to rely on reports without making their job a paid one - and if we were doing that, I'd expect to pay $500k across the 7 jobs - make it similar to legislative pay. That would be ruinous for a lot of smaller districts (Skokies half dozen) but Evanston could afford it so long as the north 4 schools don't split into their own district to keep their schools open.
At the risk of sounding like Elon Musk or like I am insane, but I think AI can have a role in this kind of oversight. FOIAgras wouldn’t exist without my ability to process a lot of documents quickly. While not perfect, these governments spit off an enormous amount of data and paperwork that mostly goes ignored for the reasons you mention. Anyone want to fund an Inspector General Bot?
I'm an avowed AI/LLM hater, but I've seen Matt Bruenig mention its use when trained on specific datasets (in his case, NLRB decisions). So it's certainly possible.
The other idea would be to partner with Northwestern and have their finance undergrads do research each year on D65 finances!
The self driving mode on my car still sends me into oncoming traffic but the AI for document processing is getting very very good. When I started the blog, I used upworkers to do a lot of the processing but over time migrated it all to LLM-based workflows. I can take the last meeting, throw it into an LLM and say “find something wrong” and it works well.
I don’t trust it to author but it’s very good at finding. Northwestern finance kid is just going to throw it into AI anyway 😂😂
Just noting that the same Iowa school district had two prior superintendents also step down, to round out the picture provided by featuring just the story on the current superintendent (who happens to be Black and an immigrant). See this local news story: https://www.weareiowa.com/article/news/local/ian-roberts/des-moines-public-schools-dmps-superintendent-dr-ian-roberts-nancy-sebring-thomas-ahart-education-controversy/524-fe4cc734-8fb3-438d-b638-734b772df50a
Oh my god 🤦 “Over the course of six weeks, Sebring and her lover exchanged at least 40 emails using her district email, according to Local 5’s sister station,”
And also, the guy after her stepped down due to steps taken in response to COVID, which has also been a big part of the critique of superintendents in Evanston. Just wanted to provide context to say that these issues are not uncommon, and it's not just a certain demographic of school leaders who are involved. And so helpful to provide a range of examples when bringing out these points.
Friend of mine just sent me this:
https://southwestregionalpublishing.com/2025/04/13/adult-site-charges-on-argo-superintendents-card-uncovered-through-foia/
To your point, these problems are just absolutely rampant right now and its across the board.
The flurry of gift-card purchases is extremely odd. You almost wonder if he fell victim to a romance scam or some such.
probably just withdrawing some last minute funds from the D65 ATM, he knew he was leaving in a month or two
Many years ago my purse was stolen right in front of me from a shopping cart in about 5 seconds… they were a team. One person distracted me, one snatched my purse and the other people were outside ready to get away as soon as possible. They went to Target and bought lots of gift cards with different credit cards… maybe a value of 2500 or 3000 total between a few cards. Apparently this is a very common practice when a credit card gets stolen because the thief can very quickly obtain the gift cards, there is less video coverage since it happened so quickly, and then even after the credit card gets cancelled, they still have the gift cards.
I could make a lot of assumptions here. But we can all read between the lines…
https://c.org/Vb2F6bCztt
Sergio needs to resign. Sign the petition.
If you think Sergio should resign consider signing this: https://www.change.org/p/demand-sergio-hernandez-s-resignation-from-d65-school-board?recruiter=457348994&recruited_by_id=99db1860-b179-11e5-bf52-0911e0e2c69a&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=starter_onboarding_share_personal&utm_medium=copylink
Does anyone have any guess at why the feds began their investigation? The board email says it began prior to the Pcard story coming out. I'm clueless on what tipped them off.
Dr. Horton has been indicted, along with his accomplices... good.
Let's go deeper and ask the following question: Who were the District Board Members when all these things happened? Let's start with Sergio Hernandez. Either he was aware of the situation, in which case he is an accomplice, or he didn't know what was going on, which then makes him negligent. Pick your poison.
I think there was a lot of head-in-the-sand among board members.
Respectfully, Tom, I think you might be wrong here. And at a minimum, a number of them used their board seat, their “hiring” of Dr. Horton and the ideals that he wanted to implement within D65 as a way to line their pockets through consulting gigs.
I am genuinely asking: have any of them once apologized for their obvious missteps along the way? I haven’t seen anything of the sort.
I think it can be both head in the sand and also side gigs. It works together. Yin and yang of public corruption.
I’ve never seen an apology, yesterday was the first time I’ve even seen them say something even abstractly critical of Dr. Hortons behavior.
are we sure none of the board members past and present were getting any kickbacks or tied to anything else? even when they announced him leaving and they knew about the pcard abuse they still sang his praises. seems fishy.
Never seen any evidence of this. I am working on a story regarding letting him off the hook of $18,000 in fees on his repayment agreement, though. I don’t understand the logic here.
Well done sir! My national media contacts hit me up this morning and your work will definitely be appreciated here in Georgia
123391 I'm happy you are back!
THANK-YOU!
well we know why there were like 2 mothers day cards purchased now - one for him, one for his sibling Individual A