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How probe into failed startup led to LAUSD superintendent investigation
Alberto Carvalho and Debra Kerr’s roots date back to their days together in the Florida education community.
Carvalho was the charismatic leader of Miami-Dade County schools, and Kerr was a well-known figure in the private sector, working for firms doing business with school systems.
Carvalho gave the keynote speech at a summit for superintendents sponsored by Age of Learning, where Kerr worked at the time as the head of sales.
Over the years, Kerr shared Carvalho’s Facebook posts to her own page, congratulating him on winning an award and often using the hashtag “#leadershipmatters.” Three years ago, Kerr posed for a smiling photo beside Carvalho, who had become the superintendent in Los Angeles, during what she described as his “brilliant” opening of schools address.
In 2023, Carvalho and Kerr became linked through another project. By now, Carvalho was head of the Los Angeles Unified School District and Kerr was working with AllHere, a Boston-based startup that promised a revolutionary tool in the form of a chatbot that would provide tailored academic guidance and other help to students and families — putting the district at the leading edge of artificial intelligence in the field of education.
But the multimillion-dollar project failed within months of its partial launch. Then, the company went bankrupt and its chief executive was accused by federal prosecutors of fraud. This week, FBI agents searched the homes of Carvalho and Kerr as part of an investigation that sources confirmed is connected to AllHere. The LAUSD headquarters also was searched.
LAUSD placed Carvalho on indefinite administrative leave Friday, clouding his future helming the nation’s second-largest school district.
Authorities have not provided any details about the scope of the investigation or named any targets. Carvalho and Kerr could not be reached for comment. But a review of court records and other documents offers a window into how a technology project envisioned as reshaping education crumbled amid allegations of fraud.
‘Award-winning solution’
Joanna Smith-Griffin founded AllHere while at a startup incubator at Harvard University in 2016, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Her stated goal was to use technology to reduce absenteeism in school.
On the startup’s now-defunct website, Smith-Griffin described herself as a former district attendance and family engagement coordinator whose experience “revealed the frustrations that often arise when trying to connect students with the right support at the right time.”
“At AllHere, our mission is to strengthen student outcomes and boost staff effectiveness by offering easy-to-use, technology-powered, evidence-based education support services,” the website read.
AllHere’s tech included an automated text messaging service that would send “nudges” to parents in an effort to improve their child’s classroom attendance, according to an indictment charging Smith-Griffin. She later pivoted the startup’s strategy to using AI technology to develop a “chatbot” that would interact with students and their families.
On its website, AllHere touted itself as an “award-winning solution” and “the only digital application powered by artificial intelligence and built by educators that is independently proven to positively impact stakeholder communication, family engagement, and student achievement.”
Amid the company’s purported success, Smith-Griffin’s public profile also grew. In 2021, she was on Forbes magazine’s coveted “30 Under 30” list of leaders in the education field.
“My goal over the next 12 months is a land grab,” Smith-Griffin told Forbes. “We want to help students get to school every day and put them on the track to success.”
AllHere had client school districts in different parts of the country, but authorities later alleged that AllHere exaggerated its business success.
In late 2022, Miami-Dade County Public Schools awarded AllHere a three-year, $1.8-million contract to create communication software to help at-risk students. The bidding process for the project began in the latter part of 2021, while Carvalho was still superintendent of that district, and the school board approved the agreement in October 2022, about eight months after he left.
Carvalho has said he had nothing to do with that contract. It is unclear what role Kerr played in securing the deal and whether she talked to Carvalho about the project.
The following year, AllHere entered into what became a $6-million work order with LAUSD to develop a new AI chatbot, “Ed,” prosecutors said. The company’s greater value proposition was looking forward, as AllHere was to manage, moderate and continue to develop Ed — and partner with LAUSD in marketing and licensing the product to other school systems.
Carvalho also denied involvement in the selection of AllHere in LAUSD. In an AllHere bankruptcy hearing in September 2024, Kerr said she helped the company close the lucrative deal in L.A.
In a splashy announcement in August 2023, Carvalho claimed “Ed” would be LAUSD’s newest student advisor, programmed to tell parents about their child’s grades, tests results and attendance. The official debut was in March 2024: At a party at the Roybal Learning Center, dignitaries gave speeches, a mascot paraded in an Ed suit and a DJ spun tunes.
But AllHere already was falling apart behind the scenes.
Company collapse
Around May 2024, Smith-Griffin, the sole person providing financial updates to investors and the company’s board of directors, was late sending AllHere’s first-quarter financial report.
According to prosecutors, that prompted an associate at one of the investment companies to contact AllHere’s accountant for the report, which showed AllHere’s annual recurring revenue was millions of dollars below what Smith-Griffin reported to investors in prior quarters.
Two of AllHere’s major investors, along with the startup’s outside financial accountant, began questioning Smith-Griffin on the discrepancy.
Prosecutors allege that in an attempt to conceal the truth, Smith-Griffin in May 2024 created a fake email address for a real AllHere financial consultant and sent additional false financial and client information to investors.
That June, the board of directors removed Smith-Griffin’s access to AllHere bank and corporate accounts and terminated her as chief executive, prosecutors said. The company furloughed the majority of its employees, shuttered its operations and filed for bankruptcy the following month, according to the indictment.
On Sept. 4, 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York served upon the bankruptcy trustee a grand jury subpoena seeking certain information and documents. In November, authorities arrested Smith-Griffin at her family’s home in North Carolina. In the indictment, prosecutors accused her of engaging in a scheme to defraud investors starting around November 2020.
As Smith-Griffin sought millions from investors, prosecutors allege that she misrepresented her startup’s revenue, cash and customer base in marketing materials and financial statements. Smith-Griffin allegedly told investors AllHere earned approximately $3.7 million in revenue in 2020 from 92 total customers. In later rounds of financing, she allegedly inflated the revenue for that year to $6.8 million.
In reality, prosecutors said, the startup generated approximately $11,000 that year. And, according to the indictment, AllHere never had more than 31 client schools and school districts.
Smith-Griffin also allegedly misrepresented which public school districts were AllHere customers. According to the indictment, six of the eight districts she claimed as customers had no contractual relationship with AllHere. The two districts that did paid AllHere approximately $27,000 and $30,000 over the life of their contracts. The eight districts did not include LAUSD.
Prosecutors allege Smith-Griffin fraudulently obtained nearly $10 million from AllHere’s investors. She is accused of using some of those funds to put a $150,000 down payment on a house in North Carolina and to pay for her wedding expenses.
Smith-Griffin pleaded not guilty to charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Her lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Former FBI Assistant Director in Charge James E. Dennehy said in a statement at the time that Smith-Griffin’s alleged actions “impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses.”
“The FBI will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of educational opportunities for our city’s children will be taught a lesson,” Dennehy added.
Bankruptcy proceedings
Kerr’s ties to AllHere came to greater public attention during the September 2024 bankruptcy hearing. Kerr is listed in Delaware bankruptcy documents as the company’s largest creditor — owed $630,000 — although that is listed as disputed.
The education website The 74 reported that during the bankruptcy hearing, Toby Jackson, AllHere’s former chief technology officer, said he had no invoices to substantiate the debt. Kerr chimed in during the hearing, stating she never was paid her commission from the first payments that LAUSD made to the startup under their contract, the website said.
“I never did collect any commissions and it’s in the contract based on commission percentages that would have been made on any sales accrued,” Kerr told the trustee, according to The 74.
Neither the FBI nor confidential sources identified Kerr as a target of an investigation. Attempts to contact her were unsuccessful.
In AllHere’s bankruptcy filing, one of the largest assets listed was the LAUSD contract — valued at $2.88 million.
The indictment and collapse of AllHere was an embarrassment for Carvalho and the school system but did not appear to represent a major financial exposure. The school system spent about $3 million with the company for work completed as part of contracts worth up to $6 million over five years. By comparison, the district’s budget this year is $18.8 billion.
In an emailed statement, Miami-Dade County Public Schools officials said the district is aware of an investigation involving Carvalho but declined to comment. A spokesperson did not answer a question about whether the Miami-Dade schools system made any payments to AllHere on its $1.89-million contract, instead routing it as a public record request that will take additional time to fulfill.
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Catholicism Thrives in Africa, but Pope’s Cameroon Visit Highlights a Divide
Catholicism is growing fast on the continent, yet Africans play a comparatively small role in church leadership. Cameroon, which Leo XIV will visit Wednesday, shows the disparity.
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 4: Majorana’s Mystery
(This is Part 4 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
It’s 1937. One year before Ettore Majorana vanishes. He is sitting with Dirac’s framework — the precise, picture-perfect vision of quantum mechanics — and doing what very few people in history have been capable of doing: going toe-to-toe with it.
He asks the kinds of questions nobody else is even thinking of asking. Does everything HAVE to work this way? Does a particle HAVE to have a distinct antiparticle?
He discovered that the answer is no. It’s not mandatory. It’s optional. It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that the universe, in all its infinite wisdom, made for electrons and quarks and every other charged particle we know. But neutrinos have no charge. Do they absolutely 100% HAVE to follow the same rules?
Majorana said “eh, maybe not.” And then disappeared.
These are what we call Majorana particles, as opposed to Dirac particles.
All Dirac particles have charge and have an antiparticle partner. All Dirac particles flip-flop between the two hands, but the universe doesn’t really care. Maybe neutrinos aren’t Dirac particles. Maybe they’re Majorana particles. Maybe their opposite partner doesn’t have opposite charge — it has opposite handedness. And the “charge” is the part that nobody cares about. Which is true, because neutrinos don’t have charge.
This means that neutrinos might be their own antiparticles.
Consider this: remember when 3D movies were briefly everywhere? Those work because light comes in two handednesses — left-circularly polarized and right-circularly polarized. One lens filters one out and passes the other, giving each eye a slightly different view. The photon is its own antiparticle. A left-handed photon and a right-handed photon aren’t particle and antiparticle of each other — they’re just the same particle with different handedness. The photon gets away with this because it carries no charge. Nothing forces the particle/antiparticle distinction to exist.
The Majorana idea is just: maybe the neutrino does the same thing. For the same reason.
In the Dirac picture we have four options. Left-handed neutrino — we see it. Right-handed antineutrino — check. Right-handed neutrino — invisible. Left-handed antineutrino — never seen. Two observable, two permanently hidden.
In the Majorana picture, we collapse that. The right-handed antineutrino and the right-handed neutrino? Same thing. The left-handed antineutrino and the left-handed neutrino? Same thing. Just two particles instead of four.
Most particles care about charge but not about handedness. Neutrinos might be the kind of particle that cares about handedness but not charge.
The Dirac picture asks us to believe in four kinds of particles when we only ever see two, and explains the missing two with “they exist but interact with literally nothing, deal with it.” The Majorana picture says: maybe there are only two particles. Maybe the universe isn’t hiding anything. Maybe we were just overcomplicating it.
But nature doesn’t care about elegance. You can have a beautiful, perfect, logical, completely wrong theory.
Watching Atoms Die
So how do we test it? How do you look at a neutrino and ask: hey buddy, are you your own antiparticle?
One option is to watch atoms die.
There’s a process called double beta decay. Sometimes two neutrons in a nucleus decay at the same time, producing two protons, two electrons, and two antineutrinos. We’ve seen this happen. It’s rare, but it’s real.
But if neutrinos are Majorana particles, then there’s really no such thing as “neutrino” versus “antineutrino” — they’re the same thing. And that changes what can happen inside the nucleus when the reactions go down. Instead of two antineutrinos coming out, you have one coming out of one neutron and going straight INTO the other. What comes out is two protons, two electrons…and nothing else.
We call it neutrinoless double beta decay. And right now, in deep underground laboratories that are absolutely not evil lairs, shielded from cosmic rays, surrounded by tons of carefully chosen isotopes, experiments are running and watching and waiting for exactly this signal.
We’ve got nothing.
That’s not a no. But it’s also not a yes. It’s just…not yet. The signal from neutrinoless double beta decay would be extraordinarily faint — neutrino masses are so vanishingly small that even if the process exists, it almost never happens. The non-observation just tells us it’s rare. It sets limits. But it’s not the final word.
Nobody knows what happened to Ettore Majorana. Some said it was suicide — that letter he sent wasn’t exactly the epitome of mental health. Some said he faked his death and fled to a monastery. There were reported sightings in South America, years later. Unverified, of course.
A lot like his namesake particle. A case that hasn’t been closed.
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Why now? Because that’s how trauma works. Get over it

Why now? Why now?
Every time a woman comes forward with her story of sexual assault, this is the first question she faces. OK, maybe the second — after some variation of “Are you a lying slut?”
At least we are consistent. But on behalf of all survivors everywhere, of any gender, identity or age, let me give you some blanket answers to “Why now?”
Survivors come forward now, whenever now is, because they have reached the point in their recovery when facing the inevitable “lying slut” accusation is less terrible than watching their abuser strut around as if that person is not a dangerous, cruel predator who is almost certainly going to hurt someone else if they are not stopped.
Whether it’s in Congress, on a movie set, in the halls of their school — wherever that predator is just living their life without consequence — there is a survivor who has been cowering in the shadows of her own life, in pain, wanting to scream to the world that this person is not what they seem.
But the price of that honesty has always been steep. Too steep. Even after #MeToo.
Ask Cassie Ventura. Ask Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Ask E. Jean Carroll. Dolores Huerta. Simone Biles.
Even powerful women can’t escape the blowback, the fear. Even powerful women are steamrolled over and over again by the overwhelming presumption that they are lying, and there is an ulterior motive for coming forward at this particular moment.
Imagine just being an average person holding that secret. Who are any of us to stand up alone against a rich and powerful man whose very freedom will depend on crushing our credibility?
P. Diddy. Harvey Weinstein. Donald Trump. Cesar Chavez. Larry Nassar. Eric Swalwell.
Those men know power, and know how to use it.
“He thought he was untouchable. He acted with total impunity. He never thought that the consequences of his actions would follow him,” Ally Sammarco, one of the women who has spoken out about Swalwell (who has previously denied allegations of misconduct), told CBS.
It’s why the women of the Epstein files stayed silent for so long. It’s why there are thousands of rape survivors out there right now who have never said a word about what they endured, and maybe never will.
“Why now?” is just a more palatable version of “lying slut,” a question based on ignorance about how trauma — and society — works. A question meant not to elicit fact, but to feed the Jezebel frenzy men always use in their attempt to escape justice.
Here’s the truth about sexual assault: There is no right way to respond to it, no right time. There is no one reaction that proves it happened or that creates the perfect scenario that will protect the survivor’s reputation while delivering justice upon the predator. In fact, there is really no way at all to respond to a sexual assault that won’t bring secondary trauma.
Wait years and face disdain — that it didn’t happen, wasn’t serious, is only coming out now for some agenda, like politics or money.
Report it immediately and be prepared for every move, every smile, every sip of a drink, to be examined for signs that this was, if not consensual, somehow deserved — a gray area of shared responsibility.
Imagine, at a moment of crushing vulnerability, when your body has been violated and your mind is reeling trying to find safe ground, being bludgeoned by these accusations, stated or implied, that you brought this on yourself.
“Why now?” becomes “Why would you?”
Even when the scenario is one in which there can be no defense — such as the UCLA gynecologist, James Heaps, who on Tuesday pleaded guilty to sexually abusing five of his patients during exams — the cost of reporting is terrible. That case has wound on for years, leaving each of the victims to constantly relive their worst moments, constantly fear that all of their courage would come to nothing.
Which is why survivors don’t always come forward. Maybe they need time to put themselves back together, even just a little bit. Maybe the fear of all that societal scrutiny is just too much. Maybe they fear they won’t be believed, and their attacker will be free to harm them again.
Maybe they just want it to all go away. Maybe they do blame themselves, and are paralyzed by an unfounded shame.
There are so many reasons why survivors stay silent — and none of them are because it didn’t happen, or because they are lying.
Lonna Drewes, the Beverly Hills model who came forward Tuesday with an accusation that Swalwell drugged and raped her in 2018, summed up the experience of many, many survivors.
“I did not want to live anymore,” she said of how she felt after the attack. “I cried all the time for years.”
So here’s the real answer to “Why now?” from a victim’s statement that one of Heap’s survivors read in court.
“What you intended to break, you did not,” she said.
That is the answer to “Why now?” Because the bravery and courage at the heart of the survivor was bruised but not defeated.
Because she doesn’t want it to happen to anyone else.
Because she deserves to be free of his secrets: Ones she has been forced to keep out of fear of him, but also of us.
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