Lawsuit Alert 4
Natalie Chavez v. SCCCD
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Another lawsuit. Another bill for taxpayers. Another failure of oversight by the Board of Trustees.
Once again, Chancellor Carole Goldsmith’s retaliation‑driven leadership has delivered a costly lawsuit to the State Center Community College District’s doorstep—one that was both foreseeable and avoidable. While the Board of Trustees continues to shield Goldsmith from accountability, the District finds itself dragged into court once more to defend decisions that never should have been made, leaving taxpayers to hold the bag again.
In this fourth installment of the “Lawsuit Alert” series, the plaintiff is a familiar name: Ms. Natalie Chavez—the architect of the HOPE program, the author of the $34.2 million student‑housing grant, and the faculty coordinator who spent years fighting to keep homeless students safe. What follows is a brief review of our prior coverage of Chavez, an examination of her newly filed lawsuit, and a closing message for those who keep insisting this cascade of litigation is somehow “normal.”
1. Brief Overview
Goldsmith’s treatment of Chavez and the devastation left in its wake for students, employees, and the District have already been documented in two exhaustive investigations.12 A brief review of the core facts, however, sets the stage for the legal reckoning now unfolding in Chavez’s lawsuit against State Center Community College District (SCCCD).
1.1. The HOPE Program
The Housing Opportunities Promote Education (HOPE) program at Fresno City College (FCC) was a coordinated lifeline for homeless and housing‑insecure students between 2020 and 2024. HOPE secured apartments, rent assistance, wraparound services such as case management, counseling, and addiction‑recovery services through partners like Fresno EOC, RH Community Builders, and WestCare, so students could stay enrolled and in recovery instead of cycling through shelters alone. HOPE created a genuine safety net and was hailed as “California’s most successful college student homeless support program.”
At the center of HOPE was its architect and faculty coordinator, Natalie Chavez, a dedicated 17‑year District employee who fought tirelessly to secure grants, built partnerships, and shouldered a crushing workload to keep unhoused students safe through emergency supportive services and housing. Even as she expanded housing options and brought in millions in grants, Chavez was denied a proper office, left chronically understaffed, and endured a revolving door of supervisors, while top administrators—especially Goldsmith—despised her for insisting the grants serve unhoused students rather than Goldsmith’s pet projects, administrative priorities, and cartel of consultants.
On April 24, 2024, Chavez formally warned District leaders that terminating HOPE would push more than 60 students with serious substance‑use and mental‑health needs back into homelessness and relapse, documenting the “human devastation” as a foreseeable outcome. She wrote:
“I fear what is going to happen to over 60 students that are experiencing homelessness and have the highest acuity of substance use disorder, that receive services because of this vitally important grant. These students could relapse without that desperately needed support and their safety could be in danger… The stress of knowing the human devastation of those students becoming homeless again is a stress that weighs heavy on me daily and continuously triggers my anxiety to the point that it is unmanageable.”
In the Goldsmith regime, standing up for students and refusing to play along with financial malfeasance and ethical corner‑cutting has become a fireable offense. So on June 25, 2024, barely two months after Chavez’s warnings in her complaints, she received a layoff notice, effective June 30, ending her role just seven days before July 8, 2024, when she was scheduled to have her first interview with the law firm retained to investigate her whistleblower claims. The District cited a single reason: lack of funding. The next day, June 26, HOPE students received an email claiming a “funding shortfall,” warning that housing assistance could not be guaranteed past September 1, and instructing them to move out by August 31, with a list of shelters as their consolation prize.
However, the lack of funding cited for both laying off Chavez and eliminating HOPE was a pretext, because that same day, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office notified SCCCD that $621,000 in Homeless and Housing Insecurity Program funding had been awarded to the HOPE program, on top of more than $2.5 million in unspent Basic Needs allocations for housing and essential support services. Moreover, Chavez’s first role overseeing the Foster Kinship Care Education (FKCE) program remained funded and would have paid for her position for the 2024–2025 academic year. Despite these facts, SCCCD neither reinstated Chavez nor continued the HOPE program. Reportedly, eliminating Chavez was the goal, so killing HOPE, regardless of the consequences, became the cleanest way to remove the one person who kept saying no.
For one HOPE student, Spencer Irwin, that email became a breaking point. Receiving an apartment and a structured support network through HOPE had given Spencer enough stability to stay enrolled and maintain his recovery. Spencer was known for his kindness, generosity, and desire to become a certified alcohol and drug counselor so he could help others. When he learned HOPE was ending, he texted his mother, “The HOPE program is ending 😢.” Those close to him described a sharp decline: deep distress at losing housing, relapse, and disengagement from counseling, as he was left to navigate a crisis HOPE had been designed to catch before it spiraled.
On July 28, 2024, Spencer left his HOPE‑provided apartment to walk 4.3 miles to a Verizon store on Shaw Avenue to get a new phone, specifically so he could use it to stay in school. This was a walk he never would have taken if HOPE were intact to offer him services. Spencer never made it. Four days later, on August 1, his unclothed body was found face down behind a building near Shaw and Blythe in Fresno. The timeline—Chavez’s April warnings, her June 25 layoff, the June 26 eviction email, the ending of HOPE’s contracts on June 30, and Spencer’s death in early August—maps a chain of administrative decisions, driven by spite and retaliation, that stripped away critical protections from highly vulnerable students in a matter of weeks.
Spencer’s death is not an isolated tragedy but the most painful and brutal proof of what happens when a working safety net for the most vulnerable students is dismantled while money sits on the table unused and those warning of the consequences are treated as the problem.
Multiple sources have told us that when Goldsmith took the Chancellor’s seat, she repeated a simple message: either people get on board and fall in line, or she will get rid of them. Spencer’s story shows what leadership looks like when that posture collides with real human fragility; the cost was never just reputations, job titles, or careers—sometimes it is a student’s life.
So the next time Goldsmith or the Board repeats the lie that they “care about students,” send them to the memorial on the Eaton Trail at Woodward Park—a tree that now stands in Spencer Irwin’s name—and ask them to explain, out loud, why a memorial had to be planted at all. [images below]
1.2. The $34.2 Million Grant
In our second story involving Chavez, we exposed how a $34.2 million state housing grant she wrote was delayed, distorted, and effectively weaponized under Goldsmith’s control, while students like Spencer Irwin were left unhoused and at risk.
The Higher Education Student Housing Grant Program set aside billions to build low‑cost student housing across California, including $34.2 million awarded in March 2022 to FCC for deeply affordable apartments tied to HOPE’s public‑private partnership model. During the height of the pandemic, Chavez single-handedly wrote the proposal for a $34.2 million construction project that would house 350 low‑income students. Chavez’s proposal was ranked second statewide because it offered the lowest state cost per bed and the lowest rents relative to statutory limits, explicitly to serve the lowest‑income, housing‑insecure students—not general dorms.
From the outset, Goldsmith treated Chavez’s work as a threat to her own ambitions and favored her cartel of consultants, attempting to sabotage Chavez’s construction applications in favor of smaller planning grants for FCC and Madera Community College (MCC) until she was reassured those would still be funded. Once the $34.2 million award was secured, Goldsmith took control of the grant, sidelining Chavez, the program’s architect and the District’s most experienced low‑income housing practitioner who had designed and operated “California’s most successful college student homeless support program.” The first RFP for the project was a “summer surprise” in June–August 2022, without consulting Chavez, and multiple developers never even received formal responses, while sources say Goldsmith pushed dorm‑style, low‑occupancy housing geared toward athletes, in direct conflict with the grant’s purpose and ranking.
After the first RFP failed, Goldsmith waited over two years, until November 22, 2024, to issue a second RFP, and did so only after Chavez was laid off on June 30, 2024, and HOPE was dismantled on July 1, removing the one internal expert most likely to challenge any deviation from the grant’s affordability requirements. The timeline—grant award in March 2022, missed 2022 construction, Chavez’s removal, HOPE’s closure, Spencer’s August 1, 2024 death, and a second RFP in late 2024—strongly suggests that eliminating Chavez was a precondition to moving forward on Goldsmith’s terms.
The original grant framed 75 deeply affordable units, designed around HOPE, as a way to eliminate the waitlist for up to 350 homeless and housing‑insecure students by lowering their cost of attendance and embedding comprehensive supports. By contrast, the second RFP Goldsmith advanced required the selected developer to “provide reliable positive cash flow… to support the indirect costs of housing as well as the overall educational mission of the District,” effectively turning a homelessness grant into a revenue‑generating asset for her unrestricted funds, presumably to fund her consultant cartel and enrich her friends and family.
While the $34.2 million sat idle, Goldsmith funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the housing planning grants and capital project pool to outside consultants like Brailsford & Dunlavey instead of relying on the District’s own research staff, reportedly hired to deliver predetermined outcomes and validate her preferred dorm-style model. District records show at least $380,963 paid to Brailsford & Dunlavey between November 2022 and January 2025, including roughly $75,159 tied to a 2022–23 housing survey that concluded, unsurprisingly, that students prefer single-occupancy units, even as the grant’s affordability logic (and SCCCD’s own promises) depends on maximum affordability through maximum occupancy. This is the same consultant playbook we flagged in “Consultant Cartel 1.1”:
Ideas first. Expertise later (often never).
Consultants don’t discover; they “validate.”
And Goldsmith collects the triple payoff: money flows to her inner circle, constituencies get routed around, and accountability gets outsourced to a glossy PDF, while the district drifts further from housing for unhoused students and closer to dorm-style housing.
The District promised the state it would begin construction by December 31, 2022, but almost four years after receiving the grant, no ground has been broken. Had SCCCD honored its own promise to begin construction by late 2022, the project could have been completed by spring 2024, providing stable housing and support to HOPE students, including Spencer Irwin, before HOPE was dismantled. Instead, Goldsmith’s years‑long delay, fixation on dorm‑style or revenue‑generating projects, and removal of Chavez left tens of millions of dollars unused, generating a shocking amount of deferred revenue, while homeless students were pushed back toward shelters, relapse, and despair—a pattern that advocates believe cost Spencer his life and has harmed many more.
In our “September 2025 Board of Trustees Meeting Report: Part 2,” we documented how Vice Chancellor Finance and Administration confirmed that the District earns interest on funds held in its accounts. This admission reinforces the suspicion we raised in our initial article on the grant that Goldsmith has hoarded the $34.2 million homeless housing grant for four years as a strategic ploy to let it accrue interest while the District’s most vulnerable students are harmed. That is Goldsmith-style “kindness.”
What follows shows how a faculty coordinator who built and ran a nationally recognized lifeline for unhoused students ended up out of a job, cut off from insurance, seriously harmed, and forced into court, while the Board keeps insisting everything is “normal.” Chavez’s complaint frames it as something far uglier; she became a target because she spoke up, and a vendetta-driven culture created and promoted by Goldsmith and rubbers-stamped by this Board did the rest.
2. Natalie Chavez v. SCCCD
Filed on December 12, 2025, Natalie Chavez v. SCCCD is the predictable legal endgame of Goldsmith’s escalating, retaliation‑driven leadership. This time, Goldsmith’s disdain for Chavez translated into retaliation against one of the District’s most effective advocates for unhoused students. The complaint reads like a litigation‑grade sequel to “Death of HOPE and Spencer Irwin,” and shines a light on the devastating impact on Chavez, who alleges a familiar mix of disability discrimination, failure to accommodate, and retaliation against an employee who documented wrongdoing and refused to be silent. The full complaint is below. [PDF below]
Chavez alleges SCCCD unlawfully terminated her in retaliation for whistleblower complaints, refused to accommodate her preexisting disability, refused to engage in the interactive process, and terminated her less than 24 hours after she requested a reduced workload due to a serious medical condition. She also alleges SCCCD falsely cited “lack of funding” while grant resources were available for the HOPE and FKCE programs that she led.
According to the complaint, Chavez created and managed the HOPE program beginning in 2020 and secured major grant funding, including approximately $4.5 million initially and later the $34.2 million housing grant. She states that on April 24, 2024, she filed three formal EEO complaints against FCC administrators, which warned that dismantling HOPE would endanger homeless students, and disclosed that her preexisting PTSD was being exacerbated by the hostile work environment.
She further states that she reported a psychological workplace injury on May 1, 2024, and took 17 days of short-term disability leave, then requested accommodations on June 10 and a reduced workload on June 24, only to receive a layoff notice on June 25, effective June 30, 2024, purportedly due to “lack of funding.” Chavez contends that this explanation was false and cites $823,866 in additional program funding available beginning July 1, 2024, including $620,976 for HOPE and $203,890 for FKCE, the two programs that she managed.
Chavez further alleges that after her termination, SCCCD failed to provide COBRA information, leaving her uninsured and allowing her untreated psychological injury to escalate into serious physical harms, including temporary blindness, a stroke, and permanent stroke-related impacts. She also alleges that following her termination, SCCCD dismantled HOPE, informed students they would be evicted, and that a homeless student served by HOPE was found dead on August 1, 2024, echoing the timeline detailed in our HOPE investigation.
Her complaint asserts seven causes of action: (1) FEHA disability discrimination; (2) failure to engage in the interactive process; (3) failure to accommodate; (4) FEHA retaliation; (5) failure to prevent discrimination and retaliation; (6) whistleblower retaliation under Labor Code § 1102.5; and (7) CFRA retaliation. Chavez seeks general and special damages (including lost wages, benefits, and retirement), emotional‑distress damages, statutory damages, penalties and interest, reimbursement of business expenses, attorneys’ fees and costs, and injunctive and declaratory relief requiring policy and training reforms, along with any other relief the court deems proper.
This lawsuit is not an outlier; it’s another case study in how Goldsmith’s vindictive and retaliation-first leadership style has turned SCCCD into a legal ATM and is bleeding taxpayer dollars through outside counsel bills, settlements, and rising insurance premiums. That is not “normal,” no matter how often Goldsmith and her inner circle try to chant it into legitimacy. Worse still, multiple credible sources indicate that this wave of lawsuits has not yet crested; the docket, by all accounts, has company coming.
3. The Pattern
This is where Lawsuit Alert 4 snaps into place alongside Lawsuit Alerts 1–3: once again, the District finds itself in court facing allegations that follow the same script—and all of it is directly tethered to Goldsmith’s vindictive, retaliatory leadership.
The pattern is painfully familiar: an employee raises protected concerns; Goldsmith and her cronies retaliate and create a hostile work environment; the employee is injured; disability disclosures and accommodation requests are ignored; the District reaches for a pretext to terminate the employee who spoke up. Then comes the part the Board of Trustees never seems to budget for, and one that the taxpayers always pay for: lawsuits, costly litigation, outside counsel invoices, and the compounding cost of refusing to course-correct.
At this point, you have to work not to see the pattern. As our legal‑costs analysis showed, the District’s annual spending on legal services has more than tripled under Goldsmith’s tenure, crossing the million‑dollar mark and staying there even as other needs go unfunded. Each new lawsuit—Tarazi, Ainsworth, Castle, Bolen, Hernandez, Madec, and now Chavez—adds weight to the same conclusion: SCCCD does not have a “lawsuit problem”; it has a Goldsmith problem that, for reasons only they can explain, the trustees keep underwriting with their votes and their silence—trading away SCCCD’s reputation, burning out employees, destabilizing students, and sticking taxpayers with the bill.
4. A Word for Supporters
Our District’s legal crisis is not a string of unlucky, isolated lawsuits; it is a system designed, sustained, and promoted by Goldsmith that rewards retaliation and punishes anyone who stands between her and her ambitions, no matter the cost. The Board has made its position clear. The only remaining question is what we, the employees, are prepared to do about it. Are we willing to accept a hostile work environment, a vindictive chancellor, mounting lawsuits, insulting contract offers, and a Board that acts as Goldsmith’s water carrier, or are we willing to stand up and refuse to normalize it?
Here is the Board’s real strategy: not oversight, not accountability, but attrition. They are betting that exhaustion will do what their governance will not. That you will get tired, tune out, and accept lawsuits, retaliation, and wasted millions on Goldsmith’s pet projects, consultant cartel, and lawsuits as the “normal” cost of doing business, while your reasonable demands at the bargaining table are brushed aside.
The only counter‑strategy is stubborn, organized persistence: to keep showing up, keep documenting, and keep forcing this pattern into the public record until the cost of protecting Goldsmith exceeds the cost of replacing her. And when that tipping point comes—and it will—the defining difference will not be what she did; it will be what you did, or refused to do, once you knew.
One more thing: pay attention to what has already changed. Goldsmith’s conspicuous absence from opening‑day events and other public‑facing moments—despite her favorite refrain, “I ain’t going nowhere. And I’m not going to be quiet.”—is not a sign of strength; it is a sign that pressure works. But do not confuse retreat from the spotlight with retreat from the mission; it usually means the plotting has simply moved indoors. Our next story will document yet another attempt to suppress faculty voices, so stay tuned.
State Center Community College District (SCCCD) - Fresno City College (FCC) - Madera Community College (MCC) - Clovis Community College (CCC) - Reedley College (RC) - Dr. Carole Goldsmith - Chancellor Goldsmith - godmother Goldsmith - La Nina Goldsmith - Magdalena Gomez - Danielle Parra - Robert Fuentes - Austin Ewell - Deborah Ikeda - Nasreen Johnson - Destiny Rodriguez - Noel Reyes