The Chronicle looks today at the City Hall career of Rosita Hernandez, the former manager of the mayor pro tem's office — and finds that it started with a lie. When Rosita Hernandez applied for a job as a municipal court secretary in 1994, she wrote on her application that she graduated from Bell High School in Los Angeles County in 1983. But the school said she actually dropped out in the 10th grade to move to Texas. Oops!
When the Chron asked Hernandez about the discrepancy, she said (through her lawyer) that she didn't graduate from Bell after all. Instead, she said she earned a GED while she was enrolled at Barclay Career School in Houston in the late '80s. The problem with that: The state has no record of Hernandez earning a GED, and a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman said Barclay didn't give GEDs. Oops!
But Hernandez was persistent, insisting that she did receive a GED from Barclay — and clearly, if no record of that exists, she must have been had by the school. "If there was a scam, she was a victim of it," attorney Walter Boyd III said. "She certainly believed she got a GED and paid for a GED." (Incidentally, Barclay apparently doesn't exist anymore.) Hernandez can't produce her GED certificate because she says her ex-husband threw it away; the ex, Ismael Reyes, said that's not true and that he doesn't believe Hernandez ever got the GED.
Despite that — after all, at City Hall seems to have checked on her educational record — Hernandez moved up the city ladder, going from the municipal courts to the mayor's office, then to the parks department and finally to the mayor pro tem's office, where she took over as manager in late 2004. It was there that officials say she and other pro tem employees gave themselves nearly $200,000 in unauthorized payraises and bonuses — Hernandez's share was a 37 percent raise, which took her salary to $78,000, plus $47,500 in bonuses. Hernandez claims former Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado authorized the bonuses and raises; Alvarado maintains that she didn't.
By the way, if you're wondering how Hernandez got by with lying on her city application, it's actually quite simple: She left blank a section of a form titled "verification of employment and education," which is supposed to be filled out and sent to human resources for checking. City HR Director Lonnie Vara said it's not uncommon for a secretary's high school diploma to go unverified.
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