An LAUSD student tries out Ed, the district’s new AI assistant for students.
Credit: Los Angeles Unified / X
Los Angeles Unified School District students will soon have their own individualized AI tool, a “personal assistant,” to help them with everyday tasks and remind them about school work when they forget.
The tool, named Ed, is the first of its kind in the nation and will be able to accommodate students verbally and on screen in 100 languages.
“What we are announcing here today is a vision that was built over years of thinking about it, but only one year in actually bringing the necessary partners together — to give a voice, to give a simple life, to give a color, to give an experience,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho during Wednesday’s inaugural event at the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center. “And what has emerged is Ed.”
Ed includes a number of features. It will, for example, be able to remind students of upcoming tests, inform them of the cafeteria menu, provide updates on school buses and even wake them up in the morning, Carvalho said.
“Ed will tell Maria ‘You’re falling a little behind in reading, but we got you – click here,’” Carvalho said. “Maria will click, and, without the need for an additional sign on … (it will) open the doors to all of the resources to elevate each student’s needs.”
Carvalho said this tool will not replace the many people in LAUSD who teach and support students on a daily basis.
During the pilot period, Ed will be available immediately to 55,000 students in 101 elementary, middle and senior high schools. Once an initial pilot period is over and the program proves successful, Carvalho said it would expand to the whole district.
“Just like humans are not perfect — although sometimes, in certain political circles, some say they are — the technology produced by humans isn’t perfect either,” Carvalho said.
“With all of the protections against the vulnerabilities, there is always a concern. That’s why we are over vigilant.”
Carvalho also tried to dispel potential cybersecurity concerns — emphasizing that the district has had support from local, state and national agencies in monitoring the program’s evolution.
He also said Ed is currently operating at 93% accuracy, several percentage points above the gold standard of 85% to 87% for ChatGPT.
A strong set of filters will also ensure the program is free from any kind of offensive language, Carvalho added.
More than 100 people, including LAUSD school board members, partners from various universities and businesses as well as representatives of local and state government officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, attended Ed’s inauguration.
The event space was decorated with balloon archways and various photo backdrops — along with Lego building tables, face painting, juice stations and food trucks to celebrate the occasion. Students also sat at tables testing out various features provided by Ed, while the parent interface was displayed on iPads.
“It is the power of artificial intelligence that will allow us for real-time understanding of where students are and where they need to go,” Carvalho said.
“It is the power of this technology to ensure that we will meet every one of our students where they are and accelerate them academically and in terms of enrichment towards their full potential.”
Sun Valley Apartments provide homes to LAUSD families that have experienced chronic homelessness.
Credit: Mallika Seshadri
Twenty-five units of permanent, supportive housing have been made available to families of LAUSD students who have experienced chronic homelessness.
After more than seven years of collaboration, district officials and partners — including Many Mansions, a nonprofit that provides affordable housing to Los Angeles County and Ventura County residents — cut the ribbon for the new Sun King Apartments on Monday and vowed this would be the first of many structures to come.
“I am filled with hope and determination to continue bringing housing opportunities to more LAUSD families in need,” said school board member Kelly Gonez on Monday. “Because while we’re not in the housing business, we are in the business of doing everything we can to advocate for our students and families.”
High rates of poverty “should not be the reality in the richest country on Earth, in the richest state in the nation, in one of the richest counties of this state,” district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho added.
The Sun King Apartments — consisting of one, two and three bedroom apartments — are located in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, where Gonez said there are several elementary schools where more than 20% of students are homeless.
The apartments’ residents are supported through a voucher, and their rent is based on a sliding scale.
In addition to the housing, residents will have access to a range of youth services — including after-school tutoring, summer camps, family events and school supplies, according to Rick Schroeder, president and CEO of Many Mansions.
Several of the district’s partners and collaborators on the project attended Monday’s event, including U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas, City Council member Imelda Padilla and the city’s chief housing and homelessness officer, Lourdes Castro Ramirez, along with business partners.
‘Not stopping here’
Annika, Angel and their daughter, Faith, live in one of the Sun King Apartments.
The parents, whose last names were not provided, met at a homeless shelter 16 months ago.
In late December, they — along with their daughter, Faith — moved into the Sun King Apartments.
“We all started a new chapter of our lives, and it has filled us with the highest hopes, blessings and glory,” Annika said Monday. “With the thanks to Many Mansions, we have been able to create a safe and stable chapter of life and a new home for our daughter, Faith.”
Noting that homelessness among school-aged children has increased, Carvalho said Monday that similar projects to house members of the Los Angeles community are critical. He said the Sun King Apartments project is something “that we need to replicate and amplify very quickly.” The superintendent did not provide details or a timeline for when additional housing is expected.
This initial effort took more than seven years, but Carvalho hopes future projects will take less time.
So far, the district has put out a request for information for seven potential properties — some of which may also serve as workforce housing for teachers and classified personnel, Carvalho said.
He declined to share how many people the district is ultimately looking to house and said Los Angeles Unified School District would pursue options that do not cost them financially.
“How do you tackle (homelessness)? One unit at a time, 25 units in a building, many buildings, many mansions across our entire community,” Carvalho said.
“And why do we do this? … Families today live on the third floor. They see the mountains. They see the street. They’re close to the school where their baby girl attends. They feel maybe for the first time somebody paid attention, they’re important.”
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District, challenging the district’s policy limiting charter co-locations on nearly 350 campuses, including the district’s 100 Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan schools and community schools.
The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, argues that the policy is illegal and discriminates against charter students by not providing them with “reasonably equivalent” facilities.
“We have consistently maintained that this policy is a shameful and discriminatory attack on public charter school students, for which the district shares a responsibility to house,” said Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the CCSA at a press event Tuesday.
“Families choose to send their children to LAUSD charter public schools because they have found programs uniquely tailored to their needs. … This policy limits options for those parents among the most vulnerable across LA Unified.”
The CCSA started making threats of litigation when the board passed the resolution on Feb. 13. The following month, the CCSA claimed the vote was invalid due to alleged violations of the state’s open- meetings law, the Brown Act, tied to board member George McKenna’s virtual participation during the February vote.
LAUSD’s school board reconvened on March 19 and passed the policy a second time with a 4-3 vote that included the support of Board President Jackie Goldberg, Vice President Scott Schmerelson and members McKenna and Rocio Rivas.
The four board members, along with members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), have repeatedly emphasized negative effects of co-location, particularly on vulnerable students, including allegedly hostile school environments and challenges with accessing programmatic spaces, including computer labs, music rooms and art studios.
Family centers, according to Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of UTLA, are also negatively impacted by co-locations.
“Implementing proper oversight and limitations on co-located schools is the fairest way to ensure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds, can access a high-quality education within LAUSD,” Myart-Cruz said in a statement to EdSource.
She added that the lawsuit filed by the CCSA is “a misguided response” to a policy widely supported by teachers, parents and students.
“All students deserve a space to thrive, and overcrowding our already resource-limited public schools has had a detrimental effect on both public and charter students,” Myart-Cruz said.
Charter proponents, however, have argued that taking nearly 350 schools off the table for co-locations could lead to more multi-site offers and school closures, which they say will negatively impact vulnerable students.
The lawsuit specifically states that the 240 charter schools in LAUSD educate more than 115,000 students, who are largely low-income and students of color.
The lawsuit also claims that the district has failed to collaborate in good faith and points to a history of alleged violations of Proposition 39, which dealt with bonds to finance school facilities.
“Despite CCSA and the charter public school communities’ offer to work collaboratively with the board on a new policy that would improve the process of sharing campuses, LAUSD has disregarded the voices and needs of charter school families and adopted a new policy to harm their charter schools,” Castrejón added at Tuesday’s press event.
LAUSD declined to comment on the lawsuit as litigation is pending.
Meanwhile, the CCSA emphasized its strong legal track record and said they feel optimistic about the case.
“It is a common theme with LAUSD,” said CCSA’s vice president of legal advocacy and executive director, Julie Umansky, on Tuesday. “We’re feeling confident with the precedent on their disregard for Prop. 39 and our ability to get the court to see it the way we do.”
High school junior Maya Shtangrud may have given up on her childhood dream of learning to play the violin — but now, serving as an arts justice fellow at the ACLU of Southern California, she remains steadfast in her advocacy for arts education.
Like many, she hoped Proposition 28 — a ballot measure passed by roughly 65% of voters in November 2022 to allocate about $1 billion toward arts education each year — would lead to greater opportunities for her fellow students.
She’s not quite as optimistic now, and is joining a group of teachers and advocates to sound alarms on the district’s alleged mismanagement of their estimated $76.7 million in Proposition 28 money — which they claim has been used to pay for current teachers rather than create new programs or bolster existing ones.
“I really want adults, teachers, administrators, people who distribute the Prop. 28 funds, to understand that they need to really think about it from our perspective and see how much it is impacting us,” said Shtangrud, who now plays jazz piano and enjoys filmmaking. “A lot of people don’t understand the impact that the arts have on us students.”
Most families assume their children are getting some form of arts education, said Janine Riveire, a professor of music and music education at Cal Poly Pomona. Many also hoped that Proposition 28’s passage would lead to better outcomes for their children.
Despite Proposition 28’s widespread support in the polls, bringing arts education to students across the Los Angeles Unified School District has remained a challenge — with educators and advocates claiming that the district’s implementation of Proposition 28 has failed to give individual campuses their own discretion over the use of their funds, leading to roadblocks that impede teachers’ ability to access supplies central to their artistic discipline.
“Millions of Californians, voters and parents and others, voted for more arts funding for schools,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel of the ACLU of Southern California’, who is also part of the LAUSD Arts Advisory Council. “And that’s not what we’re seeing.”
Widespread calls to action
On March 25, various unions and former LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner, who authored Proposition 28, wrote a letter to state officials — Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire and Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas — demanding the state hold districts accountable for their spending.
“Prop 28 is the largest investment in arts and music in U.S. history and establishes California as a national leader. But only if it’s properly implemented,” the letter reads.
“If school districts are allowed to violate the law without consequence and substitute the new funds for something they were already spending money on, their actions will make a mockery of voters’ clear wishes.”
The letter — supported by SEIU 99 President Max Arias, Oakland Education Association President Ismael Armendariz, UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz, California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas, Teamsters Local 572 Secretary-Treasurer Lourdes M. Garcia, California Teachers Association President David Goldberg — also urged the state officials to direct schools to submit, within a 30-day window, proof that they have not supplanted money and a list of teachers employed during both the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years.
“Instead of hiring about 15,000 additional teachers and aides, the funds would instead be used to pay for existing programs,” the letter reads. “This means millions of children will miss out on the arts education voters promised them.”
In a statement to EdSource, LAUSD said it remains committed to arts education. This year, the district budgeted $129.5 million toward the arts, on top of $76.7 million from Proposition 28, for a total of more than $206 million. That is almost three times the $74.4 million that a district spokesperson said LAUSD spent on arts education in the 2022-23 academic year.
“We couldn’t agree more in how formative and critical the arts are for personal development, social emotional regulation, educational attunement, and an overall appreciation for diversity, cultures, and experiences,” according to the statement. “That is why the arts are so central to the instruction and pedagogy of Los Angeles Unified.”
The district also claimed its current investments in the arts “meet and exceed requirements specific to Prop 28, and that Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is coordinating “a comprehensive multilayered scan” of the district’s investments and expenses.
While applauding efforts at various districts throughout the state — and especially in Bakersfield and Santa Monica — for their implementation of Proposition 28, Beutner said LAUSD’s statewide leadership in arts education has waned over the past decade, referring to it as “the poster child for how to violate law.”
“Maybe the time in which (various districts) responded was similar, but one read the law and chose to do what the law says and do the right thing for kids in their schools,” Beutner said. “One read the law and said, ‘OK, we’re going to ignore that, and we’re going to do something different, and we’re going to cut funding for the arts and hope nobody finds out.’
“Two different approaches. Same law.”
Proposition 28 spending at the district level
Beutner said that before Proposition 28’s passage, only about 20% of California’s public schools had a full-time arts or music teacher. Advocates for the measure faced no opposition, and support was widespread — and garnered about 65% of the vote, he added.
Proposition 28 was also designed to prioritize hiring new arts teachers — and schools are required under the measure to use at least 80% of funds to hire staff. The funds are supposed to add to the existing money — not replace it, which Whitaker and several teachers told EdSource that LAUSD is doing. They also said they’ve heard accounts of the district firing arts teachers only to rehire them with Proposition 28 funds. They fear that this practice will deplete the funds without making any improvement in arts ed.
“For the 2023-2024 school year, the LAUSD’s General Fund is not being utilized for either of the above purposes,” an instructor claimed in an email to the California Department of Education.
“Instead, LAUSD has replaced the General Fund’s allocations for itinerant arts positions (approximately 250 FTE funded in the 2022-2023 school year) and the allocations for arts materials/supplies for every elementary and secondary school with the funds from Proposition 28.”
Ginger Rose Fox, an elementary school dance teacher who serves as the United Teachers Los Angeles Arts Education committee chair, said she is concerned that LAUSD’s implementation is costing schools their autonomy in choosing how to spend their Proposition 28 money.
Beutner added that giving schools autonomy is also the law.
“Not top down ‘what does the district want done?’ … This was written to give agency to school communities, and it saddens me greatly to see L.A. Unified ignoring what was written in the law, the will of the voters to do something, just because they want to do it their way.”
Ensuring schools can make their own decisions directly affects students’ ability to access certain arts disciplines and have continued access throughout their K-12 education, Fox said.
“Can this kid who was excelling in dance in elementary school be able to have dance in middle school?” Fox said.
Fox and other educators have emphasized that giving individual schools autonomy on how to allocate resources is critical to that process.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to bring families into school to engage alongside teachers and school leaders and say, ‘What do we want to do?’” Beutner said.
In November, Fox wrote a letter to Thurmond and California Department of Education.
In addition to concerns about allegedly supplanted money, Fox claimed that the district’s use of Proposition 28 funds has also depleted the stock for critical arts supplies.
Arts educators and advocates stressed that some teachers are now struggling to purchase basic materials that are critical to their discipline — ranging from musical instruments to clay and visual arts supplies.
Many of them are still calling for accountability and hoping that the funds will eventually come to support students.
Beutner said he had hoped that after the documentary film “The Last Repair Shop” won an Oscar recently, the district would make a greater commitment to arts education. Unfortunately, he said, that did not happen.
“The repair shop has been wonderful. It’s been long standing, and the people that work there are my heroes,” Beutner said. “How, at the same time, could you be and have been, for more than a year now, cutting funding for the arts?”
Members of UTLA and SEIU Local 99 rally outside of Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters on May 7, 2024.
Credit: Delilah Brumer / EdSource
Thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and employees took to the street outside the district headquarters on Tuesday to demand an end to what they describe as the “Carvalho cuts,” referring to the superintendent.
Members of both United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and SEIU Local 99, which represents roughly 30,000 workers in LAUSD, anticipate staffing and program cuts in the upcoming academic year, despite Los Angeles Unified having roughly $6.3 billion in its reserves.
“We’re out here making sure the district hears us and funds our positions properly,” said Conrado Guerrero, the SEIU Local 99 president, who has served as a building engineer in LAUSD for 27 years.
“We’re so understaffed,” he said outside a district board meeting on Tuesday. “We’re being overworked, and they’re underpaying us. After a while, you just become a robot from working and don’t have time to be with your family.”
UTLA also claims in a news release that the district has failed to set aside enough money to keep its current staffing and services and is instead planning to “reclaim an unprecedented portion of ‘carryover funds’ that schools rely on to address budget shortfalls.”
Amid declining enrollment, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told The 74 in an interview in December that LAUSD was implementing a targeted hiring freeze and may have to consider consolidating or closing some of its schools as pandemic aid funds run dry.
“Los Angeles Unified is committed to prioritizing investments that directly impact student learning and achievement,” an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource on Tuesday. “We are exploring a multi-faceted approach that combines fiscal responsibility with strategic resource allocation.
“We will protect our workforce and the historic compensation increases that were negotiated, and we will protect programs for our students.”
If the cuts take place, union members fear these positions, among others, could be at risk:
special education assistants
campus aides
school supervision aides
pupil services
attendance counselors
psychiatric social workers
school psychologists
library aides
IT and tech support staff
Art and music teachers
The unions have stated that on top of reducing students’ access to services such as mental health and special needs support, the cuts will also lead to messy or dirty classrooms and larger class sizes.
Support for programs like the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan, community schools and English language learner programs could also take a hit, they say.
Cheryl Zarate, an eighth grade teacher at Thomas Starr King Middle School, said she found out about the cuts from her school principal and immediately felt “devastated.”
Thomas Starr King Middle School alone could lose as many as six campus aides, two counselors, school climate advocates, custodians and an assistant principal, Zarate said. School psychologists, she added, will no longer be available every day — and will only be on campus twice a week.
These cuts, Zarate said, would have a particularly negative effect on students with disabilities and those who are struggling with mental health challenges.
“It scares me and the other educators to know that we have middle school students who go through mental fatigue and anxiety and, God forbid, have suicidal ideations,” Zarate said.
“Are we supposed to schedule out when a student is going to have a mental breakdown?”
Zarate added that LAUSD should be focused on keeping and supporting the staff, not prioritizing other initiatives such as the diagnostic assessment tool called iReady and its newly launched AI tool, Ed.
“All these projects … are not relevant to what we asked and fought for, which is a full-time staff … mental health, safety, a greener campus for our students,” Zarate said.
“That’s what we deserve. That’s what the students deserve.”
Amid a sea of UTLA red and SEIU purple, the rally’s participants shook tambourines, waved pompoms and chanted “stop the cuts.”
Among them was William Chavez, a social science teacher at Wilson High School, who has worked in LAUSD for a decade.
“We’re sending a clear, unified message to the superintendent and the school board that these deep cuts are unfair and unjust,” Chavez said. “We’ll all have to wear more hats. We’ll have to do even more work, and something’s got to give, and that really hurts the students.”
Delilah Brumer is a sophomore at Los Angeles Pierce College majoring in journalism and political science and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
Four years after removing district police from individual campuses, the Los Angeles Unified School District has temporarily restored officers to two schools — reviving longstanding debates and dissatisfaction over school policing.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho attempted to restore officers to 20 school sites to make campuses safer, according to a May 13 memo to school board members. Those campuses were chosen based on “relevant safety data.”
“As we near the end of the school year, we continue to refine our protocols to ensure our schools are safe and welcoming environments for students and staff,” he said in the memo. “It is critical that we are aware of the specific needs of our schools, and respond accordingly.”
A day later, amid a backlash, Carvalho’s plan collapsed, with the district limiting police to only two of the 20 schools until the end of the school year because of “heightened activity” in the region: Washington Preparatory High School and Northridge Middle School. At each of the campuses, police could be stationed either all day or during specific times, including dismissal, according to an LAUSD spokesperson.
The district will decide weekly whether to keep police in place. It is unclear what the district will do next.
The district’s own data shows a 45% spike from 2017-18 to 2022-23 in incidents involving suicide risk, fighting/physical aggression, threats, illegal/controlled substances and weapons. And 25% in the year ending 2022-23.
Weapons incidents rose from 994 to 1,197 in the year ending 2022-23.
Police were restored to the two campuses after gun incidents. In one, a student died in a shooting a few blocks from Washington Prep. During that incident, a member of the Safe Passage program — which involves community members monitoring routes to and from school to keep students safe — allegedly failed to intervene.
Meanwhile, at Northridge Middle School, police came to arrest two students who had brought loaded semi-automatic handguns. Afterward, members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety, alleging the district failed to issue a lockdown and did not communicate adequately. LAUSD did not respond to the union’s allegations.
Members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety at Northridge Middle School in May.Credit: Courtesy of UTLA
“The recent uptick in interest in bringing police back to schools happened because of a few incidents on campuses,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California. “And, as always, the immediate response is to bring in police — when oftentimes we know the police wouldn’t have prevented the situations in the first place.” Whitaker is also the primary author of a 2021 report titled “No Police in Schools,” which concluded police in schools have “devastating and discriminatory impacts on tens of thousands of California students.”
How LAUSD is dispatching its police is part of a continuing EdSource investigation that revealed the vast presence of police in K-12 schools in California. EdSource obtained nearly 46,000 call logs from 164 law enforcement agencies for the period January to June 2023. LAUSD’s police department refused to release its data.
The current debate over school police is part of a longstanding tug-of-war over student safety. Some community members have advocated during board meetings for more law enforcement, while others maintain that school police should be abolished altogether.
“There isn’t security on campus, and that obviously affects our children,” said Efigenia Flores, a district parent and member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, a group of Latino parents that has consistently advocated in meetings with district officials for an increased police presence, alongside mental health and counseling supports.
“This is unacceptable,” she added in Spanish. “That is why we want a clear and transparent plan that incorporates our voice.”
According to a recentdistrict safety and school climate presentation, a range of safety concerns have increased across the district in recent years, leaving many parents worried about their children’s well-being and eager for the district to restore a presence on individual campuses.
“In alignment with our commitment to comprehensive safety measures and as an ongoing practice, we continuously review relevant statistical data and implement enhanced on-campus support from a number of departments within our District as deemed necessary,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource.
Uneven access to community-based safety
Several community organizations, however, have maintained that law enforcement heightens fears around racial profiling and violence against students of color —and say the district has “really failed to commit to implementing” community-based safety efforts that could help tackle “root causes” of violence, according to Joseph Williams, director of Students Deserve, a community organization focused on “making Black lives matter in schools.”
Those community efforts include Safe Passage and restorative justice practices, which are designed to help students understand the impact of negative behavior and address underlying challenges that may have caused them to occur in the first place.
LAUSD spokesperson Shannon Haber maintained, however, that the district has “really leaned into our safety initiatives and restorative justice practices,” citing efforts to hire more mental health professionals and partnerships to promote safe passage, among other initiatives.
School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin has long supported restorative practices in the district — and said the fears Black students experience around police “is not something I want to perpetuate, personally.”
“Everybody’s job in the school district is to make sure kids are safe; and, some people think only officers focus on safety,” Ortiz Franklin said in an interview with EdSource.
“Your teachers are focused on safety, your principals focus on safety, your campus aides are focused on safety — everyone understands that is our primary concern. And so, where we need to improve and grow as a system is not just with one department. It’s with everyone.”
LAUSD’s current law enforcement landscape
In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murderat the hands of police in Minneapolis, LAUSD’s school board voted to cut the district’s Los Angeles School Police Department by 35% and remove police officers from all campuses.
The district’s police department saw a $25 million reduction in the 2020-21 budget, including more than $14 million in salaries and over $10 million in overtime pay, according to a Dec. 15, 2020, report by the Board of Education.
Since then, the district has adopted a “patrol model,” where an officer is assigned to patrol a neighborhood in a car, both before and after the school day.
Some officers also patrol during the evenings when there could be potential trespassing or vandalism — and they are often present during evening events, including football games, Ortiz Franklin said.
If an incident takes place on campus, she said, a school principal or designee can call the police, and the district department has a response time that ranges from three to seven minutes.
The district did not disclose how many calls were made to district police over the past several years.
“We have public education dollars to spend on teaching kids to get ready for college, career and life; and, if we choose to spend education dollars on law enforcement, that to me feels like a disservice and a missed opportunity,” Ortiz Franklin said, while emphasizing that the district anticipates “dire budget cuts” in the coming years.
With incidents on the rise since 2017-18, some parents are asking for more police in schools to keep their children safe.
“Because there is no security, this will continue: the distribution of drugs, fights, bullying and sexual harassment,” said Maria Hernandez, a mother of four LAUSD students and a member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz.
“There are many mothers who are saddened by the deaths of their children, and I don’t think they are hoping for more,” she added, speaking in Spanish.
Evelyn Aleman, who runs Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, added that “we, as the adults, really have to step in and take charge of the safety of the students.”
She also questioned whom principals would call in an emergency if there aren’t district police at schools.
“They’re going to call LAPD. Do we want the principals doing that?”
‘A visceral response’
Venice High School senior Lindsey Weatherspoon saw a man in a blue uniform enter her classroom a couple of weeks ago. Aware of allegations that district police had targeted students of color, she panicked.
“I could just feel my heart literally beating out my chest — thinking it was wrong, and they’re conducting random searches or something,” Weatherspoon said.
Fearing police violence, she wondered: “‘Is this going to happen to me? Is this going to happen to one of my friends?”
The uniformed person entering the school turned out to be a maintenance worker, but Weatherspoon found it “mind boggling” to have “such a visceral response.”
Weatherspoon is part of the ACLU of Southern California’s Youth Liberty Squad, one of many community organizations that has called for an end to school policing altogether — whether by district or municipal law enforcement agencies.
Several students from these organizations also attend district board meetings and speak out against policing during public comment sections — claiming the district police force has disproportionately profiled and policed students of color and consistently posed a threat to their emotional safety at school.
Despite being roughly 8% of LAUSD’s population, Black students account for roughly a quarter of arrests, citations and diversions, according to a 2022 report released by the Police Free LAUSD Coalition, a group of community organizations that oppose school policing.
“Rather than arresting (students) and pushing them out of our schools, we truly need to find out the root cause of what is really going on with our youth. What is it that’s going on at home? What’s going on mentally, as well?” said Steven Ortega, the director of youth organizing at the East Los Angeles-based non-profit InnerCity Struggle.
“We’re not saying, ‘Let’s let young people get away with anything.’ We’re saying that there still needs to be accountability, but more holistically.”
Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District school board continued to discuss student safety Tuesday — and are still a ways away from determining whether to revamp its police presence on individual campuses.
A safety task force — which previously recommended each campus choose whether to have police stationed at its site — made a presentation about LAUSD’s approach to student safety, including community-based safety methods such as restorative justice. They will continue to meet in the coming school year.
Discussions about reintroducing police to individual LAUSD campuses are taking place for the first time since George Floyd’s murder amid a 45% increase in incidents between 2017-18 and 2022-23, including suicide risk, fighting/physical aggression, threats, illegal/controlled substances and weapons.
Here’s what the board members said at Tuesday’s meeting. Their remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
School board President Jackie Goldberg: ‘Not really desirous of having armed police on campus’
I spent 17 years teaching in Compton. … We had two sets of gangs. … We then hired school police to come onto campus. The problem was that there were two (officers). The problem was that when the gangs came over the fences, they came over in 10s and 20s. … How did they have guns? They came over in sufficient numbers to disarm the police. So, I’m not really desirous of having armed police on campus. …
LAUSD Board Member Jackie Goldberg
What do I think school police can do? I think school police can be in neighborhoods where most of the problems happen. … What we mostly had to do was to have them in the community around the school and for us to be able to find out from trusted — usually — graduates of ours when trouble was about to happen. And so, (police) could be not in twos, but they could be sent in fours and fives to neighborhoods where things were about to come down.
… If you want to stop drug abuse, are you going to have a police officer sitting in the bathrooms because that’s where the exchanges take place? No, we’re not. We’re not going to put a police officer to sit in classrooms. Do we want school police on campus when there’s a fight? Yeah, that may be useful.
… Most of the fights are not bad. And I think as we keep statistics, I would like us to have a notion of what the types of fights were. Was this two or three kids who … called your mother something and they’re fighting and it gets stopped? I think they should be counted, but I think they aren’t the problem. The problem is the massive fights, and those do need to be treated differently.
Secondly, we do not have restorative justice in this district. Period. I visited all 151 of the schools I represent, several of them several times, and in only a handful of them did I see anything that resembled restorative justice.
School board Vice President Scott Schmerelson: ‘I also believe in school police’
Let me just tell you what really bothers me: when people think that school police are supposed to do discipline at school. They’re not supposed to be doing discipline at school. That’s the teacher’s job. That’s my job as the principal, or the assistant principal, or the dean. …
LAUSD Board Member Scott Schemerelson Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
I do believe that we need climate advocates at school. Absolutely — all the help that we can get at making peace at school. Very, very important. … Yes, I do believe in restorative justice. I do. Our kids need to see what they’ve done wrong and how to make amends for what they have done. Very, very important. I also believe in school police.
We are responsible from the minute the kids leave home to the minute they get to school. And, we’re responsible from the minute they leave school to the minute they go home. … That’s why safe passage is really so important too. Kids need to have check-in points along the way home to and from school. Extremely important. Everybody has a job at school, and we should not be pushing people under the bus whether you’re a school police officer, or a climate control officer.
Board Member Rocio Rivas: ‘We do have the data on what we need to do’
We’re not the same since the pandemic. Things have changed. Our students are suffering. They have high anxiety. There’s increase of suicidal ideation.
LAUSD Board Member Rocio Rivas
… We have (positive behavior intervention and support) and restorative justice, but they’re not strengthened. They’re not bolstered. So, the district does have that system in place where we can create safe, loving, culturally responsive schools, but we’re not giving the investments or the support that our schools need.
… The area that needs that support are middle schools. … That is where we start seeing the suicide ideation, when we start seeing the fights, when we start seeing our students needing to medicate themselves.
… We love our kids, and at early ed centers, we love them; we want to protect them. But once they leave those early ed centers, it’s almost as if they lost that system of love and compassion and care. And we put in other systems, and we look at them (as though) all these kids are deviants. No, they are children. They are children until even after they’re 18 … because their brains are still developing.
… We know exactly what we need to do, but we’re not putting the money or the strength or the emphasis. … We’re talking about test scores, but you know what? You are not going to see increases … in student achievement unless that child feels that they’re being heard, that that school cares about them, that they have somebody in there.
… We do have the data on what we need to do. We have the funds. We just don’t have the buy-in from this district, from this building, because it’s so disconnected from our schools and from our communities.
Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin: ‘We’ll keep the conversations going’
LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin
I’ll just bring our attention back to the Community Based Safety Resolution. The last resolve does ask us … to strengthen community-based safety approaches … and resources as a primary means of cultivating and maintaining positive school climates and keeping school communities safe even in emergency situations.
… We need the (restorative) training throughout for all of the staff members — as many folks can come back before the school year starts. We’ve got $350 million invested in people who are focused exclusively on safety. If we can focus on this community, restorative approach as the primary means — really shifting away from that punitive, traditional, policing model — I think we’ll get even closer to the vision of this resolution that we all passed. I think we’ll keep the conversations going next year in the school safety committee.
Board Member Kelly Gonez: ‘It’s about creating a true infrastructure around community-based safety’
I was looking just at the (Local Control and Accountability Plan) information for our meeting later, and it highlights different demographic groups of students and the percent of students reporting that they feel safe in the school experience survey, and there are significant gaps — like for our Black students, who are rating the lowest in terms of whether or not they feel safe, which obviously is very concerning, as well as the number of students who feel like they are part of their school.
LAUSD Board Member Kelly GonezCredit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Those numbers, it looks like, took a significant dip in the wake of the pandemic and have not really fully recovered, and I would just surmise that there’s a connection between feeling disconnected or not seen at your school site and whether or not there is true safety and belonging for students.
… It’s not just about restorative justice and the practices, but it’s about creating a true infrastructure around community-based safety. And, I think that’s inclusive of a number of staffing positions as well — beyond, just for example, your restorative justice teachers and beyond the partnerships with community based organizations, which are also integral. It’s about, for example, our classified staffing positions. We know that a number of our incidents happen during lunch, during dismissal.
… I would just ask that in any plan … that we’re providing for the necessary staffing and supervision that our schools and our students really deserve — and especially looking at our secondary schools, because we know that’s where the majority of these incidents are happening.
Board Member Nick Melvoin: ‘The glaring omission (is) … the data on the fights.’
LAUSD Board Member Nick MelvoinCredit: Julie Leopo / EdSourc
Regardless of our views of what’s happening outside of the school, our responsibility is for school safety on the school campus, and we have different ideas. … But I do think really the glaring omission (is) … the data on the fights.
… I’m trying to understand where we can trace that based on grade levels, and Covid, and the effects of the pandemic and the success or lack thereof of our positive behavioral intervention supports and restorative justice. … (and) on school campuses with the current deployment model, which is not having police there, except for rare emergencies.
… We have different ideas … and I just hope that we can engage, starting from the premise that we all want kids to be safe and talk to each other and not just about or past each other.
And then the last thing, too. … I just want to make sure that the city and the county aren’t off the hook for this — and that as we’re talking amongst each other, we’re also bringing them in.
Board Member George McKenna: ‘We still haven’t come to grips with the reality of what makes the schools safe’
I’ve been in this for 62 years — I’ve never seen police criminalize the children. I’ve seen them respond.
… Do you know that there is no guideline in a teacher’s contract — or even an administrator’s contract — that says you must go break up a fight? The only one that has to do that is someone who’s trained to do that. And that will be a school police officer.
Board Member Dr. George J. McKenna IIICredit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
… I have no problem with the climate coaches or whatever they’re called, in addition to the people that have been there in uniform with the licensure and the legal responsibility for student safety … And the only people that have voted for the safety of school police being on campus are people who have been on the campus as administrators, including principals. … The most important people in the school district are the people who run the school, that’s the principal.
… The most police officers we’ve ever had on the campus … is two, and I think it’s understaffed if you only put one on it because they have no backup. They need to be visible in order to assist the students and the prevention of incidents that occur because … the students will confide in them.
….We’re not OK the way we are. And we still haven’t come to grips with the reality of what makes the schools safe and whether or not our school safety officers are a benefit to us. When you start with the premise and use the word the “punitive school police” and that’s the way you introduce it, you are already biased because that means you don’t understand what they do. And you can fill up the room with your accolades and your people that you’ve encouraged to be here, but we have to go to the schools on a regular basis. It makes a school safe.
Special education has been inconsistent in California schools since the coronavirus pandemic.
Alison Yin/EdSource
When the Covid-19 pandemic led to school shutdowns in 2020, and students began plugging into their classes online, Naomi Burn saw her 17-year-old son’s grades soar.
Her son seemed more engaged, completed his assignments and was in better spirits. The virtual classes seemed to serve him better. So, when face-to-face instruction returned, Burn decided to enroll him in one of the district’s virtual academies, where he would also be able to receive the counseling outlined in his individualized education program (IEP).
But in October 2023, Burn received an unexpected message from her son’s psychiatric social worker, who had previously provided him with the support he needed.
“He was removed from my caseload at the start of the year, and due to staffing issues, none of the virtual students are receiving their IEP services,” the email read. “I hope they are able to find a solution soon, so that he may begin to access this support.”
Several months later, Burn received an email from the district offering a solution: a chance to make up for lost services whenever the district has adequate staffing. Karla V. Estrada, LAUSD’s deputy superintendent of instruction, told EdSource in January that any problems with unfulfilled IEPs at Burn’s son’s school had been fixed.
On Jan. 9, the next day after Estrada’s statement, Burn said nothing had changed. No one had reached out to her. Her son’s educational plan and needs were still not addressed, and the family was still waiting.
“I understand it’s a societal issue,” Burn said. “But, at the same time, today’s counseling minutes don’t help the child with yesterday’s emotional social barriers.”
Burn is one of many parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District who say they have struggled to get their children adequate disability accommodations and support this past academic year. They say the district has been largely unresponsive and are concerned about possible repercussions for their children.
Experts warn that not providing accommodations in a timely manner could worsen students’ disability symptoms, while adding additional hurdles, including social and emotional challenges.
Meanwhile, the number of district students with disabilities continues to grow, and teachers have sounded alarms that as their workloads skyrocket, more student needs could go unaddressed.
“There’s no time like the present. Right, time only moves in one direction,” said Rebecca Gotlieb, a human developmental psychologist and educational neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles. “And I want every student to have all the supports they need.”
When students were attending school online, LAUSD allegedly decreased services provided to students with disabilities and failed to properly track them, according to the U.S. Department of Education investigation.
The agency also found the district informed its staff that LAUSD was not responsible for school closures and was therefore “not responsible for providing compensatory education to students with disabilities,” according to the report.
Meanwhile, the investigation determined that the district “failed to develop and implement a plan adequate to remedy the instances” when students with disabilities were not provided access to a fair public education during remote learning.
Soon after the investigations, the district entered an agreement with the agency, promising to address the Department of Education’s concerns.
“Today’s resolution will ensure that the more than 66,000 Los Angeles Unified students with disabilities will receive the equal access to education to which federal civil rights law entitles them,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said in a 2022 media release.
“I am deeply grateful for the district’s commitment now to meet the needs of its students with disabilities.”
Estrada told EdSource that the district conducts a report at the beginning of each academic year to find out how many students aren’t receiving the services they are entitled to and need. The process also helps the district come up with solutions, including providing services retroactively once they are available, she said.
“There are certain students that aren’t receiving special education services or as outlined in their IEPs,” Estrada said. “Sometimes, it’s not that they’re not receiving services, but not to what has been prescribed in the IEP.”
Less than a year after the investigation, parents and advocates sounded alarms that the district was not following through on their promises and that children were still going without necessary supports.
Lourdes Lopez is one of many LAUSD parents who have had to work tirelessly to get the necessary support for their children. She has two children with disabilities who rely on speech and occupational therapy.
“As a parent, we’re begging for the services the child needs,” Lopez said in Spanish. “But always, they say she doesn’t need it.”
Her son, Dylan, was eventually able to get an IEP at his elementary school. But Lopez said she’s worried that the services Dylan is receiving are not enough to tackle the challenges his disability poses.
“They give him 10 minutes, and he’s in a group. They ask questions to one; they ask questions to another. It’s really sad how very little they are giving him,” Lopez said in Spanish. “Then, they return him to the classroom.”
A growing need
Lopez said that LAUSD students with disabilities are only able to graduate and stay confident into adulthood if “they’ve really had everything, all the services, all the support.”
Going Deeper
From language barriers to jargon-filled legal language in the IEP application process, families often struggle to get accommodations for their child in the first place, according to Paul Morgan, a social and health equity endowed professor at the University at Albany, SUNY.
Sometimes, Morgan said, schools are not proactive about informing parents about services because they can be costly to offer. And there can be instances where students don’t get an IEP because the findings of a school evaluation don’t match the conclusions of outside providers.
To increase the odds of getting an IEP, Morgan stressed the importance of having objective measurements that can answer these questions:
What kinds of challenges is your child having?
Have these challenges been going on for a period of time?
How are they performing in relationship to their peers?
“I know families that are coming from two parent, two income households [where]both parents are highly educated … and they have great difficulty getting the services,” Morgan said. “I’ve had parents say they have to fight like hell to receive those services from schools.”
Adrian Tamayo, a special education teacher at Lorena Street Elementary School, is one of the LAUSD educators who work day in and day out to support students with special needs.
Tamayo arrives at school at 7:30 a.m. to begin a day packed with regular teaching duties like working with students and planning lessons — as well as unique responsibilities that come with a job in special education, including district and statewide assessments that track students’ progress.
As a special education teacher, he also helps students secure IEPs; he administers standardized tests and carries out observations that are central to that process. This past year alone, he has conducted about 34 IEP assessments, with each taking three to four hours.
“It’s amazing how much time out of our own time we put in outside of the typical school day for the average educator,” Tamayo said.
Tamayo says he and his colleagues feel overworked and understaffed partly because the number of special education hires across the district has fallen — alongside retention, which dropped from 90% to 77% among credentialed teachers in the past three years, according to a district committee presentation.
Meanwhile, special educators who remain are having to support an increasing population of students with disabilities — which has grown from 13.4% to 15.9%, despite LAUSD’s overall enrollment dropping by about 20% in the past decade.
Estrada, the district’s deputy superintendent of instruction, added that since the pandemic, providing speech and language services has been especially difficult due to staffing constraints — but that the district has been able to contract with an outside provider to help fill the void.
“You have so many service providers, and IEPs are happening constantly,” Estrada said. “So, (a) new IEP requires potentially new services, and so we’re constantly adapting and making changes to caseloads.”
Soaring caseloads
This year, Tamayo’s caseload began at 19 students — and increased to 27 by the end of the year. A load higher than 28, he said, would violate California’s education code.
He said having the support of a paraprofessional in the classroom is invaluable — as it allows him to break his class into smaller groups based on grade level. But paraprofessionals aren’t always available.
“I have got to mentally prepare for any unforeseen (circumstances),” Tamayo said, adding that he is “always adjusting as we go.”
Tamayo said he is one of the lucky ones at Lorena Street Elementary; some of the programs have far surpassed their cap of 12 students, with a single professional working with up to 20 students.
He also said the number of psychiatric social workers at his school — supporting students with needs, like Burn’s son — has dropped. A year ago, there was one on campus every school day, he said.
This year, one was available to students three days a week, he said. Next year, he anticipates, they will be available only one day each week.
“That doesn’t mean that children that need that support also decrease,” he said. “You’re basically being asked to do the same job with one day of service.”
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, right, with students at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park.
Credit: Twitter / LAUSDSup
The Los Angeles Unified School District is showing signs of recovery from the learning losses it incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Tuesday at a press conference, following his Opening of Schools Address at The Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The preliminary scores for the California Smarter Balanced Assessments show that English proficiency increased from roughly 41% to 43% among LAUSD students. Meanwhile, district students’ math scores went up by more than 2 percentage points — reaching a 32.8% proficiency rate across the district, a spokesperson for LAUSD confirmed. The scores were first reported Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.
Carvalho said the increase in math scores was particularly impressive given the subject had always been LAUSD’s “achilles heel.”
“For every grade level tester — those are Grades 3 to 11 — both in English Language Arts as well as mathematics, our students beat the odds,” he said Tuesday. “They rose to the expectation we had with them.”
Since 2015, when the state began its current testing system, there has only been one other year when scores have gone up at every grade level.
According to a district announcement on X Tuesday evening, students “are achieving success” in both English Language Arts and math, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or gender.
Specifically, students who are English learners — and make up a significant portion of LAUSD’s student population — made the most significant progress of any sub-group, Carvalho also said Tuesday. He added that foster youth was the only sub-group that did not make the same strides.
The district has not yet released its science scores; last year, it was LAUSD’s weakest link, with only 22% of students meeting or exceeding state standards.
At this point, the California Department of Education has not released scores for the state as a whole, so it is impossible to know how Los Angeles Unified performed in comparison to other districts.
In fall 2022, Carvalho vowed to curb the district’s pandemic learning losses. Last year, halfway to that benchmark, math scores went up by small margins, while scores in English Language Arts declined slightly.
Experts at the time called the district’s goal of returning to 2018-19 levels in another year ambitious but possible if they specifically target students who are struggling.
“I just want to appreciate and celebrate the amazing work of our schools in achieving the progress that has been discussed today,” said LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez at Tuesday’s press conference. “When you think about the struggles that our families are facing, they are significant.”
She applauded the principals, teachers and classified staff members who support Los Angeles Unified students on a daily basis — especially as students continue to struggle with mental health challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Everyday we’re showing up for our students, and it’s showing results,” Gonez said. “I believe that we’re at the tipping point of really achieving the ambitious goals that we have for our students in our school district. And I’m excited for the best school year yet.”
Despite Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s promise two years ago to settle the conflict, Los Angeles Unified continues denying millions of dollars in federal aid that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles argues it is owed for ongoing services to low-income students in Catholic schools. The archdiocese maintains that the district is diverting the money to bolster its students’ funding.
Both the California and the U.S. departments of education have chastised the district for breaking federal regulations in dealings with the archdiocese. Now, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ordered the district to turn over documents and data that it withheld.
That information, which should illuminate the district’s decisions, could either restart stalemated talks or lead the archdiocese to turn to the courts to order a settlement after seven years of fighting.
“We do not believe further litigation is necessary, and we can achieve equity for non-public school students,” said Paul Escala, the archdiocese’s superintendent of schools. “However, we will pursue all means to see that all students receive their legally entitled services.”
Title I rules for private schools
Congress requires that low-income students in private and public schools receive equivalent Title I funding to pay for counseling, tutoring, teacher aides, and learning specialists. The dispute with LAUSD concerns how much money should be allocated for the archdiocese’s schools and how to ensure the funding gets to the students.
Under Congress’s rules, private and religious schools do not receive Title I funding directly. Instead, districts determine the eligibility of private and religious schools within their borders, administer the funding, and provide the services directly or through vendors after consulting with the schools. Los Angeles Unified, until recently, hired the Title I staff and put them on its payroll (see Frequently Asked Questions by the California Department of Education).
The system worked amicably for years. Districts can choose from several ways to determine Title I eligibility, and LA Unified picked the fairest and most efficient method for the 100-plus schools within the archdiocese with low-income students, Escala said. The district used census data to determine the number of Title I-eligible students in an attendance area, then awarded a proportionate share of the money to archdiocese schools. Long Beach Unified uses the same method.
More paperwork, more confusion, less money
Then in 2018-19 and the following year, coinciding with the new administration of Superintendent Austin Beutner, the district chose another option for calculating private schools’ eligibility — student registrations for the federal school lunch program. Not only did this method require a lot more time, paperwork and verification by the schools, but the district changed the reporting rules several times with little notice and failed “to engage in timely and meaningful consultation,” the California Department of Education concluded in a 58-page report issued in June 2021 in response to a formal complaint by the archdiocese.
Los Angeles Unified’s Office of Inspector General removed hundreds of students’ eligibility after examining parents’ school lunch forms in the two dozen schools it chose to audit and failed to include any students from other schools it didn’t audit.
The result was to cut Title I funding to the archdiocese by more than 92%, from about $9.5 million in services 2017-18 for 102 schools to $767,000 for fewer than two dozen schools, according to Escala. In 2023-24, funding crept up to about $2 million for 43 schools. The district cut its total share allocated to private schools from between 2% and 2.6% of about $291 million to 0.5%, according to the California Department of Education.
‘Totally unreasonable’ demands
The state Department of Education harshly criticized the district. The timetable for demanding documentation was “totally unreasonable,” and the district “engaged in a pattern of arbitrary unilateral decisions” and failed to justify its decisions to the archdiocese, the report said.
In ignoring the archdiocese’s Public Records Act requests for documentation to justify the cuts, the district took a “hide-the-ball approach (that) breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law, the report said.
The spirit of Title I, as stated in the law’s preamble, Escala said, is to maximize participation. The intent of other options like surveys and free-lunch verification is for schools to prove they have higher proportions of low-income families than neighboring schools, he said.
LAUSD is doing the opposite, Escala said.
“The district’s using these other methods as a way of filtering and screening and reducing participation,” he said. “You’re extracting children you know qualify simply because a “t” wasn’t crossed or an “i” wasn’t dotted. It is beyond reproach, because they (LAUSD officials) don’t apply the same standard to their own schools.”
LAUSD had an obligation to give (the Archdiocese) the requested information. LAUSD’s hide-the-ball approach breached both the spirit and the letter of the duty to consult. — The California Department of Educationin a June 2021 ruling
LA Unified declined to comment on the state’s report, and last week, a spokesperson wrote in an email that “Los Angeles Unified does not typically comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
Districts have a financial incentive to minimize private schools’ funding eligibility. The federal government awards the total Title I funding to districts, which determine how much should be allocated for services to private and religious school students. Lawyers for the archdiocese point out that the less money that districts award, the more Title I funding they can spend on their own students.
The district appears to understand this, said Kevin Troy, an attorney for the archdiocese, citing a Jan. 29, 2019, email from the principal auditor of the district’s Office of the Inspector General to the archdiocese, in which the auditor stated that the archdiocese “receives over $10 million of Title I funds from the LAUSD every year — money that could otherwise be allocated to LAUSD schools.”
“There’s a moral and ethical question on the table,” Escala said. “You (LA Unified) have got children in need, and you’re not serving them right,” he added, referring to students in archdiocese schools.
The impact on one high school
Mark Johnson, principal of Bishop Mora Salesian High School, has seen the effect of the cuts on students. Before the cutback, Title I paid for a reading intervention teacher and part-time aide who worked with 40 to 50 students weekly — about 1 out of 8 students at the all-boy, 400-student school in the low-income Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although on the district’s payroll, the teacher fit in like any other staff member, building personal relationships with the students and collaborating with their teachers.
“She (the teacher) had her own classroom and was just a regular teacher as far as any of our kids knew,” he said. She would work with the lowest-performing students on basic reading comprehension skills. “If they were working on a tough piece of literature, she would help them break it down so that they could write an analytical paragraph or essay.”
Pulling out students also reduced the class size for the remaining students, he said. Now, there is only enough money for a two-day-a-week coach from a contractor who sees at most a dozen students a week.
“We’re serving kids who are significantly behind grade level and families that deal with poverty and all the things that come along with that,” Johnson said. “So this kind of antagonistic relationship that has developed (with the district) ultimately hurts kids.”
The California Department of Education gave the district 60 days from its June 2021 ruling to consult with the archdiocese to fix deficiencies pointed out in the report and then recalibrate the proportional share of Title I funding for archdiocese schools. It ordered the district to begin providing the increased services for 2020-21, the next school year.
Instead, the district appealed the decision to the U.S. Department of Education, which issued its own findings in November 2023. In his decision, Adam Schott, deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, found that the district could justify reducing the eligibility count based on its analysis of parents’ forms. But by doing that, they cut the funding for the dozens of schools that the district did not audit. He credited the district with consulting with the archdiocese to an extent, but said the district’s overall approach in demanding documentation was “inconsistent and confusing.”
Schott also ruled that the district violated federal regulations by claiming it didn’t have to share data with the archdiocese on how much it spent on Title I services for students and how much was unspent at the end of each year.
In December 2021, the archdiocese sued the district in Los Angeles Superior Court for ignoring multiple requests under the state Public Records Act to turn over Title I spending records and other relevant information. The court held off ruling until the complaint process played out.
On July 16, Judge Curtis Kin ordered the district to turn over all relevant documents, emails and records to the archdiocese by Aug. 20 and to pay $82,141 to the diocese in attorneys’ fees.
Anappeal to Superintendent Carvalho
Weeks after he started work as Los Angeles Unified superintendent in February 2022, Alberto Carvalho told EdSource he had familiarized himself with the case and added, “I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later.” He declined to elaborate due to litigation.
“What I can tell you,” he added, “is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty.”
Escala said he remains hopeful. “I believe that Superintendent Carvalho has the ability to direct his staff towards that outcome. I have a great degree of confidence that when brought to him, this can get adjudicated appropriately.”
