"It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it."
- George W. Bush
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is currently operating under a $11 billion ($11,000,000,000) general fund budget (per the second interim report). These funds not only cover teaching Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but also provide critical services at neighborhood schools like maintaining facilities, after-school care, and delivering special education supports.
The sheer volume of the budget makes it difficult for most community members to understand its intricacies. Given that the majority of people will have glazed eyes when discussing numbers, it makes for a very difficult subject to report on. Therefore, most media outlets will simply pick up the headline numbers provided by LAUSD bureaucrats and call it a day. After all, how many people will read an in-depth article that drills down into how the budget was formulated?
To her credit, Los Angeles Public Education activist Tracy Cook has made a video on YouTube that attempts to summarize the budget currently being debated by the School Board and explain why parents and guardians with children in the District should be concerned about the information under discussion. This hour-long video should be mandatory viewing for any person concerned about public education in Los Angeles:
As Cook explains, the bureaucrats working out of the LAUSD's headquarters on Beaudry Avenue are predicting massive deficits in future school years. If these predictions are accurate, this could necessitate layoffs, program cuts, and the closing of school sites. Those who do not follow the LAUSD carefully might find this warning to be alarming, but the truth is that the Beaudry Bureaucrats have been predicting doom and gloom for years.
When seeking approval of the proposed budget by the Board, LAUSD staff provides what they think the finances will look like for the following three years. For the entire decade that I have been covering the District, they have consistently stated that while the first year will have a healthy reserve, the second year is barely balanced, and the following year will result in a massive deficit. They then warn that cuts must be made immediately or the District will be in danger of being taken over by the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE).
If these predictions were accurate, it would be expected that when the budget was presented in the following year, the District would be looking at a barely balanced budget, but invariably, the healthy ending balance has reappeared. Like previous predictions, the new budget shows that the second year is the barely balanced one, and disaster will occur in the third year. Doom and gloom are always on the horizon.
This fiscal cliff was infamously used as the Board prepared to defend itself against the strike by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in 2019. Instead of negotiating with the union to provide lower class sizes, a full-time nurse in every school, and a librarian in every secondary school, the LAUSD Board pushed the myth of the impending fiscal cliff to explain why these were not possible. They even trotted out LACOE's CFO to warn that providing these benefits to LAUSD students could result in an unbalanced budget that would require the County to take control of the District.
Even with these warnings, the public overwhelmingly backed the Union during the strike, forcing the District to cave. Not surprisingly, the extra costs incurred in the new contract did not result in financial ruin and the following year the District once again operated with a surplus. It was even revealed that the LACOE CFO's opinion was not an independent one as her speech had been written on a District computer.
One day the bureaucrat's predictions of impending doom may come true. Depressed birth rates continue to reduce the number of school-age children in Los Angeles, charter schools are still not properly regulated, Trump's War on Education will potentially reduce federal education funding, his War on Immigrants may reduce the number of enrolled students who feel safe attending schools, and, as Cook points out, the one-time Covid funding has timed out. Indeed, there may be a need for cuts, including to the $600 million in outside contracts. Unfortunately, their narrative has a long history of the boy who cried wolf and a lack of transparency so much that nobody will know when the threat is serious.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, and serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him "a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles." For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.
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