Maria Brenes and Rocio Rivas will also likely head to a runoff for the district 2 seat on the seven-member board.

As an LAUSD teacher, Rodriguez has taken votes from Gonez because he had “credibility as someone who knows the system from the inside. Teachers have a lot of sway with the public right now,” said Pedro Noguera, Dean of USC Rossier’s School of Education.

Gonez, the board member for the East Valley and the frontrunner heading into the election; has led the board on crucial decisions, including pandemic recovery and expanding school choice.  “I have a track record of successfully fighting for our students and delivering for our community …,” she said. “I thoroughly understand what the position entails.” 

Gonez was endorsed by both the United Teachers Los Angeles union and charter advocates, but as of Friday her vote count hovered at 47.64%. She must receive more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff.

“I think this election was really framed by the issues during the pandemic. Voters’ top priorities right now are education and public safety and we had a teacher and a police officer on the ballot in district 6,” said Ana Ponce, the executive director of the non-profit Great Public Schools Now. 

Jess Arana, a police officer and the third candidate running in district 6, received 21.1% of the vote, which Ponce said also likely contributed to Gonez not winning the primary.

“Unlike my opponent … I have the unique perspective of my community and share their experiences … My direct experience with students makes me more qualified to make decisions on their safety and success,” Rodriguez said.

There are still hundreds of thousands of ballots left to be counted. The results in district 2, which covers most of East Los Angeles, also took an unexpected turn. The two frontrunners,  Rivas and Brenes, will vie for the open seat in their district in the fall. 

While a runoff was expected between the two, Rivas surprisingly pulled ahead of Brenes. Rivas collected over 43.84% of the vote, while Brenes gained just over 30%.

“The two candidates are very similar on the issues, so you can’t draw a stark contrast between them,” Noguera said. Rivas and Brenes both prioritize pandemic recovery and expanding opportunities for historically underserved communities in their district. “That race is going to be a question of name recognition and getting the word out … who can mobilize more voters?” said Noguera.

Rivas is backed by the teachers’ union, while Brenes is backed by the Service Employees International Union. Brenes also was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, which Noguera said gave her a boost with voters as well.

The teachers union launched an independent campaign for Rivas, spending more than $772,000, while Local 99 of the Services Employees International Union, which represents employees like bus drivers and janitors, doled out almost $900,000 on an independent campaign for Brenes.

The other two competitors in district 2, who had no big union backings, will not advance to the runoff. Miguel Segura, a substitute teacher received 17.8% of votes and Erica Vilardi Espinosa, a parent in Los Feliz, received just 7.8%. 

There are still ballots left to be counted, but as anticipated incumbent Nick Melvoin will keep his seat in district 4. 

Melvoin received almost 60% of votes in his district which covers some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including Hancock Park and the Pacific Palisades, as well as parts of the San Fernando Valley.

“The fact that Melvoin won shows that a lot of concerns that people had about him four years ago when he ran have gone away. They see him as a credible board member who is really taking action,” Noguera said.

Melvoin went up against two lesser known candidates – Tracey Schroeder, an LAUSD teacher who received 26.3% of the votes, and Gentille Barkhordarian, a parent who received 13.9%. 

According to the LA Times, Melvoin spent more than $550,000 on his campaign and he received an additional $1.6 million from retired businessman, Bill Bloomfield. Four years ago, Melvoin raised hundreds of thousands in order to defeat incumbent Steve Zimmer. 

Melvoin was previously an attorney and a school teacher. He has helped increase internet access during the pandemic and was one of the leading members in efforts to recruit Superintendent Carvalho to Los Angeles.

Melvoin said that his first priority now that he’s been elected is to help students recover academically and emotionally from the pandemic. 

“Melvoin is willing to make difficult decisions when it comes to making sure the focus is on students and recovery and safety … he’s shown bold leadership on the board,” Ponce said. 

Ballots will continue to be counted and results will be updated every Friday and Tuesday until July 1. The necessary runoffs will take place on Tuesday November 8, 2022.

In the primary, voter turnout was extremely low. Only about 25% of LA County’s registered voters cast ballots, according to . This was just a bit lower than state voter turnout, which came in around 26%. In midterm years without a presidential election, voter turnout is historically lower, said Noguera. Ponce also attributed the low voter turnout to voter literacy and complicated ballots. 

“I heard from a lot of voters that the ballot was confusing … I think we really need to focus on making sure folks are equipped to participate in the democratic process come fall,” Ponce said. She said that the low voter turnout in the primary could be contributing to unexpected results that might change if more people show up to vote in November. 

As a teacher of color, Daniel Helena has experienced firsthand the challenges chronicled in “If You Listen, We Will Stay: Why Teachers of Color Leave and How to Disrupt Teacher Turnover.” As a Teach Plus-California Policy Fellowship alumnus, he collaborated with the report’s authors for nearly a year by leading several focus groups with other educators in Los Angeles. is a national nonprofit with a mission to empower teachers to lead improvements in policy and practice during its nine-month fellowships.

Across the nation, 51 percent of students in U.S. public schools are students of color, but just 20 percent of teachers are teachers of color, according to the report, which also notes that in the 2000s, 15 percent of white teachers were leaving the profession, compared with 19 percent of teachers of color.

Helena sees the negatives in too much teacher turnover in his own career and in meeting his goal to have schools better address the needs of the communities they serve.

“I’ve bounced around to different schools, and I’m hoping to stay here for a while because I think that’s what it takes. You kind of get some agency in your classroom and then eventually the school, and then as you stay long enough, you get to know the community well.”

Helena is now in his third year at Kory Hunter Middle School, part of the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools charter network, where he teaches sixth-grade English. The school in Huntington Park in southeast Los Angeles is in a heavily Latino, low-income neighborhood. Many of Helena’s students are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves and, like him, have Spanish as their first language.

Helena was born in Venezuela. He was 6 when he and his mother immigrated to the United States and settled in Atlanta, where he attended public schools. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a master’s in early childhood education from Georgia State University.

He began his career in the metro Atlanta public school system, where he taught for five years before moving to Los Angeles to work for charter schools, where he implemented positive behavioral interventions at a high school. He says the number of suspensions there was drastically reduced by creating a character-building curriculum and establishing systems that recognized student accomplishments.

Helena says he feels supported at Kory Hunter and trusted in the classroom decisions he makes, but he acknowledges that many teachers of color do not.

The Teach Plus report proposes that schools provide pathways for leadership for teachers of color as one of its five recommendations. Others are to provide mentorship, improve compensation and reduce isolation as ways of addressing the five main challenges leading educators of color to leave the profession: feeling unwelcome, invisible, undervalued, deprived of autonomy and placed in unfavorable working conditions.

The 74 asked Helena about what could be done better or what needs to change in the education system to allow reforms and innovation to take place in the classroom, as well as his goals for the current school year. His answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to want to become a teacher?

I moved to the United States when I was 6 years old. It was just me and my mom. I guess I started teaching because I really benefited from having good teachers as a kid. I didn’t know any English when I moved to the United States; neither did my mom, and so I was at the whim of the public school that was in our neighborhood. My mom didn’t know anything about the public school system. I ended up getting really lucky because I went to a pretty good school. It was a public school.

And so I was able to learn English pretty quickly. I already had a pretty strong foundation in Spanish, but I appreciate the help that I got when I was young, and I became a teacher because I feel some kind of responsibility, some kind of calling to help families and students in a similar situation as mine. I currently teach in an area where there are a lot of Spanish-speaking families, where I’ve taught in different types of communities as well. So that’s why I started teaching.

How did you get involved in the Teach Plus and The Education Trust report?

Well, I’m at the point in my career where I’m interested to see and learn about different policies that affect classrooms. And through becoming a fellow for Teach Plus, I was able to meet other teachers who are in this, who have similar interests, and we kind of landed on how to better support teachers of color and how they can be in the classroom longer. Because of my personal experience, being in traditional public and also charter schools, I noticed that it’s not easy —��it’s not easy to teach —��but it’s also not easy to teach in schools with high needs. And if you’re a teacher of color, you can face additional challenges and obstacles.

What did you find new or surprising from the focus groups?

One thing that really resonated with me was a comment that I heard in my first focus group from an educator. They said that they wanted more professional development around youth culture. And the reason that resonates with me is because a lot of the time teachers, who share racial or cultural identity markers with students, are thought of as having an advantage with their students. But one identity marker that is really not talked about is age and the differences in generations. So just because you share that racial or cultural or ethnic identity marker doesn’t mean that you’re just, it’s going to be so easy for you. And schools and school systems really do need to adapt to understanding the current generation of students, the challenges that they face and how teachers in schools can support them and meet them where they’re at. There is a disconnect, not only academically in terms of what we’re having our students learn and how we’re having them learn, but also the space or the lack of space that we allow for our students to develop socially and emotionally as well.

From the report’s recommendations, which one do you consider to be crucial?

I would really push for the more culturally relevant professional development one, the one where teachers are having more opportunities to learn about trauma-informed practices, implicit bias training, because I have worked exclusively in high-need communities, communities where, based on standardized testing, the students don’t really perform very well, and I don’t think it’s a representation of just students’ abilities. I think it’s more of a lack of understanding of the school systems and how to support the students. And so I say that because there’s a big gap in terms of — I already mentioned this — about what adults understand and what needs to be done for students. And so, if we were able to educate our teachers better in terms of how to teach students who bring a lot of trauma into the classroom and how to help them navigate the world of academics, because we still have to teach them, we still have to get them to achieve at a high level, but we have to do that with more obstacles that a lot of [more] affluent communities don’t have to face.

What have you done in the classroom that has been innovating or unique?

When I worked at Ednovate, I taught ninth-grade English. I created a curriculum with another teacher. And that curriculum allowed students to explore their identity markers. They would read with other students, and they ended up writing about the identity markers that most resonated with them. The ones they struggled with. It was just a really good opportunity for students to learn more about themselves. We were still able to teach the skills and the strategies that the students were responsible for, but we did it in a way where it was a lot more culturally relevant for them. And I think students really took a lot out of it, but they also enjoyed it.

How do you think school administrations or school districts could better support teachers of color?

Well, just like a teacher that looks at their curriculum, I think administrators need to do the same with the type of professional development that they’re prioritizing. One of the challenges is teacher turnover. If there’s constant teacher turnover, then a lot of the times the schools have to constantly retrain teachers and those retrainings, sometimes they’re veteran teachers, the teachers who have been there for a while. They have to attend those too. And so for them, it’s not as meaningful, because they’ve already learned a lot of the training. But what can end up happening is that as a school, the school gets stuck in terms of their development and their learning, because we’re not teaching, we’re not differentiating our teaching to our teachers. It’s just like a good teacher teaches students who have various abilities and who come in at various readiness levels. Schools need to do the same with their teachers.

It is encouraging that LAUSD is looking to make some changes to their program and their curriculum, which is one of our recommendations. I hope that continues to build the … momentum that we need to focus on how we’re developing our teachers. Because if teachers of color were —��and really all teachers, but really if teachers of color —��were receiving this type of training, it would be communicated that the work that sometimes is taken for granted, in terms of getting to know our students and understanding their situations well, we’re going to prioritize it so much that we’re going to professionalize that knowledge. The teacher who can speak in the student’s home language or can speak in a way that students understand and are more receptive to them. The teacher who can adapt their curriculum in a way that makes it more engaging for the students. We’re going to make that important. It needs to be prioritized and standardized.

What can parents do to better support teachers?

That’s a great question. From my perspective, parents, I feel a lot of love and appreciation from parents, I do. I still kind of want to put it on the school, though. I think schools need to continue to reach out to parents, to educate parents. I worked at schools where not to … not to stereotype, but I worked at a lot of schools where there’s just a big gap of knowledge for the parents, in terms of how does the American schooling system work, how does the L.A. charter school system work. I mean, a lot of people don’t know that. “How can I support my student at home so that I’m working at home to support them and then I trust that their teachers at school are also supporting them?” So then we’re working as a team, teachers at the school and parents at the home base.

Currently, at my school, we have parent workshops. We have several events at the school, hosts like coffee with the principal, content nights, back-to-school nights. So, engaging with the parents. When the school engages with the community, then it’s the responsibility of the parents to participate. But a lot of the times the parents don’t know. They don’t know where they can have an entryway. I’ve made home visits in the past and I’ve done research on “How do parents perceive the school if they’re coming from a different country?” Sometimes, parents, they see themselves as respecting the school by not getting involved, because they trust the school so much. It’s kind of backward from the American thinking of you need to be as involved as possible.

I’ve talked about educating the teachers better, obviously educating students better, but also educating the parents better and getting to know what questions they have so they can feel comfortable, especially when there’s a language barrier and the school personality is not equipped to necessarily understand and communicate with parents. It’s really important that those barriers are addressed and parents are made to feel welcome in the school.

What keeps you motivated to continue teaching?

The students give me so much life. They give me so much energy, as much as it, as much energy and effort as this job requires, particularly when students have several years of growth to make. I get just as much, if not more, appreciation from students. I feel supported at my current school because I’m trusted that the decisions I make are the right ones. It hasn’t always been the case for me, but, and I know a lot of teachers, especially teachers of color, are sometimes questioned, “Hmm, is that the best thing? Is that the right thing?” And that can be a difficult situation to be in, because if you feel like you’re being questioned and not supported, then all of the challenges grow and grow. You don’t see the silver lining. So I guess, just to phrase it in another way, I am reminded of the growth that my students make and I see the success and I try to focus on that as much as possible. I try to celebrate that with my students, and that’s what keeps me motivated.

What are your goals for the new school year and overall as an educator?

Well, we’ve been talking about … I want to do some work around changing schools and school systems to meet the current landscape of the students in the communities. Our schools need to work for families that are in the communities. But what I have seen a lot is, the communities change, but the schools stay the same. Policies don’t adapt to meet the needs of our communities. And when that happens, the people who suffer the most are first and foremost the students, and then the families in those communities. And it might be linguistic changes, it might be socioeconomic changes, it might be cultural changes.

But I do want to do some work around how to make grassroots changes because the community should be the biggest source of information that drives a school’s vision. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, almost all of the time, the vision comes from the top, from whatever the district sees as best, whatever the network sees as best. But even within a network, there are so many differences. Even within one city, there are so many differences that aren’t taken into account when there’s a standardized goal, when there’s a standardized approach. And so I guess my goal is to continue to learn how to leverage student voice, parent voice and the community voice to best meet the needs of those particular communities.

And I’ve bounced around to different schools, and I’m hoping to stay here for a while because I think that’s what it takes. You kind of get some agency in your classroom and then eventually the school, and then as you stay long enough, you get to know the community well. And I know I’m going back and forth, but that’s a challenge when there’s a high teacher turnover rate, and it just limits your impact when teachers bounce around from school to school for various reasons.

, the CSU Board of Trustees were expected to cast votes on Wednesday either green-lighting or rejecting a controversial addition to admissions standards: requiring applicants to take a fourth year of high school math/quantitative reasoning to be eligible to apply to the system’s 23 campuses. The change would go into effect in the fall of 2027, with the current class of fifth-graders.

Facing continued pushback from advocates and state officials, however, the CSU Chancellor’s Office last week put a “phased” option on the table. The asked trustees to approve the plan establishing the new requirement by fall 2027 but delayed a formal vote until spring 2022. That vote to amend the California Code of Regulations, which governs the university system, would follow a third-party independent analysis on how high schoolers’ access to the CSU would be impacted, particularly for low-income students of color.

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, whose nearly nine-minute speech just before the vote captivated the chamber, supported adding the requirement while acknowledging the complexity of the situation. The CSU is the largest four-year public university system in the country, with about 481,000 students.

“Let us accept that there is risk — that many students could be impacted negatively — but let us accept that there’s a greater risk to not take bold action to try and support our students,” he said.

The implementation timeline can be “extended” or “halted” if the policy “is resulting in unintended consequences,” according to the proposal. It’s wasn’t clear what kind of consequences would be needed to delay the new requirement.

“We cannot accept that the disparities in preparation that exist today … must be the destiny” of marginalized students, said Loren Blanchard, CSU’s executive vice chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs, who helped present the proposal. He added: “Actions speak louder than words.”

The board of trustees’ educational policy committee approved the plan unanimously Wednesday morning. The full board passed it soon after, with 20 voting yes, one opposing and one abstaining.

As with past debates leading up to the vote, Wednesday’s discussions underscored a continuing schism among advocates and officials on how best to tackle educational inequity. Many districts, including L.A. Unified, already struggle with access to the CSU system. Less than half of the state’s Class of 2018 — about —��met CSU’s current eligibility standards, which require a C or better in three math courses: Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II.

Speakers Wednesday expressed varying levels of confidence in the latest iteration of the proposal, though there seemed to be widespread support for having an independent analysis.

CSU officials and some trustees reiterated that a fourth-year math/quantitative reasoning course would expand marginalized students’ access to more rigorous coursework, especially those needed in more lucrative STEM-related fields. There are also benefits, they said, of taking quantitative-reasoning-based courses, such as personal finance, statistics and computer science, which center on problem-solving and critical thinking. The proposal with at least one “public comprehensive university” that has similar existing requirements.

A handful of trustees gave their express backing. “It’s just intuitive,” said trustee Jack McGrory. “Why don’t we want to make our students more successful by requiring four years [of math/quantitative reasoning]?” Another, Christopher Steinhauser, highlighted he’s seen in his own Long Beach district since it adopted a similar requirement about six years ago.

State Superintendent Thurmond later cautioned against what he saw as an oversimplification of the issue of inequity. “Let us not fool ourselves that just by doing this, we’ll close the gap.”

Across the aisle, some advocates Wednesday revived concerns that the change could block more black and Latino students from the CSU — especially those from low-income families — because of existing disparities in who has access to math and quantitative-reasoning-related courses. The statewide shortage of STEM teachers has also been a recurring talking point.

About 15 members of the public came forward prior to the vote to applaud the CSU’s decision to pump the brakes. A few continued to speak in opposition altogether.

“I truly appreciate the recognition that any change in admissions should meet a much higher bar of proof and evidence before making a change that affects all Californians,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity.

“While I believe that black and brown teens are capable of any and everything, one thing we must acknowledge is that if they are not being led and accepted into our institutions, then the system needs to take accountability for failing them, not the other way around,” a representative for Students for Quality Education at Cal State-LA added.

CSU officials have stressed that there will be multiple ways to satisfy the requirement, including taking a math, science or quantitative reasoning course, taking certain Career and Technical Education classes or pursuing dual enrollment courses at a local community college. The CSU intends to form a “steering” committee for stakeholders to give ongoing feedback, and it will work with pre-K-12 districts to expand curricula in subjects that align with the requirement, . The system also committed $10 million over the next four years to double the number of STEM teachers that the CSU produces.

There would be an automatic exemption provided “during the initial implementation of the requirement” for students with course limitations at their high schools, the proposal states.

Even with the proposal’s “safety valves,” at least four trustees Wednesday expressed lingering hesitations before ultimately voting “yes.”

“I’m not yet convinced when we make the assertion that quantitative skills [in high school] is going to close the equity gap,” said trustee Silas Abrego. “The issues of closing the equity gap are not based on one year of quantitative reasoning skills.”

Trustee Lillian Kimbell questioned districts’ capacity — and even their willingness — to meet the requirement. She mentioned L.A. Unified in particular. “At the end of the day, I don’t know that we have the power to make L.A. Unified school district, the largest school district in California, provide the courses students will need,” she said.

The 74’s own analysis in November found that less than a quarter of seniors at L.A. Unified took a fourth-year math/quantitative reasoning course in 2018-19. An estimated 46 percent of the district’s Class of 2019 met current CSU admissions requirements.

“I commend and thank the chancellor and Cal State Board of Trustees for responding thoughtfully to our community of children and youth advocates. We are partners in preparing our young people for career and life,” a staffer speaking for L.A. Unified school board member Mónica García told trustees Wednesday. García co-sponsored last June opposing the CSU proposal.

The chancellor will submit a progress report to the board in March 2021, and then a final report by January 2022 that will include the findings from the independent analysis, where the CSU stands on growing the number of qualified STEM teachers, and steps taken to increase awareness on the new requirement across communities, among other things.

For more of our coverage:

• Less Than Half of Los Angeles’s Class of 2019 Are on Track to Graduate With Grades That Would Make Them Eligible to Apply for California’s Public Universities

Until this month, the nation’s second-largest school district had unique court-ordered mandates to improve and expand services for its�� special education students, stemming from a 1996 legal settlement. In 2003, the agreement was modified to include a third-party “independent monitor,” who meticulously reviewed and published annual reports on L.A. Unified’s compliance in — such as whether students with disabilities receive all of the services mandated in their and how often they were subject to out-of-school suspensions.

The so-called consent decree governing special education formally ended Dec. 31, following reached in August with the lawsuit’s original plaintiffs. For district officials and , the decision is recognition of having met “nearly all” of the consent decree’s mandates. Officials added that there’s now flexibility to shift L.A. Unified’s focus to working on its compliance with the state’s special ed��, and to continue building local-level supports that cater to “the individual needs of our students.”

“The most exciting part about this is this chapter of our work will be guided by educators and parents rather than lawyers,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said Wednesday. He added that the district is “not leaving compliance behind, because that’s a big part of the work.”

Although there is optimism from some parents that the decree’s end will spur fresh conversations about how to best serve students with disabilities, it remains unclear for many how the district intends to hold itself accountable for serving these students, who make up of L.A. Unified’s enrollment.

“Parents are deeply worried that when the oversight is lost, it will be that much harder for students with special needs to achieve success in LAUSD,” one parent told the school board’s special education committee in September.

There is still work to be done, as independent monitor David Rostetter wrote . Thousands of special education students are reportedly receiving less than 70 percent of their required services. Many of L.A. Unified’s district schools remain out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, with about 1 in 5 lacking an accessible main entrance. And academic outcomes for students with disabilities are trailing statewide averages: In 2018-19, of all L.A. Unified students with disabilities met or exceeded state English standards, while 9.41 percent met or exceeded them in math. State averages for this group, comparatively, were 16.26 percent and 12.61 percent.

Higher standards for these students — and more expansive teacher trainings — would ensure that those “closest to students with special needs have the information and support they need and can work together to better serve these kids,” said Lisa Mosko, a mother of two children with learning disabilities and ’s director of special education advocacy. “We need to raise the bar.”

Progress and a change in focus

While L.A. Unified struggled to check certain boxes under the consent decree, the independent monitor’s report marked progress in several areas:

• The percentage of students with disabilities receiving out-of-school suspensions was at its lowest ever in 2019 — 1.1 percent, compared with 14.1 percent during the 2004-05 school year. The report credits this in part to L.A. Unified’s decision to ban willful defiance suspensions��in 2013.

• About 60 percent of students with mild to moderate disabilities are currently spending the majority of their day in general education classes,��a percentage district officials note has been “steadily increasing.” (Some parents whether inclusion in general ed is always beneficial.)
• ��The district is fulfilling 99.9 percent of the requests it receives to translate students’ IEPs into a language other than English within 30 days — up from 8 percent at the start of the decree. Nearly 22 percent of students are English learners.
• The district has seen “tremendous success” in combating implicit bias in special ed evaluations. As of 2019, 92.5 percent of black students classified as “emotionally disturbed” met the legal criteria for that special ed identification. In 2004-05, it was only , according to Disability Rights California.

“LAUSD has come an incredibly long way,” David German, an attorney who represented the advocates and parents who sued, . Ending the consent decree “means they’re complying with their obligations under federal law. They got up to the baseline, which was a big deal.”

L.A. Unified had been one of the few districts in California held to a special education consent decree.��

Moving forward, L.A. Unified is “intensify[ing] its efforts” to meet and track its compliance with , a district spokeswoman said — many of which overlap with the now-retired consent decree requirements. L.A. Unified is not on-target with about half of the state’s performance indicators, according to data shown in a .

Beutner was hesitant to detail specific ways the district’s priorities are shifting, saying that “each of these [state] measures are somewhat narrow; [the district is] looking at the bigger picture.” He and other officials did note that a central focus continues to be placing more students with disabilities in the least restrictive learning environment, alongside peers in general ed classes.

“We are making a big push as a school district to put all of our resources closer to schools and the communities they serve,” Beutner said.

It’s not yet known how much money L.A. Unified will get from the state in 2020-21; Gov. Gavin Newsom this month, earmarking nearly $900 million in services for students with disabilities. L.A. Unified in 2019-20 budgeted ��of its nearly $8 billion general fund for special education.

As the district transitions, Mosko has stressed her disenchantment with the state’s special education standards to officials. They’re subpar, she says, considering research showing that of special education students can “meet the same achievement standards as other students if they are given specially designed instruction” and supports. The state’s academic goals as of 2018-19 were for or more of students with disabilities to be proficient in English and at least 13.6 percent to be proficient in math.

“I would like to see a more aggressive stance [by the district] in terms of, ‘We should be at 80 percent. How do we get there?’” she said. “I want to see more urgency.”

Anthony Aguilar, chief of Special Education, Equity and Access, confirmed Wednesday that the district is “taking an extra look at our academic achievement … Even though we’ve made some positive gains, we recognize that we need to accelerate.”

District 3 board member Scott Schmerelson, who chairs the board’s special ed committee, said he “absolutely” supports the district’s choice to home in on compliance with state indicators. Although he initially questioned whether the district had “the systems in place, the people in place” post-consent decree to continue prioritizing obligations like fulfilling students’ IEPs, his concerns were assuaged after discussions with district officials, he said.

“I’m very confident that we will continue to monitor all of these services,” he said.

Accountability moving forward

Parents seemed less confident at in September, where they expressed fears about the loss of the independent monitor.

“My concern is once oversight is removed … the schools have implicit bias to protect themselves from liability, to protect their general funding,” one parent said. “They are also on time constraints, so that they cannot take the time to hear my concerns day in and day out.”

The independent monitor hosted hearings like these for community members twice a year and published , often chock-full of data and upwards of 40 pages long. When asked if L.A. Unified will continue both of those practices, Beutner said the district “intends to continue to share information on progress toward all goals” and to host public forums in the local communities as well as in the central offices.

Pulling from current staff, L.A. Unified also recently assembled a 17-person to help “oversee internal monitoring processes to ensure that programs and services operate in a manner that promotes program accessibility, equity and compliance,” the district spokeswoman said.

Funds that had been paying for external oversight will be “available to support the internal oversight” of special ed services, she added. There have been discrepancies on the cost of the oversight: Beutner with the Los Angeles Times last summer estimated $3 million to $5 million a year. The independent monitor put the cost in recent years at “less than $800,000 on average.”

Looking at the state’s special education indicators, they some areas where L.A. Unified needs continued work. A few examples, with the district’s responses:

• A decline in the number of qualified providers. The percentage of special ed teachers with a special education credential has been decreasing since 2013-14, from 96.4 percent that year to 84.9 percent as of June 2019. The district didn’t offer any plans to remediate this, stating that “the issue of qualified teachers is one of statewide and perhaps national concern … due to factors such as retirements and declining number of teachers entering the workforce.”
• Accessibility. Making schools accessible to all students has been “one of the least successful parts of reform” to L.A. Unified’s special ed system, the report states. While the school board in 2017 passed a three-phase plan to make all schools accessible, the report notes that the first phase alone runs through 2025 and reportedly requires an extra $1 billion on top of the $600 million the board allocated.

The district emphasized that accessibility and “ADA-related goals” will be a continued focus, in accordance with .

Schmerelson said board members will “make sure that our legal department is following through on any complaints that parents may have about services being received or not received, and acting on it immediately.”

He believes that “everything should be done at the school site.” Local district superintendents, their special education administrators and school principals especially, he said, should be overseeing whether students receive all of their required services and working to remediate parents’ complaints in lieu of legal action.

Parents with complaints are urged to use their principal as “the first point of contact,” the district spokeswoman said. She noted that the also fields concerns and complaints through its call center and . Parents can use the California Department of Education’s as well.

Mosko, the parent and Speak UP advocate, said the Division of Special Education has been “very responsive when I request information.” She said she’s been “heartened” by recent leadership there and that “they seem to be prioritizing transparency of information more.”

Mosko said she will continue to advocate, especially on the “systemic issue” of not enough teachers being trained to properly serve students with disabilities. The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, she noted, doesn’t require special education teachers to know federal law as it pertains to students’ IEPs. And general education teachers, at most, might take one or two “very general courses” on special ed.

The district has increased funding to provide for more professional development opportunities, Beutner said. Specific amounts can’t be shared until district schools are given their initial budgets in mid-February.

Ultimately, it’s “a bottom-up transformation” that will make all the difference, Mosko said. “If people on the ground don’t have the information and the training and the knowledge … all you get is a bunch of lawsuits and a bunch of kids lost in the system.”

The report, “,” and the challenges faced by immigrant students and the children of immigrants across L.A. schools were among the main topics of discussion at the first “The Future of Immigrants in Los Angeles” summit in downtown L.A. on Jan. 9.

The USC report was released at the summit, where more than 300 community leaders representing dozens of local and nationwide organizations, as well as elected officials, educators and pro-immigrant advocates, gathered at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels to discuss why immigrant parents’ civic engagement and empowerment are crucial for these students to succeed.

Efrain Escobedo, vice president of education and immigration for the California Community Foundation, said that policymakers and school districts need to understand the disparities and how anti-immigrant policies around deportation impact learning for those children.

“What this report does is to have schools recognize that we have to look at families and we have to look at communities. These students are bringing needs that are impacted by the economic inequalities that exist in the county, that are impacted by the anti-immigrant policies around deportation,” Escobedo said. “All of these things affect the learning process for these immigrant children. What this report does is provide that bigger picture for school districts to understand what might be the other contributing factors that we need to think about and will force districts, I think, to say we need to partner with not just families, but with organizations.”

Manuel Pastor, director of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, said that while the findings are not surprising, they make it clear that school funding and greater parent involvement are critical in helping close the achievement gap for children of immigrants.

“One of the things you notice, particularly in smaller suburban districts, is that parents are as engaged as they might be, and we know that when parents are engaged, their children do better. Parents are also demanding better systems for their children, etc.,” Pastor said.

He noted that language limitations continue to be one of the main obstacles for immigrant parents to be involved in their children’s education and that schools need to do a better job of introducing them to the idea of being part of the PTA or school site councils.

“I think we face a number of different challenges. People who are immigrants, people who are undocumented, can sometimes be afraid of participating in a public sphere,” Pastor said. “Schools aren’t always welcoming to them either in terms of having meetings and the languages they’re most comfortable with or even really welcoming parents to be fully engaged.”

Escobedo also highlighted parent engagement and representation as a key to the educational success of children of immigrants.

“I think it is critically important that, just as with students, for parents to feel like they can engage and feel connected to the school, which in some way is influenced by who represents the leadership in the school, what the teachers look like, what the cultural competencies of the administrators are, to understand the culture they serve in their local communities,” Escobedo said. “Very specifically, do you have administrators of color? Do you have administrators that represent the immigrant communities that they’re serving? People need to feel comfortable and trusting in wanting to collaborate and feel welcomed at schools.”

“That’s really critical,” Pastor said. “I think that is as important as being able to vote in school board elections, the signal it sends that you’re welcome, that you’re a full participant in determining the education of your children.”

Giving non-citizen families a voice

The report found that 20 percent of L.A. County’s population either are undocumented themselves or live with someone who is, and that 1 in 3 Angelenos is foreign-born.

It also shows how that status is a major determinant in attaining higher education, with 33 percent of naturalized citizens in L.A. holding a bachelor’s degree, compared with the 23 percent of immigrants who are permanent residents and have graduated from college. Only 9 percent of undocumented immigrants hold a college degree or higher, and 60 percent don’t have a high school diploma.

Last year, Los Angeles Unified School District passed proposed by board member Kelly Gonez to explore a city ballot initiative giving all non-citizen parents within LAUSD’s boundaries the right to vote in school board elections. One board member, George McKenna, abstained from voting either for or against the resolution, citing concern around voter confidentiality and fears that non-citizens’ personal information would be breached and used to harm immigrant families.

Gonez, who participated in last week’s summit and has an immigrant parent, emphasized that her resolution takes into account the protection of voter confidentiality. Multiple immigrant-rights groups support it, including several of those at the summit.

“Having an opportunity to have a voice about who represents the interest of your child on a school board is fundamental, so we should get that done right away,” Escobedo said. “It’s not about straight legal status, citizenship. It’s about, am I a stakeholder as a parent in this district, and if so, then I should have the right to choose who makes decisions for my child.”

“Even in Los Angeles, there is more work to be done to create an inclusive city where our immigrants can lead and thrive,” Gonez said in a statement on Jan. 14. “I plan to bring the energy and urgency that fueled our conversation to LA Unified as we begin the study group to pursue this change. It’s one concrete way to ensure our families have a voice and that our representatives better reflect their communities.”

At the board meeting that same day, Gonez also introduced a resolution that would demonstrate the district’s opposition to the proposed opening of a migrant youth detention center by a private company in the district she represents or anywhere within LAUSD’s boundaries.

“A youth migrant detention center has absolutely no place in the East San Fernando Valley or anywhere in Los Angeles Unified,” Gonez said during the meeting. “It is antithetical to our community’s values and our mission to create safe supportive spaces for young people. We are calling on the Los Angeles City Council to do everything in its power to stop the detention center from opening.”

The resolution that was approved unanimously by the board on Tuesday states that the district served about 13,000 newcomer students (newly arrived immigrants) in the 2018-19 school year and expects to serve 17,000 this school year.

Reimagining education for English learners

English-speaking proficiency was named as a challenge in the report for L.A. County, where nearly 37,000 immigrant children have limited English-speaking ability, as do 125,000 children who are U.S. born.

More than 305,000 of the county’s 1.5 million K-12 students were classified as English learners in the 2018-19 school year, according to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which offered an education session at the summit.

In L.A. Unified and at the state level, English learners have at the bottom of all student subgroups in the state proficiency test, known as CAASPP, for the past three years.

“When it comes specifically to English learner students or bilingual education, I would say, first and foremost, we need to radically reimagine our classrooms and the cultures in our schools,” Escobedo said, adding that 2016’s voter repeal of , which had mandated English-only instruction in California since 1998, gave advocates and educators the ability to do that.

“I think what we need in our schools is not just, how do we improve the outcomes of English learners under our current assessment, but how do we reimagine education and our culture to be a truly global multilingual education system, which we’re not,” Escobedo said. “So we could tinker around, but until we say we need to dismantle the English-only system we used to have and reinvent one that prizes multilingualism and multiculturalism, then, I mean, we’re not going to get transformation. We’re just going to get shifts.”

“We came out and we were playing, and the airplane was outside and we thought it was rain,” recounted Park Avenue Elementary sixth-grader Josue Burgos . “But then we knew it was throwing gas on us, and everybody started to run.”

A Shanghai-bound Delta Air Lines flight out of LAX had to make an emergency return to the Los Angeles airport around noon Tuesday, citing engine problems, and during its descent it discharged fuel�� above and around southeast Los Angeles. First responders treated about 60 people, at least 20 of them children, for skin or upper respiratory irritation. No one was transported to the hospital.

“It’s not an experience we want for our students or any of us,” Park Avenue Elementary Principal Ramona Garcia said at a��, where she thanked local response teams. Two classes had been on the playground . “I feel very tired, but thank God that everybody is fine.”

Directly hit schools were Park Avenue Elementary in Cudahy, 93rd Street Elementary in Green Meadows and Jordan High School in Florence-Firestone, the district confirmed Wednesday. Emergency responders also went to Tweedy and San Gabriel Avenue elementary schools in South Gate and Graham Elementary in Florence-Graham.

Local officials at the conference, held at Park Avenue Elementary, said they didn’t anticipate any lingering or serious health concerns from the fuel dump. Cyrus Rangan, with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, acknowledged that there are “unknowns,” though, in terms of the environmental impacts.

Tuesday’s incident “was quite unprecedented,” Rangan said. “Nothing like this has ever really happened before [here].”

Fuel dumping is and is�� or if pilots have to reach a safe landing weight, which was reportedly the case with Tuesday’s flight. remain, however, especially following the of radio conversations between the pilot and air traffic control, where the pilot initially stated that a fuel dump wasn’t necessary. Federal regulations direct planes to dump fuel over and at higher altitudes if possible.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the matter.

The affected schools reopened Wednesday thanks to what Rangan deemed “above and beyond” efforts by the district to clean the schools in tandem with the County of Los Angeles Fire Department Health Hazardous Materials Division, the city of Los Angeles Fire Department, the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the Delta Air Lines Environmental Compliance Department. That effort included washing all outdoor lunch tables, outdoor play equipment, drinking fountains and playground surfaces, and activating air-conditioning systems throughout the night for ventilation.

L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner tried to assure community members that everything was “back to normal.” “Students are safe; staff are safe,” he said.

To “put things in perspective,” he also noted that about 165 lives had been at risk on the Delta plane, which landed safely. “We’re grateful that Delta was able to get the plane back on the ground,” he said. “It is unfortunate it happened not just in a school community, but in all of the school communities that were impacted.”

The accident many in the local community.

“Planes cannot dump anywhere,” local resident Rosana Yancor told��. “Has to be another solution.”

“I was shocked and angered,” board member Jackie Goldberg, whose District 5 seat includes Park Avenue Elementary, said in a statement Tuesday. “I will continue to advocate for our Park Avenue Elementary School family, and provide updates when more information is available. I am sorry our school community had to go through this very scary incident.”

Some have pointed out that southeast Los Angeles County, which holds some of L.A.’s�� communities, is not new to environmental injustices. A toxin-emitting battery recycling plant operated in the area until five years ago,��, and Park Avenue Elementary itself closed for eight months in the 1990s because “tar-like petroleum sludge began to seep up from the ground.”

“Why is it always our communities having to deal with the brunt of these issues?” Cudahy Mayor Elizabeth Alcantar told the Times.

A few commenters on�� of Wednesday’s conference voiced similar frustrations.

“I couldn’t imagine this happening in any other type of neighborhood,” one said.

Another wrote: “Wonder if fuel would have been dropped over a more affluent area?”

The district declined to answer questions from The 74 on whether L.A. Unified is considering filing a lawsuit against Delta Air Lines, or if it’s aware of parents who intend to do so. Dana Debel, Delta’s managing director of state and local government affairs, declined to comment at Wednesday’s conference on the hows and whys of the incident prior to hearing from the Federal Aviation Administration’s investigation, but she said the company is “here” for the schools and local community.

“We worked through the night with LAUSD … to make sure all the schools were safe and available to open this morning for all the students,” she said. “We are going to continue to be here to partner with the community, not just with the school district, but the community at large, to make sure we are addressing the needs of this community going forward.”

Debel added that Delta has created a hotline number at 1-800-441-5955 with “dedicated” bilingual agents ready to answer any questions or concerns community members might have. Delta is also in touch with local officials, such as the Cudahy mayor’s office.

L.A. Unified in a Wednesday said it will continue to provide timely updates at , with KLCS-TV and on all social media platforms. Families can also call the district’s hotline at 213-443-1300.

About 23.5 percent of seniors — or 8,472 of 36,124 — were enrolled in a fourth-year math/quantitative reasoning course during the 2018-19 school year, according to the district’s Office of General Counsel. The California State University system, which spans 23 campuses and serves some 481,000 students, will decide in the coming weeks whether to tack on this type of elective class to its admissions requirements for prospective freshmen, starting in fall 2027 when current fifth-graders enter college.

That more than 75 percent of seniors in the state’s largest school district were not enrolled in what could become a required CSU admissions course elicited serious concerns from advocates already worried about college access and readiness among L.A. Unified graduates, less than half of whom were on track to be eligible for CSU admissions last year under the current standards.

This should be “raising alarm bells for everyone,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, executive director of Education Trust-West. “We need to have a serious conversation as a state about who has access to college and who doesn’t.”

Data also revealed that of the 35 math/quantitative reasoning courses L.A. Unified counted in 2018-19, all were math, with at least 80 percent listed as precalculus or calculus. This, advocates added, underscores the likely hurdles districts will face offering additional courses to all of their students — especially classes other than math. CSU ��touts the possibility of students taking quantitative reasoning courses, such as statistics, computer science or personal finance, to fulfill the requirement.

These findings speak to the necessity of having data-driven policy, said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. CSU’s proposal, which that the “majority of California students already meet the proposed requirement,” leans on data limited to students who applied to the Cal State system or who are already currently enrolled. This, advocates argue, discounts students who want a college education but who are already struggling to meet the bar for admissions.

“Why do we have to rely just on CSU data and public records requests to get this kind of information?” Siqueiros asked in response to The 74’s findings. “That is no good way to make very significant policy changes or admissions changes to the CSU.”

James T. Minor, CSU’s assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist who presented the official proposal to trustees, said he “would find it difficult to believe” that L.A. Unified students don’t have access to courses beyond math that would satisfy the prospective requirement.

Under the proposal, he noted, students could also complete certain CSU-approved science or Career and Technical Education courses, or enroll in a qualifying class at a local community college. There would also be an automatic waiver for students at under-resourced schools that still don’t offer permissible courses by the 2027 rollout, though a formal provision and parameters haven’t been fleshed out yet.

Minor added that he disagrees with advocates tying CSU’s proposal to the systemic college readiness challenges statewide and in districts like L.A. The proposal’s focus, he said, is mainly on students already prepped to attend CSU, and whether it’s reasonable to ask those students to take an additional course to boost their preparedness.

If “nothing changed, LAUSD would still have the same circumstance — that a very high percentage of their students would not be meeting [the] requirements,” he said. “Is that a major challenge for public education in the state of California? Absolutely. Should we be working on that challenge? Absolutely. But it’s beyond the scope of this proposal.”

Still, CSU officials reason that the additional admissions requirement would promote equity, in part by expanding marginalized students’ access to more rigorous pre-college coursework and opportunities in STEM-linked fields. They’ve also touted the benefits of quantitative-reasoning-based courses in teaching problem-solving and critical thinking.

The system’s Board of Trustees, which ramped up conversations on over the summer and has the power to approve the change, is discussing it again , with an official vote .

Existing barriers in L.A.��

Students in districts like L.A. already confront glaring disparities in college access. Less than half of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 cohort — a — was eligible to apply to the CSU under current admissions standards, which require a C or better in three high school math courses: Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II.

If that percentage holds, it would mark a slight dip from the prior two years, though it still sits above the statewide average publicly available for 2018.�� of California school districts don’t align their graduation requirements to CSU admissions standards, like L.A. Unified does.

The district has also cited concerns with procuring the funds to implement such a proposal. L.A. Unified has been walking a financial tightrope; it lost a June bid for and continues to struggle to rein in deficit spending and adopt balanced budgets that .

“We’re strong supporters of rigor, and we do want to prepare our students for a four-year university. However, we also know that that takes time. It takes money. It takes communication. It takes capacity,” said Katherine Trejo, a former L.A. Unified student who now manages United Way of Greater Los Angeles’s Young Civic Leaders Program.

Both Trejo and college sophomore Mariel Mendoza said they attended high schools in L.A. that offered only one fourth-year math/quantitative reasoning course.

For Trejo, who graduated from a downtown L.A. high school in 2012, it was an AP Calculus class. Her pilot school, unlike most other district schools, required that fourth year. So she took it first semester senior year — failed — and was forced to retake precalculus before graduating.

Mendoza’s Koreatown high school, which she graduated from in 2018, offered an AP statistics course. Students including herself avoided the class, though, she said, because they didn’t feel prepared to take on the advanced material.

The dearth in course diversity and many students’ unawareness of college admissions standards was “heartbreaking,” Mendoza said. In the case of the latest 2018-19 data out of L.A. Unified, it’s unclear whether low enrollment in those fourth-year classes was mainly attributable to capacity issues because of , or if it was also due in part to students choosing not to take them.

“I’m a student of color, and coming from a school like mine [that didn’t have a lot of resources] — we want to have the opportunity to attend a four-year college,” she said. Mendoza is attending both California State University-Los Angeles and Los Angeles City College part time, majoring in business with plans to be an accountant.

L.A. Unified has made some strides in getting students college-ready, Trejo noted. of the district’s 2018 graduates enrolled in the CSU system, for example, up from about 12.5 percent in 2014. But even L.A. Unified officials themselves say there is still considerable work to be done to ensure that more minority and low-income students have access to postsecondary education.

L.A. Unified’s school board in June opposing CSU’s proposal, claiming it would “further exacerbate barriers to accessing the CSU system” and “ignores the real challenges of limited quantitative course offerings and teachers required to meet such a requirement.” Now-former chief academic officer Frances Gipson acknowledged at that board meeting that “I don’t know that we are necessarily prepared” to teach a fourth year to all students, citing “the staffing requirements, the partnership requirements” that would be needed to “move forward elegantly.”

Kelly Gonez, a district board member who spoke out against the proposal at a CSU��public hearing in August, continues to be disenchanted by the university system’s solution to creating equity.

“The change will disproportionately impact our students with the highest needs, including underrepresented, low-income, and first-generation students,” she wrote in a statement Thursday to The 74. “I appreciate the CSU’s effort to strengthen the transition to college, but we can build better pathways without denying opportunities for our most marginalized students.”

Seeing the data differently

Part of the discord surrounding the proposal is rooted in differing opinions about its scope — whom it ultimately affects, and what data matter as it moves forward.

From CSU’s perspective, the proposal is “concerned with CSU-bound students,” Minor, the assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist, said. “[We’re trying to discern]: Among the students who will arrive to the CSU, who are meeting the [current] requirements, and is it reasonable to ask them to take one additional course to strengthen their preparation for college success?”

From that angle, tell a more optimistic story. A reported 93 percent of the 126,071 regularly admitted fall 2018 applicants would have met the prospective requirement, according to information acquired through CSU’s recent data-sharing agreement with the California Department of Education. That trend held up fairly well across racial lines, with 88 percent of African-American applicants and 91 percent of Latino applicants having already taken a course that could count.

For L.A. Unified specifically, a reported 91 percent of the 15,169 regularly admitted students in fall 2018 would have met the suggested new standard.

When asked whether there was any intention to conduct further research to glean high-school-level data, Minor responded affirmatively but provided no details, calling the idea of amassing statewide high school data “sort of a false setup.”

“We have to have reasoned discussions. … Not simply impassioned, sort of emotional pleas based on worry about what might happen in the future,” Minor said. “I think we all collectively have to have the courage to go forward.”

Advocates, for now, remain unconvinced and say they will continue their opposition. The Campaign for College Opportunity and Ed Trust-West plan to be at Wednesday’s meeting, urging trustees to press pause on the measure.

If it moves forward, “We plan to galvanize all the forces,” Siqueiros said.

and the Covington & Burling LLP law firm — acting on behalf of two district parents — Friday after the district last month roundly dismissed charges made in the groups’ July complaint that it doesn’t transparently document how $1.14 billion in annual state funding earmarked for low-income students, English learners and foster youth is resulting in improved services for those students.

L.A. Unified “has willingly accepted the disproportionately greater increase in funds it has received as a result of its high need student population relative to other districts,” the appeal read. “In return, LAUSD must meet the same transparency and engagement requirements as all other districts.”

Including the $1.14 billion, L.A. Unified receives more than $5 billion annually from the state’s education funding formula. If the state, which initially declined to get involved, steps in, it could force the district to continue reworking its recently approved LCAP (Local Control Accountability Plan) for the current 2019-20 year. The LCAP is a behemoth document that all California districts are to submit annually to outline their goals and actions for boosting student outcomes over a three-year period.

The school board tepidly passed of its LCAP Oct. 1, after district officials produced two revised iterations last month in response to the legal complaint. The deadline for approval by the L.A. County Office of Education is Oct. 8.

Only one board member refused to green-light the LCAP, expressing earnest concern with parents’ inability to understand the document. Some 25 people spoke solely on the LCAP agenda item at the Oct. 1 meeting, many of them parents pleading with board members to reject it and implement a more robust parent engagement process.

“All [speakers] are talking about is the lack of transparency and training��for parents to become partners. I don’t understand��— this is the fourth��year I’ve heard the same story,” Scott Schmerelson��said. “Something is very, very wrong.”

Some of the unresolved issues ��in a memo leading up to the appeal:

●����The continuing practice of “bundling multiple, separate, and often unrelated programs” under a single umbrella category in the LCAP that “prevents stakeholders and the public from seeing how much money is spent on each program.”

●��Failure to accurately document expenditures. According to , the district changed the wording of a $238 million expenditure in the latest LCAP from an “increase in salaries for teachers of high-need students” to “Additional Teachers” without any explanation. In another case, the memo says planned expenditures for English learners tripled from $7.8 million to $22.9 million between the two LCAP updates last month, but “none of these radical shifts were explained.”

●��The lack of a “meaningful community engagement process.” L.A. Unified offered a five-day window for public feedback in mid-September on the 274-page document.

Nicole Ochi, lead attorney for Public Advocates, acknowledged in a call Friday the challenge L.A. Unified faces in rendering the information accessible —��making ongoing pressure from advocates necessary, she said.

“It is hard for a district the size of LAUSD to completely transform things in a short amount of time, especially if they don’t have the processes in place to do that, and they don’t have a culture necessarily to do that,” Ochi said. “I’m not surprised that despite their efforts it still falls short — but I think the continued advocacy and pressure will hopefully result in those changes happening.”

The same parties have taken the district to task before. Along with ACLU of Southern California, they last sued L.A. Unified for allegedly misallocating $450 million annually in funds designated for high-needs students. They won, with the resulting prompting a $150 million payout over three years to 50 of the district’s highest-needs schools.

Next steps in this latest case remain unclear, however, until the state education department responds. It “received the appeal and [is] in the process of reviewing it,” a spokeswoman confirmed in an email Monday. She added that the state has 60 days to issue a decision.

The district on Monday also confirmed it had received the appeal late Friday and said it was reviewing it before deciding on next steps.

A promise to do better next time

In the July , L.A. Unified’s LCAPs —��past and present — were described as so “opaque” and “rife with fundamental errors” that they not only fail to identify how high-needs students are benefiting from targeted funding but also “undermine basic notions of transparency and equity and thwart meaningful efforts at local engagement and accountability.”

Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP had asked the state to intervene immediately, circumventing regular procedure. But because the county Office of Education had until Oct. 8��to approve the district’s 2019-20 LCAP, it was re-routed to the district and the county first.

L.A. Unified proceeded to produce two updated versions of its LCAP in September: one and another . Public Advocates that the updates “provided more detailed descriptions of services, reflection of effectiveness, and disaggregation of expenditures.” It added, however, that even the latest LCAP remains “legally deficient,” appearing to “wordsmith its way out of fundamental transparency and accountability problems.”

District officials, while noting a few corrections, dismissed arguments of legal deficiency in a formal . They argued that “with a district as large as LAUSD,” addressing all services at a “granular” level would “make the LCAP unnecessarily cumbersome and inaccessible to the public.” It added that since the LCAP is reformatted every three years — with the 2019-20 document the last in the most recent three-year cycle — next year made more sense for implementing any significant structural changes.

“The District felt it would be inappropriate to substantially restructure its actions in the third and final year of its three-year LCAP, but may make such changes for the 2020-23 LCAP,” the statement read.

The appeal to L.A. Unified’s formal response, filed Friday, called the district’s legal assertions “erroneous.” It asks the state to “deem LAUSD’s September 20, 2019 Board-approved amended LCAP fundamentally deficient and order LAUSD to further revise its 2019-20 LCAP.” The parties also hope the appeal will result in “more clarification, for LAUSD and for other districts as well, about how to interpret the law,” Ochi added.

Although they hope the LCAP is revisited, Ochi acknowledged that it’s possible that the state might just “order [LAUSD] to stop doing these things going forward.”

A prescription to “do better next time” was an overarching theme of the Oct. 1 board meeting. Board members approved the Sept. 20 version of the LCAP in a 6-1 vote, despite all of them expressing some level of wariness about the document’s existing deficiencies.

“We do have a new opportunity to reset [with the next three-year cycle] ….which is ultimately why I’ll support it, though somewhat reluctantly,” board member Nick Melvoin said at the meeting. He added, “If next year’s LCAP isn’t a more user-friendly and visionary document, I’ll be voting ‘no’��…��[But] if we deny the LCAP at this late stage, funding for our most vulnerable students that we’ve��heard a lot��about will be put in jeopardy, as will our entire budget.”

Board member Kelly Gonez said similarly. “While I don’t feel great,” she said, “I don’t know that voting ‘no’ solves any of the problems that are raised.”

When families can’t get answers about what their children are learning, how they are doing or what the plan is if they have fallen behind, they are denied the opportunity to act as their children’s advocates and to support their schools in implementing coherent instructional programs. In a system where about 60 percent of students do not meet standards in reading and writing, our students and our schools cannot afford for families to be left on the sideline.

At Parent Revolution, we organize public school families so that they have the power to get their children the education they deserve. Whether we are working with an individual family to find the right school for their child or organizing a team of families who want to change things for all students, our work begins with listening to parents.

It’s far too easy for school systems to dismiss or talk over the experience of an individual family. But over the years, we’ve found that families who are frustrated with the lack of educational opportunities for their children don’t have unique, isolated challenges. For every parent who shares his or her story, there are many more with similar experiences. These patterns point to systemic challenges that need to be taken seriously, understood and fixed.

One story we’ve heard in many variations is the family that finds out too late that their child has fallen behind. Sometimes this is a middle school student who reads at an elementary level or a high school student who isn’t on track for college eligibility. Often, it’s an English learner who has always received good report card grades and positive reviews from teachers, but who has not mastered English at a level needed for high school and college.

Families’ experiences must be taken especially seriously in a school system that does not make important data public and that does not use the data it has to identify and tackle its most persistent problems.

In an effort to elevate their experiences, members of the Parent Power Network spent the 2018-19 school year investigating how families in the Los Angeles Unified School District get information about their children’s academic progress, readiness and opportunities. They gathered and analyzed information from the classroom, school, district and state. They looked at websites, the notices sent home in backpacks, report cards and state test score reports. Families also designed and asked a shared set of questions during parent-teacher conferences.

Their findings and recommendations can be found in a new report, “.” They found that while families get lots of information about their children’s learning from various sources, it is rarely aligned, accessible and actionable so that parents can take steps to improve their children’s opportunities.

The project also revealed several important bright spots. At the school level, most families feel that their teachers and principal are accessible and responsive. in Los Angeles, it seems the days of children translating for their parents are behind us, as every school reflected in the report consistently made translators available for families.

There were signs of early, if scattered, adoption of new technology to engage families with information that gives them the power to monitor their children’s academic progress and intervene if necessary. We also found that teachers, schools, LA Unified and the California Department of Education consistently used state standards to answer the question “What is my child supposed to be learning?” This question had the most consistent information available for families across classrooms and schools, helped largely by the district’s use of a standards-based report card template. Not surprisingly, these report cards are incredibly important for how a family understands their child’s readiness for the future and how they choose to act.

The report found that families still rely primarily on information received directly from teachers and schools. It’s a great sign of strong relationships, but unfortunately, there is far too much inconsistency from classroom to classroom and from school to school.

In some classrooms, families got weekly updates on their children’s academic progress, including a clear sense of what that progress means for their high school and college readiness. But in every case, these updates were provided by an individual teacher taking his or her own initiative, rather than as a consistent practice within and among schools. New technology tools, like LAUSD’s online parent portal, hold promise, but only if they are implemented with clear expectations for how teachers will use them and a comprehensive effort to promote their adoption and regular use by families.

Even in the few areas where families can rely on consistent information from year to year and from classroom to classroom, information from various sources is misaligned and fails to paint an accurate picture of student progress. One prominent example is the misalignment between state test scores in English language arts and math and report card grades. Report card grades are routinely higher than state test scores, and state test scores are rarely discussed with parents by teachers or school staff. This often results in families having an overly confident sense of their child’s academic well-being, which causes them to lose valuable time in intervening in their education. This issue is more pervasive and pronounced for families of English learners.

For those families, especially those whose children enter the school system in middle and high school, there is a disconnect between information presented on a student’s progress at mastering English and how this impacts college readiness. While Los Angeles Unified deserves credit for making sure every family in our network knew the importance of their children being reclassified as fluent English speakers, this information is often presented in isolation from course grades and ELA and math exams.

The greatest level of frustration comes when families know that their children are behind and want to know the plan to get them on track. Parents often ask for academic support by asking for tutoring. Unfortunately, most schools take this request literally and either respond that there is none is available or refer parents to out-of-pocket tutoring companies. This is a huge missed opportunity to listen to what parents are actually asking for, which is to understand what their school and their teacher’s plan is for students who have fallen behind. They want to know what to look for from day to day, how they will know if it’s working for their child and when they can expect to see results.

When I go to the dentist, I want to be told exactly what to expect. It’s the only way I know if the pinch I feel is totally normal or a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s the same thing that I want from a pilot during a flight, especially when we hit turbulence. Schools however, rarely share specific information with families about the instructional program, what they should expect to see and how they’ll know if things are going as they should.

This approach discounts the role of families and ignores the ways that parents can accelerate student learning when they have information about their school’s instructional plan so they can monitor whether it’s happening and whether it’s working. It’s easy to pay lip service to this kind of democratic accountability and local control, but it cannot happen if schools don’t share the type of knowledge that translates into power.

There’s a lot of work to do in Los Angeles. The ELA proficiency level for LAUSD students has gone up by just 1 percentage point each of the past three years. At this pace, it will be another 60 years — generations — until the children of this city’s schools, who are mostly black and Latino and from low-income families, will have access to the opportunities that they deserve.

This is a moral crisis, and the pace of change is too slow.��Addressing the scope of the challenge and facing the urgency of the crisis in LAUSD will require a strategy that engages parents as powerful advocates on behalf of their children.

Seth Litt is executive director of .��

As California this month expanded a on suspending younger students for defiant behavior, lessons on how this increasingly sweeping school discipline reform may play out can be found in Los Angeles, which barred such suspensions on an even broader scale six years ago.

Previously in California, “willful defiance” suspensions were not permitted in grades K-3. Beginning in July 2020, under the , they will be prohibited for students in both traditional and charter schools from kindergarten to eighth grade. Expanding the suspension ban to the older grades was contentious, as was the use of the subjective term “willful defiance,” defined in state code as “disrupt[ing] school activities or otherwise willfully def[ying]” authority. It can include using a cell phone in class, wearing a hat and even chewing bubble gum.

Los Angeles Unified was the first California district to ban suspensions for disruptive behavior in 2013 and did so in an even more comprehensive way, covering all public schools in grades K-12. Local officials and advocates reflecting this week on the district’s policy shift six years later called it “a huge step” forward in reforming school discipline. They touted a drastic drop in suspensions — a more than sixfold decrease in district schools between 2011-12 and 2017-18 alone — resulting in thousands more instructional days for students. This is especially notable for students of color and those with disabilities, who have historically been in school.

“We have come far with tackling school discipline, moving away from punitive consequences and treating our students with respect, love and compassion,” school board member Mónica García, who led the formal proposal for the ban, wrote in a Sept. 12 email.

But advocates added that it is just that: a step. The larger “culture shift” away from school discipline and toward de-escalation and positive interventions, they said, is still very much a work in progress. The district in 2018-19 set aside more than five times as much funding for school police as for programming in its ��operating budget. And racial disparities in suspensions have remained — widened, in cases — since the ban passed, according to state education department data.

“LAUSD has to do more,” said Amir Whitaker, a staff attorney with . “We just have to see more priority in support for the students.”

“The right direction”

Advocates all cited the ban’s principal victory as the drop in suspensions and the corresponding hike in instructional days for marginalized students.

A year before the ban, in 2011-12, L.A. Unified doled out 17,595 suspensions at district schools— more than a quarter of which were for “willful defiance,” according to education department data. By 2017-18, the most recent year of verified state data, that total had plummeted to 2,796.

“The district has made tons of progress” when looking at those numbers, said Victor Leung, senior staff attorney with ACLU SoCal. “The ban really did its job in dramatically reducing the number of suspensions throughout the district.”

Suspensions at charters within L.A. Unified boundaries also dropped, from 8,974 in 2011-12 to 3,627 in 2017-18, although these schools continue to suspend students at a —��about versus 0.6 percent, respectively.

Suspensions cost students learning days, which research shows�� their academic achievement and�� of dropping out. And marginalized students — black and brown students and those with disabilities — often pay the highest price. The year before the ban passed, black pupils at L.A. Unified were losing ��to suspensions per 100 students. Despite making up about 9 percent of the district population, they represented 28.6 percent of those being suspended.

The math now tallies to about 4 days lost per 100 black students — a heartening development for equity advocates like Aurea Montes-Rodriguez.��

“Students are staying in school, which puts them in a much stronger position to have an opportunity to complete, and be successful in, their academic experience,” said Montes-Rodriguez, executive vice president of , one of the central advocacy groups that campaigned for the 2013 ban.

Similar to the statewide measure, there were early concerns in L.A. that eliminating these suspensions would and disrupt classroom instruction for other students. Current board president Richard Vladovic had supported the ban , saying in 2013 he would be “the first to stop it” if it proved disruptive to learning. Vladovic was unavailable for comment this week. The local teachers union also didn’t respond to LA School Report’s request for comment. Its parent organization, the influential California Teachers Association, hasn’t affirmatively supported or opposed the latest state-level ban, though that suspensions should be used as a last resort and that districts must provide sufficient resources for alternative discipline programs.

One student from Garfield High School in East Los Angeles told the school board at a that he’d seen improvements in school climate since the ban passed.

“As a student, I feel that the school environment has changed,” he said. “I feel it’s changed for the better. I feel it’s become safer for students; they no longer have to fear about penalties for superficial infractions: wearing a hat, chewing gum, having earbuds in. Instead of punishing them and taking time away from their education, students are allowed to stay in class.”

The percentage of middle and high schoolers feeling some degree of safety in L.A. Unified schools was in 2018-19, according to the district’s annual school experience survey — the highest it’s been in at least seven years.

At the July 2 meeting, the board passed����backing the state’s expansion of the ban, which is now permanent for grades K-5 and runs through 2025 for grades 6-8. Last week, Superintendent Austin Beutner also voiced his support for the statewide measure, known as Senate Bill 419.

“Since 2013, when Los Angeles Unified adopted the School Climate Bill of Rights, we have established restorative justice programs and other non-punitive strategies to promote positive behavior and ameliorate issues that might otherwise lead to a suspension,” Beutner said in a statement. “Senate Bill 419 will support our work to keep students in school where they have the opportunities to succeed.”

“Slow progress”

Paired with that optimism, though, is recognition that there’s more work to do. Advocates expressed concerns with potential inaccuracies in discipline reporting, lingering racial biases in schools and insufficient funding for positive intervention efforts.

Whitaker said he’s heard reports of teachers or administrators pulling students from class but just not marking it down, which he deems “counterproductive.” At some schools, he added, suspensions are down but are up.

And black students are still being suspended at higher rates than their white peers. Between 2011-12 and 2017-18, the number of black students in district schools being suspended fell from 5,037 to 1,004. Yet they made up a growing proportion of the suspensions: 35.9 percent in 2017-18, versus 28.6 percent in 2011-12.

Comparatively, suspensions for white students, who have similar enrollment numbers to their black peers, fell —��from 1,258 in 2011-12 to 163 in 2017-18 —��but so did their share of suspensions, from 7.1 percent to 5.8 percent.

“What you’re seeing is the slow progress,” Montes-Rodriguez said. “There are still systemic issues of racial biases within the district and our schools where black students are being profiled or disciplined in harsher ways than other students.”

A fundamental part of successful school discipline reform, advocates noted, is a “culture shift” away from zero-tolerance policies and toward restorative justice. Restorative justice focuses on training school staff to de-escalate conflicts and rebuild relationships and trust with students who act out rather than throwing them out of class.

When L.A. Unified approved the ban in 2013, it also promised to provide restorative justice training to all district schools by 2020. Sixty-five percent of schools have completed restorative justice training so far, and “all schools will be considered fully trained” by the end of 2019-20, district spokeswoman Shannon Haber wrote in an email Friday.

But from anecdotal reports, Leung said he doesn’t believe the training is “on track.”

“The district hasn’t invested enough staff or resources or training to ensure that it’s implemented with fidelity across the district,” he said. “We know a lot of people who haven’t heard of it, don’t think it’s on their campuses, and we’ve heard others who say for their campus, what restorative justice has meant so far is just the district head office providing a binder of materials and telling them to read it.”

In , the district allocated $11.03 million in targeted school spending on restorative justice, compared with the $57.8 million it set aside for school police. That discrepancy reveals a continuing “mis-priority” in the district, Whitaker said.

Restorative justice includes “everyone, down to the groundskeeper and the custodian and the nurses,” he said. “It takes a significant investment and there’s no shortcut around it.”

Spending in 2019-20 was less clear. No police funding information was provided in . District spokeswoman Barbara Jones wrote in an email Tuesday that the “overall budgeted expenditures for School Police was reduced in 2019-20 because some of the administrative costs were moved to the Central Office,” but couldn’t provide a spending amount.

Restorative justice funding didn’t decrease in 2019-20, but nearly $9 million was moved to ��“to provide schools with more autonomy in how to fund implementation of the practices,” spokeswoman��Haber��said. The index is a ranking system that distributes designated funds to schools based on a variety of factors, such as local gun violence, asthma rates and chronic absenteeism.

“We need to constantly review and re-evaluate the needs of our schools and also allow for more local control so that schools are getting the services that best serve them,” García, the board member, said Sept. 12 in talking about the student needs index. “We don’t support a one-size-fits-all model.”

Like others, she acknowledged that the district is still learning years after the ban started.

“There is always more room for growth,” she said. “Change is good — no progress ever came about by keeping things the same.”

Correction: Los Angeles Unified School District’s 2019-20 budget did not cut funds for restorative justice, it moved them to a different part of the budget. An earlier version of the story was unclear about the funding’s status this school year.

*Updated

L.A. Unified’s nearly half-million district students are headed back to school on Tuesday for the 2019-20 year.

While students were away, district officials and advocates began laying the groundwork for the upcoming year’s priorities. On the heels of a failed parcel tax bid, L.A. Unified will continue clamoring for more funding and proposing initiatives that officials hope will build public trust.

The district is also following a contentious state university proposal to alter admissions requirements, while charter advocates target state bills that could restrict local charter expansion.

Here are some of the top storylines on our radar as school starts back up:

1 A tax, take 2?

Another attempt at a local funding measure is possible as L.A. Unified continues to seek new “desperately needed” revenue after a proposed $500 million annual parcel tax�� at the polls in June, Superintendent Austin Beutner said in an Aug. 13 interview with LA School Report.

The district in March or November 2020 hopes “to put out a proposition again in front of voters to increase funding for public education,” Beutner said, noting that it’s not yet decided whether the initiative would be a local measure or part of a broader statewide push. L.A. Unified has already for , a statewide November 2020 ballot measure that would increase commercial property taxes — some of which would go to public schools.

Beutner has repeatedly said that new revenue is needed to sustain the three-year teachers’ contract the district signed in January, . The district is also looking to address insufficient annual per-pupil funding ($16,000 in L.A., compared with $29,000 in New York, Beutner pointed out). Although the district’s $7.8 billion budget is balanced through 2021-22, its surplus is projected to drop from $837 million this year to in 2022.

The district intends to collaborate with United Teachers Los Angeles on future funding efforts, Beutner said, adding, “We all need to work together.”�� last week that UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl was unaware of renewed efforts to pass a ballot measure.

2 New transparency efforts amid splintered parent trust

Parents as early as this fall could be able to directly compare schools with one another. L.A. Unified is considering rolling out a rating system for public schools and privately run charters that would rate schools on a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 being the lowest — based largely on student improvement on state standardized tests, low suspension rates, graduation rates and chronic absenteeism prevention efforts, the Los Angeles Times .

Board District 4’s Nick Melvoin told the Times that the system could be in effect by October. It isn’t a surefire thing yet, however: There is criticism that simplified ratings are unfair, and the concept has mixed support from school board members and Beutner.

Transparency is a priority this year, Beutner told LA School Report — especially as parents in recent months have blasted the district for being opaque about its spending and how its investments are translating to a better education for kids. Parents at school board meetings in June and even a now-pending legal complaint in July.

“We have a long way to go to rebuild — or build — trust,” Beutner said. “It starts with transparency.”

In that spirit, Beutner said, the district in September will also publish a document “which will show where every dollar goes.” There isn’t “a firm date as to when this will be released,” a district spokeswoman wrote in an email. She didn’t respond to a question asking whether this is tied to under the Every Student Succeeds Act or goes beyond the mandates of the federal K-12 education law.

3 Two local districts try “communities of schools” model to empower principals, families

��and —��two of L.A. Unified’s six local districts —��are piloting Beutner’s recently unveiled plan. The plan entails restructuring local districts into six “communities of schools,” which officials say would shift power away from the traditional centralized bureaucracy and prioritize principal, teacher and family engagement. It aims to take busy work, such as compliance and facility issues, off of principals’ hands, and give schools more budget flexibility to address students’ personalized needs, among other changes.

Local District East, for example, has close to 96,000 students across 151 schools, while Boyle Heights, one of Local District East’s school communities under the new model, includes 22 schools serving about 23,000 students.

L.A. families in these local districts can expect their principals to play a more active role in the community — even small gestures like greeting students at the door every morning, Beutner said. He added that administrative offices are now located within those communities as well, making it easier for parents to voice concerns and “know our staff, our administrators on a first-name basis.” Parents are encouraged to confirm with their child’s school where their community’s office is.

Expanding this plan across all six local districts will take “months and years, not days and weeks,” Beutner acknowledged. But “we think it’s the right direction.”

When asked how success will be measured and who will be held accountable, Beutner said, “We expect to see an acceleration, improvement in test scores, we expect to see attendance get better, we expect to see graduation get better.” He noted that “distributed leadership” comes with “distributed accountability.” District leaders will set up objectives with schools and have “constant progress monitoring” along the way, he said.

.

4 Charter school restrictions pending at state level

Charters, which serve more than 138,000 students within L.A. Unified boundaries, don’t all have the same Tuesday start date as traditional schools. You can refer to the directory to find individual school websites with more information.

California Charter Schools Association spokeswoman Brittany Parmley said Thursday that a main priority for charter advocates going into 2019-20 is battling two pieces of state charter legislation — AB and . AB 1505, the more controversial of the two, would grant local districts more discretion to approve or deny new charter petitions and narrow the existing appeals process for denied applications. AB 1507 would close a loophole in the state’s current charter policy that allows some districts to boost their budgets by approving charter schools outside their boundaries.

Both bills passed the state Assembly in May and were under review by the state Senate’s Appropriations Committee as of Monday. The bills would need to be approved by the full Senate before the session ends Sept. 13. Gov. Gavin Newsom would have until Oct. 13 to either approve or veto the legislation.

5 State university system considers new admissions requirements

The California State University’s Board of Trustees will continue considerations this fall to add a fourth year of “quantitative reasoning” to the 23-campus system’s admissions requirements by 2026. A quantitative reasoning course largely centers on problem-solving using math-based skills, such as statistics and personal finance.

About 1 in 6 L.A. Unified graduates attend a CSU system school for their first year. While proponents say the extra prerequisite would help students build a stronger learning foundation before college, L.A. Unified board members and local equity advocates worry that it would instead bar more marginalized students from attending.

Access already isn’t universal, with of L.A. Unified’s class of 2019 cohort — a projected 46 percent of more than 34,000 students— eligible for the current CSU system.

A public hearing on the proposal is scheduled for Aug. 29, with a vote anticipated in November. Read more about the proposal and what people are saying here.

Other syllabus items to know:

●��New student voice: L.A. Unified’s newest student board member, Carson High School’s Frances Suavillo, will be sworn in on Sept. 3. Keep a lookout for LA School Report’s profile on Suavillo that week.

●��Pending legal complaint: The district has to respond by Sept. 20 to a legal complaint in July that claims L.A. Unified has failed to ensure that high-needs students are receiving the more than $1 billion annually they are due in state funding.

●��Special education: Court-ordered oversight of L.A. Unified’s special education program is ending Dec. 31 with the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ approval, the district announced . The district’s special education services have been monitored by a federal judge since 1996, following a class-action lawsuit. The news release says the district “will continue monitoring progress in its special education programs,” though it wasn’t immediately clear what accountability will look like.

●��Housing homeless on district property: L.A. Unified’s school board last November the possibility of using district property to house homeless students and their families, despite split public opinion. A district spokeswoman said Friday that the staff “is currently finalizing the report,” which the resolution had initially requested be done by May.

●��New safety policy: The school board in June a contentious random search policy by July 2020. In preparation for that, the district is “in the process of establishing a task force of internal and external stakeholders who will be meeting in the coming weeks to explore and develop an alternative policy to keep students safe,” the spokeswoman said. The task force “will invite parent and student participation.”

●��Student voting rights: Board members approved a resolution directing L.A. Unified officials to study whether it’s possible to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in board elections. A special task force “has been developed to study this, and an update is scheduled to be provided to the Board later this fall,” the spokeswoman said.

*This article has been updated to include the news that court-ordered oversight of L.A. Unified’s special education program is ending this year.

The same could be said of most California school officials, including those in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Indeed, Superintendent Austin Beutner’s recent 15-page for improving schools makes no mention whatsoever of confronting the district’s high levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation.

Some believe school integration is irrelevant in districts like L.A. Unified, the nation’s second-largest, given the relatively few white and middle-class children who use the public school system.

But New York City and Chicago — the largest and third-largest school systems in the country, respectively — have in recent years taken important steps to integrate their schools. And a significant new from L.A. school board member Kelly Gonez could help the district catch up. Her resolution calls for the superintendent to convene a research collaborative to make recommendations by June 2020 on how to reduce segregation through new school choice programs in Los Angeles.

School segregation is too important an issue to ignore. Fifty years of research that integrating schools by race and economic status is among the most powerful interventions available for boosting achievement and social mobility. And in an era of deep national divisions, it is more important than ever that public schools be a force for social cohesion. Decades of scholarship that students learn much better how to get along with classmates of different races, religions and economic backgrounds when they attend diverse schools.

In big cities like Los Angeles, it is not feasible to integrate all the schools in the near future, but as experience in New York and Chicago shows, important progress can begin with a substantial subset.

New York City has been engaged in its most robust discussion of school integration in 50 years. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza recently an aggressive set of from an advisory committee (of which I am a part) to set racial and socioeconomic goals for school diversity. Although not all of New York City’s schools can be integrated overnight, nine of 32 community school districts — educating more than 300,000 students — have sufficient racial and socioeconomic diversity to make integration plans viable. Last year, referencing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed school segregation, Carranza : “We’ve been admiring this issue for 64 years! Let’s stop admiring and let’s start acting.”

Likewise, Chicago has for a decade sought to promote socioeconomic integration in an important subset of its schools — high-achieving selective enrollment campuses and nonselective magnet schools. I worked with local officials to create an admissions system that seeks to draw students from each of to ensure both economic and racial diversity. The Brookings Institution recently that Chicago’s selective schools are far more diverse than comparable schools in other cities.

Los Angeles could employ similar plans — using public school choice, not compulsory busing — to create more integrated schools. A small number of diverse-by-design schools already exist in the city. Since 1977, magnet schools organized around particular themes have been seen as a vehicle for integration; , 80,000 students attend 260 such schools. Likewise, Los Angeles has some notable , such as City Language Immersion Charter and Larchmont Charter School, that bring children of different backgrounds together.

But integrated magnet and charter schools must become the rule, not the exception. Los Angeles magnets are not, in fact, magnetic: are considered desegregated, and many charters are segregated as well. These schools should be redesigned, based on surveys of parents in the community, to become more attractive to students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Desirable school offerings could pull in some families now sending their children to private schools. In Denver, for example, the share of students attending private schools from 13.2 percent to 7.9 percent between 2009 and 2018.

About 12 percent of L.A. Unified schools have a healthy socioeconomic mix (with between 30 percent and 70 percent of students coming from low-income families), according to California Department of Education data for the 2018-19 school year. I estimate that proportion could double in the near future with the right school choice offerings.

With school integration re-emerging on the national stage, and in other large cities, Los Angeles has a splendid opportunity to improve the lives of thousands of children by recognizing that it is time to move beyond separate and unequal to something much better.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and the editor of “The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy.”

Standing at the podium during an , Carbajal recounted her accomplishments since she’d joined the program two years ago: She’s attended a foster youth summit in Sacramento. Honed networking skills. Won a $20,000 scholarship for college.

“Without [my counselor], I would be without guidance,” Carbajal, who is heading into her senior year at San Pedro High School, told the board. “Without [my counselor], a year ago I would not have been able to talk to you today. I wouldn’t have the confidence to.”

Now, the five-year-old program, which focuses on foster youth school attendance, educational achievement and social-emotional well-being, is being restructured, despite vigorous opposition from foster youth advocates. The district is combining five specialized student programs together — including the Foster Youth Achievement Program and the Homeless Education Program — which officials say will streamline counseling services for L.A. Unified’s highest-need pupils by placing counselors at specific school sites, cutting down on travel time typically spent driving to schools across the district.

While district officials say intensive care for L.A. Unified’s nearly 8,700 foster youth is “not changing,” the program will no longer have its own designated counselors come August. It also remains unclear how many foster youth will stay with their previous counselor.

There are “no savings” from making these changes, district spokeswoman Barbara Jones wrote in an email on July 16. She confirmed that none of the 154 counselors across the five programs have been laid off.

The planned consolidation has sparked concerns among several advocacy groups, whose leaders have told school board members in at least three public meetings since April that the new model would bloat counselor caseloads, “dilute” services and upend current relationships between foster youth and their counselors. Such dilution in a formal parent complaint filed July 11 that claims that L.A. Unified and its county overseers are not ensuring that more than $1 billion a year in targeted state funding is going to high-needs students — including foster youth.

Foster youth are considered one of the most vulnerable student populations. In California, they post some of academic scores, attendance and high school graduation rates of any student group attending public schools — though those numbers at L.A. Unified. Foster youth can such as emotional trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, frequent school moves and an absence of healthy, trusting relationships.

“We’ve shared [with the district] … how impactful it has been to have this dedicated team to focus all of their expertise and all of their work for the success” of those students, Ruth Cusick, an education rights lawyer for Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that’s advocating against the change, told LA School Report. “We’re very concerned about the level of support students who are foster youth will experience under the new model.”

Explaining the new model

The district is blending five separate programs — the , , , and — into a single “specialized” program, Pia Escudero, executive director of L.A. Unified’s Student Health and Human Services, told LA School Report.

That means counselors across those districtwide programs will now be pooled together and placed into local school networks, where they’ll serve the cumulative needs of foster youth, homeless students and students who have gone through the juvenile justice system.

There will be 150 masters-level counselors “out in the field” serving 29,056 students as of July 25, according to district counts. There are 8,668 students in the Foster Youth Achievement Program, 19,526 in the Homeless Education Program, 811 in the Group Home Scholars Program and 1,048 in the Juvenile Hall/Camp Returnee Program, which serves students who have been released from juvenile detention centers and are on probation.

(Some students are double counted in the data if they’re enrolled in more than one of the programs. The 29,056 students is the unduplicated count. The numbers “fluctuate and are based on the current enrollment,” Jones said.)

Last year, comparatively, the Foster Youth Achievement Program had about 80 counselors assigned to schools, according to the district. The Homeless Education Program, which Escudero said serves students in various housing scenarios who don’t all require intensive levels of care, had 19 counselors with no specific student caseloads in 2018-19.

A few goals of the restructuring, Escudero said, are to “reduce duplication of services” —��which can happen when a student is enrolled in various programs that all have different counselors —��and to “maximize the staff relationship with students in schools.”

Previously, counselors “spent a lot of time in their cars, finding parking, traveling from school to school,” Escudero said. “We’re going away from a model where a principal may have four or five counselors coming on campus to work with specific children, to really having this one person” attending to their needs. This streamlining, she added, will include placing one counselor with students from the same family.

These counselors will also track their assigned students’ attendance using a new data integration system. L.A. Unified continues to identify attendance as an area where improvement is critically needed. Chronic absenteeism rates have inched up in recent years, with of district students missing 16 or more days of school in 2017-18. The district loses about $62 million in funding annually from chronic absenteeism, Jones said.

Although the programs are being combined, funding for each remains the same, Jones said. The Foster Youth Achievement Program is budgeted at about $15 million for the 2019-20 year.

Some staff, such as those working with “high-end homeless populations for emergency services,” will remain in their roles separately, Escudero said. There wasn’t a staff count available.

Advocates’ take: ‘A pretty untenable plan’

Advocates have sounded the alarm about the size of counselor caseloads under the new model.

As the Foster Youth Achievement Program merges into this larger program, the number of counselors serving foster youth at the school level is growing by 88 percent, from about 80 to 150 counselors. But the number of students being served is simultaneously swelling more than 230 percent, from nearly 8,700 foster youth to some 29,000 students across all of the programs.

The highest counselor caseload assigned as of July was 147 students, Escudero said. Estimates of the Foster Youth Achievement Program’s average caseload before the restructuring vary; advocates cited a roughly 70-student caseload in 2018-19, while a in The Chronicle of Social Change, citing L.A. Unified staff, put the number at 60 foster students per counselor at the high school level and 100 at the middle school level.

For advocates like Jessenia Reyes, the manager for educational equity at Advancement Project California, a central concern is a dilution of services for foster youth as counselors juggle more students and their individualized needs. “Whole child care does not happen when we reduce quality time” for students, she told the board at a June 11 meeting.

Public Counsel’s Cusick agrees. “We think it’s a pretty untenable plan to ask our counselors to serve all of these different [group] needs,” she told LA School Report.

When asked about advocates’ concerns with caseloads, Escudero said it’s more complex than an average ratio. Counselors’ caseloads will reflect the level of student need within a school network, she said; a larger caseload, for example, would include many non-foster students who don’t require extensive attention. While all foster youth will continue to receive the highest level of care available, there will be triage for the other student groups to identify the scope of their needs, she said.

Many district-identified homeless students “are doubled up with family members, some of them are living in garages and other types of housing” and don’t meet the federal definition of homeless, Escudero said. “Many of them do not need intensive services … [We’re focusing on]: Who is not coming to school? Who has had a report of not being on track to graduate?”

Still, many advocates are questioning why the district is fixing a system they don’t see as broken.

Foster youth attendance at L.A. Unified has been improving while the graduation rate is rising. Between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years alone, the percentage of foster students with 96 percent or better attendance rose from to . The graduation rate also rose, from to — the largest jump of any student subgroup that year.

Foster achievement reporting��is now mandated under the , passed in 2015. L.A. Unified will also start producing reports that include the number of district students in foster care, how often they change schools and how they are doing academically, socially and emotionally after the 2019-20 year, thanks to a�� from board member Kelly Gonez.

Advocates have touted the role of “consistent” adult support in foster youth’s successes. Some pleaded at meetings this year to keep students with their current counselors.

“The value in this program has to do really with connections built between counselor and student and caregiver,” Traci Williams, a Foster Youth Achievement Program counselor, told the board in April. “And without us remaining in the structure that we are currently, that relationship will likely dissolve.” Williams declined to provide further comment to LA School Report with the realignment “already in progress.”

Carbajal, who is one of Williams’s students, also spoke to the importance of these connections. “I have built a relationship with her that has helped me through so many difficult times,” she said — dealing with social workers, going to court. “Foster youth like me and so many others deserve the consistency and support that the [Foster Youth Achievement Program] offers.”

Escudero said the district is in the process of doing assignments now, and “if there’s a specific counselor that has a relationship with a specific school for a long time, we’re trying to honor those assignments.” She added that there “absolutely” will be professional development for counselors. “My hope is once [counselors] get their assignment we can dig into … providing very thorough support to children,” she said.

In an email to LA School Report, board member Gonez said her team is monitoring the restructuring — and encouraging conversations between the district and the community.

“We can and should have collaborative conversations with community stakeholders about how to best ensure our programs are responsive to the needs of students and our schools,” she said. “My office has been working closely with our District staff, as well as partner organizations, to monitor the progress of those conversations.”

After 23 years teaching kindergartners at L.A. Unified’s Telfair Elementary in Pacoima, Rita Ontiveros has seen kindergarten — and her students’ challenges — evolve.

Kindergarten used to be more focused on “social exposure,” but now it’s marked by rigorous academics, which is why she believes kindergarten should be mandatory in California.

And her students, who are mostly Latino and low-income, are facing bigger hurdles, including homelessness and the fear of having one or both of their parents deported because of their status as undocumented immigrants.

That’s why Ontiveros believes her young students need more support, such as access to school nurses and counselors.

“Sometimes kindergartners are not always aware of what’s going on. But once in a while you do hear them talk, and you hear that they’re afraid that maybe one of their parents might get taken away, and it’s like, wow, they’re only 5 and they’re already hearing that,” Ontiveros said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

She said in those cases, “I reassure them that school is a safe place, that they’re OK here. They’ll tell me things that are going on in their household, and I just have to be that positive rock for them. … We’re a family. I always tell them that. And our classroom, we’re always a family, and we look out for each other and we take care of each other.”

Last year, the school — in the San Fernando Valley, north of downtown Los Angeles — had the highest percentage of����in L.A. Unified. The district this year identified about����students as living in homelessness.��Statewide, the number of K-12 homeless students has risen more than����in the past four years, to more than��.

When Ontiveros heard the number of homeless students in the district, she said, “I was in shock. I really couldn’t believe it. I do know that a lot of my students live in multifamily homes where many of the family members live in one house. As you get to know your students, you also find out that some of them might live in a house,” although that doesn’t mean they live in the main house on the property, “but in the back or maybe in a garage that was converted.”

Such living conditions are familiar to Ontiveros, who grew up in the same neighborhood and in similar circumstances as many of her students. She also attended Telfair, as did two of her three daughters.

“Honestly, I think that Pacoima always has had many multigenerational families living together. I know growing up myself, it was that way. I lived in the home of my grandparents with my mother, and I had uncles who lived there also and some other cousins. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t the norm.

“And I just have continued to see that,” she said. “As for living in converted garages, that was another thing that I do remember seeing back then, 23 years ago, and still see it today.”

But now when families live together, they’re not necessarily related, she said. They do so just to afford the rent.

So in the past couple of years she has focused more and more on building relationships with her students. “I’m their teacher. I love them. I want them to know that we’re a family. Any child that’s placed in my class, I hope that I do the best job that I can for that child.”

Ontiveros always wanted to be a teacher, but she thought that as a Latina, she could only be a teacher’s assistant, like her mother, who worked for 30 years as an aide at Haddon Avenue Elementary. Ontiveros didn’t have a single Latino teacher until high school.

“I always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” Ontiveros said. “I guess since my mom wasn’t, and I never had a teacher that was a Latina or Latino teacher, I just always assumed that I had to be the aide.”

But that changed when she was in 10th grade.

“There was an awesome biology teacher, Blanca Hernández. She was the first teacher I had who was of Latino descent,” she said. “It was there that I realized that I could be a teacher, that I didn’t have to be an aide first, and I was like, ‘Oh! I am going to be a teacher.’”

Before teaching at L.A. Unified, Ontiveros taught second grade at Baldwin Park Unified for five years. She wanted to teach at Telfair because “it’s my home. It’s where I went to school. It’s where I want to be because I want to be there for the kids. And now, my first set of students are starting to bring their kids back. Twice I’ve had children of my first class of students at Telfair. It’s an amazing feeling. I don’t really want to go anywhere else.”

LA School Report asked Ontiveros what��can be done better or what needs to change in the education system to allow reforms and innovation to take place in the classroom, as well as what keeps her motivated to teach. Her answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What do you think the school district could do better to support Telfair’s students? Is there anything you see on a daily basis in your school that you wish the district would do differently?��

My No. 1 thing is no nurse. We didn’t have a nurse the last couple months of school because our nurse moved out of state and they never got a replacement. That means some office staff and teachers have to step up in taking care of a child when they get hurt. I didn’t want to send them to the office, because I knew the office was bombarded, but sometimes they needed to go there because it wasn’t something that I could take care of with a Band-Aid.

Another way to benefit and help Telfair is we need more counselors. We need more because there are so many kids that have so many needs and they need someone to just talk to sometimes. When you have a class of 24 to 26 kids, you can’t always give a child the attention that they might need.

I know that we have been fortunate and that the district has been trying to provide us with more servicing, so I do feel very fortunate for that, but I think it needs to continue and to do a little bit more.

What do you think the school district, the city or the state could do differently to better support educators for success?

The first thing they could do is to really listen to the teachers. It doesn’t matter if it’s at the district level or at the state level, because sometimes we have people who are writing policies for us who are not in the classroom. They don’t know what it’s like every day trying to find the time to fit in everything that we need to fit in. They’re always like, “OK, well, you have the same hours. You can fit more of this in,” and no, I really can’t.

I also think that for the little ones — kindergarten, first grade, possibly second grade — it’s so rigorous and structured, but they’re still little, and they need to remember that they’re still little. They need that play-based learning. People think that because a child is playing that they’re not learning, but there’s so much learning in that. The conversation that kids can have if they have to play house or kitchen or restaurant, the conversations that used to come out of those kids were enormous. It used to be like that, but now it has to be more academic-based. For the little ones, sometimes they just need to be 5. You’re only 5 once. You need to be 5.

I just wish that those who are making our policies and our rules and our procedures, that they just listen to teachers a little bit more.

What would you say is the thing that’s most misunderstood about your job as a teacher? What’s the biggest difference between people’s perception of the teaching profession and what you have to deal with every day as a teacher?

Truthfully, I often feel like people think that all I do, especially in kindergarten, is play all day and I’m not teaching or doing academics. And to hear somebody tell me, “You have the little ones. All you do is play all day.” No, that’s not what I do. Now, kindergarten is much more academic. That’s probably the biggest misconception I feel that I get most of the time.

With teaching, there’s just so much more besides the teaching and the classroom. There’s the lesson planning. There’s the thinking. I work a lot with my kindergarten colleagues. We get together after school and we plan so that we’re meeting the needs of the kids. That’s one thing I love about my grade level: the collaboration. It’s not just that I’m there from when school starts at 8:00 until we leave at 2:23. No. I like to get there early because one, I’m an early bird, and two, I also like the peacefulness in the morning. And then oftentimes I see myself staying until 3:30, 4:00. My days are long, but for a good reason. People think I just work from 8 to 2:30. No, it’s a lot of extra hours.

How easy or difficult was it for you to enter the profession? Do you think the process is easy enough, or should it change?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have three student-teachers these last couple of years, and when I was becoming a teacher, and I was in a liberal arts program, I thought that it was more streamlined. I was able to go right into teaching, and I just had to take certain tests, and then I just got my credential, and I became a teacher. I feel that they’ve made it so much harder. The things that my student-teachers had to go through, they just make it much more difficult, because there’s not just one or two tests, there seems to be several tests that they now have to take, and if they don’t pass one part, then they have to retake it. They also have to submit reviews now. They send videos now. I’ve had to record the videos, and they have to do so much more.

I think we’re making it so much more difficult, but that’s not going to show whether someone’s going to be an awesome teacher or not. That’s just showing if you can follow all those steps.

I felt bad for my student-teachers. One, when you’re student-teaching, you don’t get paid, and then you have to pay for these tests and these videos to be submitted. There has to be a way where we can help these student-teachers and maybe help them either defer their costs or maybe put that cost at a later time, like OK, you can submit it now, but in a year we would like you to pay. Seeing what my student-teachers had to go through is just heartbreaking for me. They all did great. Now they’re employed with the district.

Do you have any specific memory of the first time you were in a classroom teaching?

I remember walking into my classroom when they gave me the keys, and I remember looking around and thinking, “Wow. This is mine, and I get to decorate it and make it what I want to make it. This is what I get to do. This is what I want to do.” I just remember being in such awe that this was my classroom. It was just an amazing experience.

How well prepared would you say that your students are when they enter kindergarten?

In kindergarten, you get such a wide variety of students that enter. You never know what you’re going to get. When those students walk in the door, you might have students that have some preschool experience, they might have attended the ETK at Telfair or the TK program at Telfair, or they might have had no experience whatsoever. You just have to really get to know them those first couple of weeks and then be able to guide your instruction to help all your students. You’re always busy because that’s such a wide range, but you can do it. You just have to find out what their strengths are.

Why do you think kindergarten is crucial for students to be successful?

I think it’s very crucial. Kindergarten is not mandatory in the state of California, but I really wish it were, because we have so much academics now in kindergarten that if you look at the Common Core standards, the things that they need to be doing when they leave me, if they don’t have that kindergarten experience and they go straight to first grade, it’s very, very challenging for them.

For example, in kindergarten, they have to be able to not just write a complete sentence, but write what an informational sentence is compared to a narrative sentence and an opinion sentence. Those are things I’m teaching them in kindergarten. What’s the difference between those things, how would we write it, what would it look like, what would it sound like. In the past 23 years, I’ve seen kindergarten really evolve, and it’s much more academic than what it was before, when it probably was much more social and exposure. Now, it’s academics.

How can parents best support you?

I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had amazing parents. I think communication is so key. I’ve been able to use social media to communicate with my parents. There’s an app called Class Dojo. It has made all the difference because I’m able to let parents know, and they’re able to talk to me too. They can send me messages through the app. I’m so lucky in that sense that I’ve had amazing parents. If you were to visit my classroom last year, and you came in, my class would tell you, “We have a secret,” and you would probably say, “What’s your secret?” They would tell you because little kids can’t keep a secret. They would tell you, “We’re the best class,” because I want them to know that. I would always reiterate that to their parents. Your kids are amazing. Your kids are great. Remember to tell them that every day.

I’m very fortunate with the parents. If I need something, if I need it, they’ll volunteer. They come in. They have to go through a whole new volunteer procedure, which actually kind of takes a little bit longer, but some parents are always willing to do it if I need it. We have breakfast in the classroom, and sometimes we have a spill because they’re 5, they’re kindergartners. The district’s paper towels don’t always absorb very well, so I would ask the parents for paper towels. They would come through all the time. If I told them, “Oh, your child needs to work on something, and this is how you can work on it with them,” and I would show them, then they would go ahead and they would do that.

I encourage them to just read with their child, to spend some time talking with their child. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve had great parents, and we’ve had a great relationship and communication, and they have really helped their kids. I think communication is so key.

What has been your best moment or day as a teacher? What would you say is your proudest accomplishment so far?

There are so many. My thing is that every day is a new day. When I walk into that classroom, it’s a new day. If, for some reason, the day before, something went wrong or somebody had a bad day, the next day’s a fresh start. It always is, and I try to remind my kids that every day you get a fresh start.

My greatest accomplishment or moment? I think for me it’s because in kindergarten a lot of times they cannot read. When we start kindergarten, I’d say like 99.9 percent of them can’t read, but at the end of the year, they’re reading. The prior school year, I had a little boy, and I would just teach him to read the books in the classroom, and he came up to me and said, “Teacher?” I said, “Yes.” He goes, “I know how to read,” and I said, “I know,” and he looked at me with the biggest eyes, and he said, “You know?” I said, “Yes, I know you can read.”

That was just like, Oh my goodness, and again it happened this year with a different child where they just are reading and their parents are like, “Oh my goodness. I can’t believe they’re coming home and they’re reading.” I’m like, “Yes, that’s what happens in kindergarten. They’re reading, writing, doing addition, subtraction.” Amazing. The growth you see in kindergarten, I don’t think you see it quite in any other grade like you do in kindergarten.

What’s your main goal for the coming school year?

The first, most important thing for my classroom next year is that I want my class to know that I’m there for them. I’m their teacher. I love them. I want them to know that we’re a family. That to me is so important, the relationships that you establish, because if you get the relationships down, then the rest come with it. There’s a saying that kids don’t learn from people they don’t like. I’m not so sure I’d be their best friend, but they have to know that you care. They have to know that you care and you’re there for them, and everything else just falls into place.

Every year, I think to myself, “Oh my gosh. I’m going to get a new class. Am I going to miss them as much as I miss my old class?” The answer is yes. Just like a mother, you have room in your heart for all your children. That’s really important. I can’t stress how important that is. I want my kids to know that they’re my kids.

CSU’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday will review����to add a fourth year of “quantitative reasoning” to admissions requirements across the system’s 23 campuses. A quantitative reasoning course largely centers on problem-solving using math-based skills; a high-level math class, certain science courses or an elective with “a quantitative reasoning foundation,” such as statistics and personal finance, could all qualify, according to the proposal. Three high school math courses— Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II — are already a must for CSU admissions.

System advocates say the extra prerequisite, which wouldn’t be implemented until 2026,��would ensure that more students build a strong learning foundation before college and have a wider array of career opportunities. Some other public university systems, such as Arizona State and Texas State, have adopted a similar requirement.

CSU is “the people’s university, and we want to provide as many options as possible,” said Susan Holl, a mechanical engineering professor at the Sacramento campus and chair of the CSU Academic Senate committee that has proposed the change. “We’re trying to fling the doors wide, bring everyone in and say, ‘You can do this.’”

There would be exemptions in certain scenarios,��. The University of California system, which is already��, is not a part of the proposal.

L.A. Unified and various advocates, however, view the move as a threat to equity rather than a vehicle for opportunity. The district school board rejected the idea outright in��, stating that L.A Unified does not have the teaching capacity to meet the requirement. Officials said they also fear that adding another prerequisite would further restrict college access for minority students, who already face pervasive equity gaps in school.

As a state, “we haven’t made the investment [in students and schools]. And to move the goalpost is something that we object to,” board member Mónica García, who authored the resolution, told board members.

In-state schools like CSU —��the state’s largest public university system — are a����for California students. About 1 in 6 L.A. Unified graduates enrolled there in 2018, according to third-party data provided by the district. But access isn’t universal.

Less than half of L.A. Unified’s class of 2019 cohort — a projected 46 percent of more than 34,000 students— are eligible for the current CSU system, according to����updated on June 28.��A cohort refers to the number of students who entered as freshmen four years ago and should be on track to graduate, though not all are.

The latest projection marks a drop from the 50 percent estimated in June 18��. If the percentage estimate holds, it would drag L.A. Unified’s progress back to 2016-17 levels. LAUSD is still above the statewide average, with about����of the class of 2018 cohort eligible for CSU system schools.

The district declined to explain the percentage drop. It cited a pending����filed with the state education department July 11 on behalf of two parents demanding more district transparency on how more than $1 billion in state funding allocated annually for high-needs students is being spent.

Tuesday’s CSU trustees’ meeting, which will be����starting at 10 a.m.,��is for discussion only. A public hearing is scheduled for Aug. 29, with a vote on the measure not expected until November. Advocacy organizations like The Education Trust-West said they’re going to keep a close watch to make sure the proposed change is fully vetted.

“What they’re proposing would be a serious and pretty substantial addition,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, Ed Trust-West’s executive director. “It’s really important to be sure the details of the proposal, and the impact it would have, are publicly discussed.”

‘I don’t know that we are necessarily prepared’

At the June 18 board meeting, then-Chief Academic Officer Frances Gibson raised doubts about the district’s capacity to respond when asked about the proposed CSU requirement.

While L.A. Unified does offer an optional fourth year of math/quantitative reasoning at all traditional high schools, “I don’t know that we are necessarily prepared” to teach a fourth year to all students, said Gibson, who����from her position last month. She cited “the staffing requirements, the partnership requirements” that would be needed to “move forward elegantly.”

The district was unable to provide data before publication on how many of its 92 traditional high schools have the staffing and resources to teach all students a fourth year of math/quantitative reasoning. About 71 percent of L.A. Unified’s 56 alternative and continuation high schools do not have any students enrolled in a fourth year, according to district data.

Board member Jackie Goldberg told LA School Report that a large concern for her is the����of STEM teachers statewide. “I don’t know if we have enough math teachers,” Goldberg said. “I know we’d make every effort, but that’s been a struggle for us, period, having nothing to do with a fourth year [requirement].”

L.A. Unified has “no resources identified to fund any additional costs”��associated with the CSU proposal, according to a budget impact document.��The district is struggling financially, losing a recent bid for����and finalizing a controversial����that sidestepped a potential��

Considering these limitations, the proposal “seems a bit tone-deaf,” now-former student board member Tyler Okeke told board members. “I think that ideally [the bar should be raised for students] … but we don’t have the resources to support that at this moment.”

Holl emphasized the six-year transition period should the proposal pass.

“What we’ve done is try to put on notice all the school districts that we are there to help them,” she said. “We have a really long lead time.”

Holl said CSU would bear responsibility for ensuring that districts are ready to meet the new standard. The system would help districts craft their curriculum and provide professional development assistance, for example. CSU “is also working to meet the ongoing need for additional teachers in STEM fields,”��.

Even then, there would be an exemption��“for any student who could not fulfill the requirement because of a lack of resources at their high school,” the��proposal states. Some Career and Technical Education courses or appropriate dual enrollment courses at a local community college could also be used to meet the requirement.

Advocates like Ed Trust-West’s Arrillaga are leery of waivers, however, because it’s “an acknowledgment that there are inequities in the system” that have yet to be addressed.

“For us, it’s a really problematic and troubling response,” Arrillaga said.

Holl sees a new requirement as “180 degrees from limiting access” for students.

Part of closing the equity gap, she said, is increasing students’ access to coursework that could spark and nurture career interests. There are disparities in access as is: 65 percent of African-American students and 76 percent of Latino students coming into the CSU system have taken four or more years of math, for example, compared with 80 percent of white peers and 84 percent of Asian peers.

It’s also about preparedness for college-level courses. Nearly 70 percent of first-year CSU students who’d completed four or more years of high school math passed a quantitative reasoning course in 2017-18, compared with fewer than half of students who’d completed only three years,��.

There is proof of success in at least one California district: Long Beach Unified. The district implemented a mandated fourth year of quantitative reasoning six years ago and has seen a hike in student eligibility for the CSU and UC systems from 39 percent to 56 percent.

“It was like [the saying], ‘The rising tide lifts all boats,’” Holl said. “When you raise expectations, these students are amazing.”

‘There are too many barriers’

Advocates agree that students are tenacious and rise to the challenge. But many, like Linda Vasquez of the Campaign for College Opportunity, worry that a new requirement would “erode” the gains made so far in expanding college access.

“Every time [students] meet [universities’] standards, our universities raise the bar on them,” Vasquez, the campaign’s senior public affairs director, told the board last month.

Starting with the class of 2016, L.A. Unified’s curriculum��is fully aligned with CSU and UC system admissions requirements. This means all students have to take 15 “A-G” college preparation courses — English, math, science, foreign language and other core electives — to graduate.����of California districts similarly mandated A-G completion as of 2017, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The needle has moved incrementally as a result. In 2011, before the realignment, only 26 percent of L.A. Unified students were on track to meet CSU and UC eligibility standards. By 2016-17, 46 percent of students who entered that graduating class as freshmen and 60 percent of those who actually did graduate qualified. In 2017-18, those figures inched up to 47.9 percent and 61.9 percent, respectively.

It remains unclear whether progress backslid in 2018-19. District spokeswoman Shannon Haber confirmed that the 46 percent for the class of 2019 cohort is the latest and most accurate estimate.

L.A. Unified enrollment in CSU schools has increased overall, too. About 16 percent of district graduates in 2018 went to CSU system schools, up from about 12.5 percent in 2014, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects data from colleges and universities.��

But it’s still far from where the district wants to be.

The district remains well below����of 100 percent of graduates being eligible for the CSU and UC systems by 2023. And there are still gaping disparities in college readiness across student groups, especially among foster youth, English learners and students with disabilities.

There is also a nearly 30-percentage-point difference between students who are eligible to graduate from L.A. Unified and those who are eligible for CSU and UC schools. Students must get a C or better in each course to satisfy CSU/UC system eligibility requirements — but����to graduate from L.A. Unified.

“Most students think that they’re able to graduate from high school and think, ‘If I’m graduating high school, I should be able to go to college,’” said Desiree Martinez,��a former L.A. Unified student and associate director of organizing for Students for Education Reform LA. “Then, senior year, it’s devastating to find out that’s not the case.”

That reality is reason enough to hit pause, said Jennifer Cano, director of education programs and policy at United Way of Greater Los Angeles. United Way is a district partner in college-readiness initiatives.

“There are enough barriers to having kids emerge college and career ready, A-G ready, as is,” she said. “So until we see improvements there and a steadier pipeline in, it wouldn’t be wise.”

For Holl, it seems to boil down to people having the same end goal but different paths for getting there.

“Change is hard for people,” she said. “It makes people fearful because what we’re proposing is a different way of creating access, I think.”

The California Department of Education on Monday declined to directly intervene, and sent the legal complaint to L.A. Unified and the L.A. County Office of Education to “promptly investigate.” The district and the county have until Sept. 20 to respond. See the CDE letter here.

A June 28 version of L.A. Unified’s LCAP, which included changes made without public input, is also no longer on the district’s website. A district spokesperson could not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Public Advocates spokeswoman said in an email Tuesday that the is the one that is now in effect.

Initial post:

L.A. Unified and its county overseers have failed to ensure that high-needs students are receiving the more than $1 billion annually they are due in state funding, a new legal claims.

So the complaint, filed Thursday on behalf of two L.A. Unified parents, is asking the state to force the nation’s second-largest school district to be more transparent in its budget and spending plans.

The Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP law firms filed the complaint with the California Department of Education. The two firms, along with ACLU of Southern California, last sued the district for allegedly misallocating $450 million annually in funds designated for high-needs students. They won, with the resulting prompting a $150 million payout over three years to 50 of the district’s highest-needs schools.

It’s unclear what impact the new complaint could have, as the state has yet to respond.

The complaint cites “fundamental” transparency concerns in particular with L.A. Unified’s 2018-19 and 2019-20 Local Control and Accountability plans.

California districts are to submit “LCAP” that outline their goals and actions for boosting student outcomes and provide evidence that state funding is generating increased or improved services for pupils. L.A. Unified receives more than $5 billion from the state’s education funding formula each year, about $1.1 billion of which is earmarked for increasing or improving services for low-income students, English learners and foster youth.

However, the complaint claims L.A. Unified’s LCAPs are so “opaque” and “rife with fundamental errors” that they not only fail to identify how high-needs students are benefiting from this��targeted funding but also “undermine basic notions of transparency and equity and thwart meaningful efforts at local engagement and accountability.”

L.A. Unified’s LCAPs “seem to be getting worse over time,” said John Affeldt, lead counsel for , which he called one of the most active groups in California helping districts implement the state’s funding formula. “Most districts, we see them getting better” the longer the funding formula has been in effect. But in L.A., “Now we can’t even see what you’re doing. So we need you to come to the table” and explain.

Among the accusations listed in the complaint:

●��That the district submitted a to the county on or around June 28 — 10 days after the school board approved it in tandem with the 2019-20 budget — without required public notice and dialogue. ( of the complaint filing for highlighted changes between the June 18 and June 28 versions).

●��That the district’s LCAPs “bundled” information on services being provided into broad categories, “which prevent the public from seeing what specific actions the district is undertaking, how much is spent on each and whether the actions can be legally justified.”

●��That the district reported $340 million in expenditures designated for high-needs students in 2017-18 that the complaint states was not explained or accounted for, and therefore might have been misappropriated.

The complaint is asking the state department to declare the June 28 LCAP “invalid,” deem the June 18 LCAP “fundamentally deficient” and order L.A. Unified to “wholly revise” the LCAP as soon as possible so that it clearly identifies each service and action, their respective costs and their justifications for “properly serving high need students.”

It’s further asking the department to “order [the L.A. County Office of Education] to approve that LCAP only if it satisfies” legal standards. The county is co-cited in the complaint because it’s tasked with reviewing and approving the district’s LCAP each year.

When asked if one of the complaint’s goals was financial reparations from the district, Affeldt said, “First and foremost, we need clarity.”

“There may be some questionable practices going on,” he said, “but we won’t know for sure until we have clarity.”

Ana Carrion, one of the parents behind the complaint (the other is Elvira Velasco), told LA School Report through a Spanish translator that she and other parents were inspired to take legal action after they struggled to understand the LCAP’s contents and felt the district was failing to engage them in the process. It was especially personal because her 12-year-old son qualifies as a low-income student who receives extra funding under the state’s formula.

“We were seeing this lack of accountability, lots of money at stake, and [we] didn’t understand how the whole thing worked exactly,” said Carrion, whose son attends a school in District 1. “What I would really like to see from this complaint is equity for kids, for the kids who are of high [need] in the district. And a real transformation in the schools for them.”

The complaint comes weeks after parent outrage with the 2019-20 LCAP and new budget at two school board meetings in June. The district’s bid for its first parcel tax also last month, with many opponents citing waning public trust.

With the complaint filed, the next step will be getting the state department’s response as to whether it will intervene. Affeldt said that’s normally within 10 business days of the complaint’s filing.

While a complaint like this would typically be filed first with the district and county, doing so, , would “be futile,” as the county failed to act on concerns expressed last year. If the state declines to step in, though, Affeldt said they would file directly with the district and county, which would then have 60 days to investigate and provide a response.

An L.A. Unified spokesperson wrote in an email Thursday that the district “received the complaint this morning, and we are currently reviewing it.” The county similarly confirmed Friday that it “has received the complaint and it is currently under review.”

Affeldt can’t predict the state’s actions, he said. But he’s hopeful.

“I’m confident we have a strong complaint,” he said.

Of the 1 million low-income African-American and Latino public school students in Los Angeles County, only 2 out of 10 of them are enrolled in a high-quality school, a first-of-its-kind found.

There are 279 public schools closing the achievement gap for low-income Latino and black students, the study found. That’s out of a pool of 1,800 schools in the county that are serving a vast majority of these students. In total, there are 2,068 public schools in L.A. County.

The authors hope the study will spur sharing of “innovative and promising” practices to help these students achieve at higher levels. Among their findings:

●��There was a higher proportion of independent charters and alternative choice schools — such as magnets — that made the list, compared with traditional schools.

● Few schools are closing the achievement gap for low-income black students — in all of L.A. County, only three high schools were doing so.

●��For low-income Latinos, a higher proportion of independent charter high schools were closing the gap — 30 out of a total of 60.

●��Of L.A. Unified’s traditional schools, 73 made the list: 70 are closing the gap for Latinos, seven are closing the gap for blacks, and four are doing so for both student groups.

The study was conducted by –Los Angeles, a nonprofit focused on access to quality education, along with the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and the Rossier School of Education Center on Education Policy, Equity and Governance at the University of Southern California. Innovate Public Schools has conducted a similar study in the since 2015. USC’s Sol Price Center for Social Innovation has previously worked with Innovate Public Schools through one of its graduate programs, but this is the first time they have partnered for a research project. The Los Angeles study was released in late April and was funded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which provides funding to this news organization.

To make the list of the , schools had to beat the statewide average in one or more factors including math and reading scores, college eligibility rates and suspension data, based on 2017-18 data from the California School Dashboard. The list includes traditional schools, independent charters and schools of choice such as magnets and pilot and community schools.

“I would say it was impressive at one level, that there were so many schools that were doing a good job of really educating the low-income students of color, and in that sense, that means that some of the narratives we hear about some schools falling behind, struggling to overcome some of these challenges and so forth, that narrative is not correct,” said Gary Painter, director of the USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and a co-researcher on the study.

“I think that the scope of the problem remains … there’s a lot of schools that aren’t achieving that objective. The step one is to assess the problem, understand where those innovative practices might exist and to uplift them,” Painter said. “The next step is to engage in a process of social innovation … within communities, to work with parents, to work with schools, to work with the district, some district officials, etc.”

Jeimee Estrada, regional vice president at Innovate Public Schools–Los Angeles, which headed the study, said, “I think that’s a very important story to tell, that there is more research to do about the practices and what the schools here locally are figuring out.”

Two other reports were released the same week as the��the Innovate/USC study recognizing schools having the greatest impact on student achievement. U.S. News & World Report released its annual 2019 Best High Schools , and the California Office to Reform Education (CORE) — a coalition of L.A. Unified and seven other California school districts — in collaboration with EdTrust-West launched its first-ever . A total of 906 schools were honored for having either three years or one year of high growth in English language arts and/or math. More than 300 L.A. Unified schools were recognized — many of which also appear in the Innovate/USC study.

Just released! Check out ‘ new LA County Top Public Schools Report, and learn about the L.A. public schools that are closing the achievement gap. Read here:

— Price Center @ USC (@USCPriceCSI)

Here are six takeaways from the Innovate/USC study:

1 In L.A. County, ‘Not a lot of schools are closing the achievement gap.’

There are more than 2,000 public schools in Los Angeles County, but only 15 percent of low-income African-American and Latino students attend a top public school, the study found. It lists the schools that are helping these students succeed. (Check out that list .)

“What I did find surprising about Los Angeles is just the sheer volume of schools,” Estrada said. “L.A. is a very big place, but California is a big place, and there are not a lot of schools that are closing the achievement gap for low-income students of color.”

Regarding college eligibility, 71 percent of low-income African-American and Latino students from the list of top public schools were eligible for California’s state universities. Only 40 percent of low-income black and Latino students from all other L.A. County schools were eligible.

2 A lower proportion of traditional schools made it to the top public schools list.

Based on the study’s criteria, across L.A. County there was a higher proportion of charters and alternative choice schools — such as magnets — that made the list, compared with traditional schools. (The list excluded any schools that have admissions requirements.)

●��Of 1,648 traditional schools, 195 were top schools (12 percent).

●��Of 368 charter schools, 75 were top schools (20 percent).

●��Of 52 alternative schools of choice, 9 were top schools (17 percent).

“On the one hand, that was really encouraging that there are so many different models out there that could be uplifted and learned from in order to improve systemwide,” Painter said. “What you see is that there’s actually quite a good representation of non-charters in addition to charters. I think what’s interesting about that, is that you can then explore what are the policies and practices within a charter environment that have led to success on the metric of closing the achievement gap.”

Painter noted that the study shows, “It’s not just a simple story of charters do better or schools of choice do better more broadly, but instead, you see promising practices and successful practices throughout quite a number of schools.”

Estrada added, “The story that you’ll see in this report is that there are all governance types reflected. There are more charter schools at the high school level, but at other levels, and particularly for African Americans, you’ll actually note there are fewer charter schools than there are district schools.”

3 Very few schools are closing the achievement gap for black students.

Among the top schools, there are only 31 schools that are closing the achievement gap for African-American students, and just three of those are high schools.

The study also shows that fewer charters than district schools are closing the achievement gap for blacks.

●��There are 473 schools serving at least 4 percent low-income African-American students in the county, but only 31 schools are closing the achievement gap for them.

●��Only three high schools in the county made the top public schools list. All three are in L.A. Unified. One is a magnet school, one a charter and one a traditional high school.

●��At L.A. Unified, 9 schools are closing the gap for low-income black students in all grade levels: 7 traditional schools and 2 independent charters.

14 Alliance schools were recognized for narrowing the achievement gap in a report by & : . Congrats to the educators, scholars and parents at ALL the schools that were recognized. needs

— Alliance Schools (@AllianceCRPS)

4 Charters dominate the list of top public high schools for low-income Latinos.

For low-income Latinos, charters make up a higher proportion of high schools that are helping them succeed.

●��In the county, there are 1,331 schools serving at least 43 percent low-income Latino students.

●��Of those, 257 schools are closing the achievement gap for low-income Latinos.

●��30 of the 60 high schools are independent charters. The rest are a mix of traditional schools and alternative choice schools, such as magnets.

“Undoubtedly, the low-income Latino high school list is very much dominated by charters,” Estrada said. But overall the study shows “that there are pockets of excellence in all types of schools. There are pockets of excellence in magnets. We don’t have a high representation of magnets, but there are pockets of excellence in magnets. There are pockets of excellence in district schools, and also in charters.”

5 Here are the breakdowns for L.A. Unified schools that made the list.

There are 130 schools in L.A. Unified that made the list of top performers for low-income blacks and Latinos.

●��125 L.A. Unified schools are closing the gap for low-income Latino students.

●��9 are closing the gap for low-income black students.

●��4 are closing the gap for both student groups.

Of the traditional schools in L.A. Unified, 73 made the list:

●��70 are closing the gap for Latinos.

●��7 are closing the gap for blacks.

●��4 are closing the gap for both student groups.

When asked to respond to the study, an L.A. Unified spokeswoman said, “We are reviewing the new report from Innovate Public Schools and their partners at the University of Southern California and embrace their efforts on behalf of our low-income Latino and African-American students. In Top Public Schools for Underserved Students, it appears their research does not take advantage of several key indicators that could better identify schools that are making a significant impact on student achievement. Los Angeles Unified remains committed to sharing best practices that accelerate growth and empower our students to reach their full potential.”

6 The goal is understanding better practices to close the achievement gap.

The study shows that it is possible for all models of public schools to close the achievement gap for low-income Latinos and black students, the authors said, which can lead to sharing and understanding better practices among all schools.

“How do we get more schools to close the achievement gap? By showing them what’s being done and showing them that it’s possible,” Estrada said. “The report shows that it’s possible for low-income kids of color to learn at high levels. It sheds a light on excellence and provides a road map for schools to get there.”

She said that school district superintendents have welcomed the report and some are eager to know how they��are doing in closing the achievement gap and who is doing better.

“We will be working very hard to ensure that superintendents are using it as a motivator for more schools to reach this bar, and for celebrating and energizing the teachers and principals that are working really hard to make this happen, because it is not easy,” she said.

“We highlight a lot what are the gaps in our system, and we need to. Parents and the public need to know the harsh reality that our education system is not delivering for underserved students. But we also have to look at the places where it’s happening, because we need to learn those practices. We need to learn from excellence, and we need to celebrate it,” Estrada said.

Painter said this study “is the first step in the series of long steps to really help understand better what practices can help close the achievement gap, and to look at those that were able to do that.”

Disclosure: The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which funded the L.A. Top Public Schools study, provides funding for The 74.

Many of the more than 20 speakers at Tuesday’s four-hour session expressed ongoing frustration with the ambiguity of L.A. Unified’s operating budget and , a three-year plan updated annually that outlines the district’s goals and actions for improving student outcomes. Tuesday’s meeting was the first since L.A. Unified’s bid for a $500 million-a-year “” parcel tax failed at the polls, and it was also the first time the and the LCAP were formally presented to the public. The board Tuesday.

“All of the voters are tired of you,” parent Luz Maria Montoya said in Spanish. “We don’t know what work you are doing.”

Some parents said district documents don’t clearly explain changes to student programs and services for next year. Others added that there isn’t transparency or robust “monitoring” of how L.A. Unified’s expenditures, such as professional development and training for teachers and principals, yield actual results for students. Montoya, for example, called district services for English learners and “an embarrassment.”

A few also accused L.A. Unified officials and principals of keeping parents out of budget and policy discussions — treating them “as sheeps, as herds,” as one speaker said — rather than welcoming them to the table as a partner.

“We have a lot of barriers” to knowing what’s going on, said parent María Daisy Ortíz, who addressed the board in Spanish. “We want to work with you, not against you. But respect us. … No one returns the wasted time to our children.”

Ortíz had brought parts of the 112-page LCAP plan with her, noting that much of it feels like a “copy and paste” job. She waved the papers in the air, her voice rising. “Please don’t deceive us with false data that are doctored, because truly, that is why Measure EE did not pass,” she said.

Juanita Garcia, a grandmother of three children with special needs, broke into tears when recounting the difficulty she’s had getting help and answers from the district after one of them was injured in January. “Up to today I have not received a report,” she said in Spanish. “Is that what we call accountability and responsibility?”

District 4 Board Member Nick Melvoin addressed the lack of public trust at Tuesday’s meeting, peppering in some concerns of his own.

“I’ve asked ad nauseam for a document showing changes [to programs or investments] and have not received anything for months,” Melvoin said. “We’re not showing how this budget reflects our shared values or strategies for improving outcomes.”

Melvoin also acknowledged Tuesday that he didn’t think the budget presentation helped quell ongoing skepticism of “how we can balance our budget every year and yet .” Melvoin’s comment was underscored by the 2019-20 budget showing the district operating in the black for the next three years despite ongoing threats beginning late last summer that deficit spending could force if L.A. Unified began dipping into mandated reserves.

In addition to the frustrated comments of parents during the public hearing, two districtwide parent advisory groups — the and — offered more formal feedback to the board on the LCAP’s six goals. They are: 100 percent graduation; proficiency for all; 100 percent attendance; parent, community and student engagement; ensuring school safety; and basic services.

Some of the key suggestions included:

●��Having a strategic plan for how English learners will catch up on instruction time lost during January’s six-day teacher strike.

●��More counselor focus on A-G requirements, which students need to meet to apply to the state’s public four-year universities.

●��Attendance incentives that celebrate not only students with the highest attendance but also those who are “most improved.” “The kids at the end of the [attendance] spectrum, we really need to boost them up,” Parent Advisory Committee chair Paul Robak said.

●��Making parent workshops accessible via Skype to boost access.

Superintendent Austin Beutner agreed with parents Tuesday that “We have to become better program evaluators … focused on what the students’ achievement is in the schools.” His office sent out a statement during the meeting calling for to the LCAP.

In response to a question from LA School Report on why the parent committee presentations were scheduled only a week before the budget vote, a district spokeswoman said in an email that the two parent advisory committees held 11 total meetings “from January to June, and comments from those meetings were shared with the Superintendent a month ago. Feedback from [both] was incorporated in the LCAP, specifically the continuation of desired programs and the increase in school site autonomy and staffing.”

While parents have voiced concerns about transparency, accountability and parent engagement , the 2019 teacher strike and resounding could signal that the district and the board need to pay closer attention to stakeholders’ concerns as they campaign for more investment in the schools. The parcel tax’s demise, as observers , was a reminder that the outpouring of support during January’s teacher strike is not unconditional — especially when it comes to money.

Even without the tax revenue, the latest budget shows sufficient revenues for the next three years. That’s a sharp departure from a that projected the district’s ending balance would fall $749 million short of required reserve levels by 2021-22 if voters didn’t approve the tax. The district now estimates having in 2022. School officials said they managed that swing in their projections without the parcel tax money after finalizing some health care savings, receiving a state waiver that excuses L.A. Unified from paying penalties for its administrator-teacher ratio and enacting other budget realignments.

By projecting that it won’t dip into its mandated reserve in the next three years, L.A. Unified no longer appears to be under direct threat of a county takeover. Fiscal experts in January by the county Office of Education will stay with the district in an advisory-only role until at least December, Chief Financial Officer Scott Price told the board Tuesday.

But it’s not an all-clear. L.A. Unified still projects it will continue spending about $500 million more a year than it takes in. On top of signing a teacher contract in January that it can’t fully afford, it also faces and declining enrollment — an estimated 14,656 fewer students next year — that lowers its state funding.

Down the line, upcoming health care and labor contracts could increase spending and push 2021-22 budget projections back into the red, a district spokeswoman confirmed in an email to LA School Report Wednesday.

At Tuesday’s meeting, President��Mónica García said she “loved” the idea of “a weekly or monthly budget conversation so that more people understand the full picture.” Jackie Goldberg also suggested compiling public feedback on different parts of the budget in the months leading up to the final version.

When Goldberg served on the board three decades ago, members would “pick a different topic [within the budget] each month in March, April and May and invite the public — all our labor partners, everybody — to come and say, ‘What you’re doing with the budget is this,’ or, ‘We’d rather you do that,’” Goldberg said. “That helped encourage people to feel like there was much more transparency.”

Speaker Juan Godinez hopes any progress forward will be sincere.

“If we are partners, let’s have parent engagement because the district wants it,” he said. “Not because a law tells you to have it.”

Before I began my service on the L.A. Unified School District Board of Education in 2006 as just the third Latina elected in 155 years, questions about whether Latino/a students could succeed academically were answered only by assumptions due to our lack of representation.

Since my first election, I have done my best to listen to all diverse voices, including the call from Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities for L.A. Unified to do more for its 85,000 students (18 percent) of Asian descent.

In Board District 2, we responded by creating dual-language immersion programs, naming schools after historic local community leaders like Young-Oak Kim and Sammy Lee, and holding roundtables with neighborhood partners from Chinatown, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, Little Bangladesh and more.

This past year, we heard a bold message from our community partners — now is the time to disaggregate data in L.A. Unified.

Data disaggregation is the primary civil rights issue in education for the community. Without inclusive demographic data and disaggregated reporting showing disparities in higher- and lower-performing groups, the model-minority myth that all Asian students are doing well persists, and groups of students of color continue to be viewed as monolithic.

On a practical level, I think about the Mien student who has no box to check on enrollment forms. I think about the immigrant student from Ghana whose life experience is vastly different from that of African Americans. I think about the bilingual Portuguese-speaking student grouped in with Spanish-speaking English learners.

We know that is not equity. Kids far too easily fall through the cracks when we do not seek to understand, value and embrace their diversity.

Our conversations with community partners led us to present the “Everyone Counts: Increasing Equity for All of Our AANHPI AMEMSA Students and Employees” resolution, which the board unanimously passed.

Passage of this resolution will not only make L.A. Unified the largest school district in the nation to institute data disaggregation policies for all students of color, including Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian students, but will make ours the most progressive urban school district in the nation on race and ethnicity.

I am grateful to my fellow board members and our community partners who joined in to ensure the passage of this resolution and to make all our communities feel seen and heard. No one should feel invisible, because everyone counts.

Mónica García is president of the Board of Education at L.A. Unified School District.

One day after voters overwhelmingly a $500 million-a-year parcel tax, Los Angeles city and school leaders sent a message to voters: We’ve heard your concerns. And we’re going to keep fighting to fund our schools.

“This is just the beginning of our fight,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said as he launched into Wednesday’s news conference. “When I took on this challenge just about a year ago, I knew it would not be easy. Decades of underfunding, strained relationships with those who work in schools, not enough progress in helping all students succeed and a lack of trust by many in the community.

“This can’t be fixed overnight.”

About 54 percent of Los Angeles voters on Tuesday on Measure EE, which would have taxed residents within L.A. Unified boundaries 16 cents per square foot of developed property to fund L.A. schools and secure the lower class sizes and additional nurses, counselors and librarians promised in January’s teacher contract. But the district couldn’t sway opponents who doubted the district’s accountability with new money and demanded reform first.

Tuesday’s results marked “the lowest percentage of voters in support of a school district parcel tax within the last five years,” Vote No on EE spokesman Matt Klink Wednesday, citing the California Taxpayers Association. The measure needed 66.7 percent approval.

Beutner said those who fought for the tax are resolved, however, to “get back up and keep moving forward,” with the next step being “to take the fight to Sacramento” and lobby Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature for more funding.

With more than 40 people behind him at the podium, Beutner thanked a slew of colleagues and Measure EE advocates and cheerleaders, including:

●��Union leaders from United Teachers Los Angeles, Service Employees International, the Teamsters, Building Trades, Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, School Police and the California School Employees Association.

●��Community organizations including Community Coalition, InnerCity Struggle, SCOPE, Korean Resource Center, Power California, CHIRLA, Great Public Schools Now, Speak Up and Parent Revolution.

●��The charter school community “whose schools serve kids and communities with great needs.”

●��The business and philanthropic community. “You helped make clear the children in our schools are your employees of the future, and the future of Los Angeles rests in their hands.”

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl — whom Beutner introduced as his “partner in this work,” shaking hands with him at the podium — also acknowledged that the Measure EE campaign faced various roadblocks.

“We knew when we began this that there were aspects that made this an uphill climb,” Caputo-Pearl said. “A tight timeline that we needed to do to try to get resources to our students as quickly as possible. Many of the most affected people — students and undocumented parents — not being able to vote.

“But we did it anyway,” he continued. “And I would do it anyway again.” He echoed Beutner in saying, “We’re ready to keep the fight going. The battle for the soul of L.A. … is just beginning.”

Mayor Eric Garcetti, who played a key role in cementing January’s teacher contract, even went so far as to call the day “historic … a moment in which you see the reflection of the face of our city.”

“On a day which I know we’re supposed to be down, I can’t help but still be extremely hopeful,” Garcetti said. Those who supported Measure EE “collectively believe that education is something we collectively have to own. … [This is] a new chapter of finding what we agree on first instead of what we disagree on first.”

He added: “Absolutely, I’ll leave it up to the analysts, to the political professionals to analyze what happened last night. But I’ll tell you this: This coalition is something I am proud to have been a part of long before January, to have strengthened this year through this measure, and to keep marching forward with together.”

The parcel tax’s downfall sparked a question during the follow-up Q&A as to whether L.A. Unified would be able to submit a budget to the county by the July 1 deadline that fulfills the county’s requirements.

County overseers have threatened a if L.A. Unified can’t over the next three years.

“By law, we have to make sure that we can get through the next three years with the resources that we think we’ll have,” Beutner said. “And we’ll be able to do that.”

Los Angeles voters decisively defeated a parcel tax that would have sent $500 million a year to schools, according to����by the county registrar.

, which would have charged residents within L.A. Unified boundaries 16 cents per square foot of developed property for 12 years, fell more than 20 percentage points below the 66.7 percent voter threshold required for the tax to pass. About����of the 304,321 voters who cast ballots as of Tuesday night approved the measure, while 54.3 percent opposed.

Voter turnout stood at 12.2 percent of the district’s 2.5 million registered voters — slightly above average for special elections and surpassing last month’s��.

As the polls closed Tuesday night, United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl����a group of parcel tax supporters in Boyle Heights that Measure EE marked a win for public education whether it passed or failed. “The city of Los Angeles is talking about what it, as the city, can do for public schools,” he said.

L.A. Unified — along with��UTLA — had touted the tax as indispensable for securing the lower class sizes and additional nurses, counselors and librarians promised in this winter’s����teacher contract, which district officials say is unsustainable with current revenue levels. Opponents of the tax cited����about poor accountability and oversight of taxpayer money.

“Achieving a two-thirds vote is a high bar for a reason, but the fact that we got 54 percent of the vote just shows how thoroughly wrong Measure EE was,” Matt Klink, a spokesman for the Vote No on EE campaign, told LA School Report Wednesday morning.

The district now has to send its 2019-20 budget to county overseers by July 1 — without a new local revenue source. The county has threatened a����if L.A. Unified can’t����over the next three years. District projections show L.A. Unified spending����more than it will take in next year alone and falling some $700 million in the red by 2021-22.

Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County’s superintendent of schools, wrote in a statement to LA School Report Wednesday that the LA County Office of Education “is disappointed” that Measure EE did not pass. “Put simply, LAUSD needs to stop spending more than it receives from the state and federal government,” the statement read, adding that “The County Office team is committed to continuing to work with LAUSD as they develop the district budget for 2019-20.”

Although L.A. Unified anticipates millions in savings through reductions in����and����costs, Measure EE’s defeat leaves the district on shaky financial footing as it prepares for the next school year.

What happened?

Passing Measure EE was always an uphill battle.

Parcel taxes aren’t commonplace. Only about 9 percent of school districts — most clustered in the Bay Area — have passed or renewed parcel taxes��. Measure EE would have been L.A. Unified’s first parcel tax. The only other one that made it to the ballot����in 2010. Parcel taxes are unique to California, primarily serving as a fallback for cash-strapped districts that aren’t getting enough funding from the state.

Measure EE proponents hoped the car honks, picketing and social media love that marked January’s six-day teacher strike would translate to an outpouring of support for the tax. February polling had found that ��of respondents saw some level of need for more investment in L.A. Unified. “Residents and voters are more inclined to support the school district today than any time in the past,” Fernando Guerra, a Loyola Marymount University professor, told LA School Report last month.

The “Yes on EE” campaign had enjoyed high-profile backing from Mayor Eric Garcetti — an instrumental figure in getting the teacher contract approved — and at least four Democratic presidential candidates. It out-fundraised the opposing “No on EE” campaign almost 5 to 1, with more than $9.3 million in outside expenditures, according to city ethics commission��.

But it wasn’t enough to convince residents who didn’t trust the district to be a good steward of the parcel tax money.

There was ample skepticism that the $500 million flowing into L.A. Unified’s general fund annually would be spent on ballooning employee����instead of in the classroom. There was dissatisfaction with the proposed nine-member��, which was outlined in a school board resolution that critics����could have been easily ignored. And there was frustration with������in the district despite taxpayers’ past investments — five construction bonds totaling $20.6 billion since 1997, for example. The Measure EE tax would have cost most homeowners between����per year.

https://twitter.com/ridgeley/status/1136257181915918339

In a recent����of 400 L.A. Unified potential voters, 44.3 percent said they didn’t think district students “get a high-quality education.” About 36 percent said they did.

“We could give them $500 million a year or $5 billion a year, and they still have no plan on how to fix themselves,” Valley Industry and Commerce Association President Stuart Waldman����LA School Report in April.

Legal challenges during the campaign further muddied the water. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association in early May����claiming that Superintendent Austin Beutner had altered the parcel tax language after the school board approved it — a change that the organization believed could subject a larger proportion of residents’ properties to the tax.

The same organization also����in late May alleging that L.A. Unified’s Measure EE advertisements broke campaign finance rules.

What’s next?

L.A. Unified by July 1 must submit its 2019-20 budget to the county. That budget needs to show the district with a “rainy day” minimum reserve of at least 1 percent of its total expenditures for each of the next three years. If it doesn’t, the county has said it would consider installing a����with “stay and rescind power.” This means he or she could rewrite budgets and overturn school board decisions —��but could not change union contracts.

Less immediately, the district will now also have to find another avenue for covering the third year of the teacher contract, which is slated to cost��$228 million.

Chief Financial Officer Scott Price����the school board in March that “we need to increase revenues.” While Measure EE was L.A. Unified’s most immediate shot at new funding, the district has been trying to save money. Its planned central office reductions will save����over two years, and a newly implemented Medicare plan will shave����a year off L.A. Unified’s more than $1 billion yearly health care bill. The district is anticipating some extra funding as well��, though that budget isn’t final yet.

L.A. Unified will also once again ask the state to waive a $105 million penalty on districts that have too many administrators compared with teachers, and pursue potential real estate sales or leasing opportunities that could generate $100 million, Price noted at the March board meeting.

Jackie Goldberg, the����board member,����LA School Report before her election that reviewing the budget was one of her top priorities. “I’m going to sit down with the budget folks and tell them what I understand the budget to be and hear what they think it is, so that we can begin to reconcile some of the differences of opinion about what state the budget’s in,” she said.

L.A. Unified could try for another parcel tax down the line. If it’s during a main election year, like 2020, voter turnout could be higher. There is also a statewide����split roll tax initiative on the ballot in November 2020. If approved by voters, it would tax commercial and industrial property according to their market value, raising an additional $6 billion to $10 billion a year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. An estimated����would be allocated to K-12 schools and community colleges in L.A. County.

“We’re going to keep going forward” if we fail on EE, Beutner had����before Tuesday’s vote. “Because we have the broadest, deepest, most diverse coalition in support of public education in a generation.”

For LAUSD, a decentralized model would be a smart move as it asks local voters to approve a $500 million annual parcel tax on June 4. Trust in the district’s , schools feel squeezed with reports that , and the to cover commitments made in years past.

Some groups are rightly for approving the parcel tax. Health care benefits alone consume a whopping per year (much of it for retirees) — more than in within-state urban peer districts. Some of that is money that otherwise could be going toward educating every student sitting in classrooms right now. And yet LAUSD leadership has been unable to muster the support needed to rein in these expenses.

That’s where a decentralized model can help. When finances are shifted to schools, schools get to make trade-offs with their money, choosing where and how to trim to save valued staff. Where those choices bump up against labor contract provisions, schools can and should make their case for more flexibility. In the long run, doing so could influence negotiations between the district and union.

Districts in New York City, Chicago, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Nashville, Atlanta, Newark, Las Vegas and elsewhere have shifted to a model that puts schools in the driver’s seat on spending. The district allocates its funds to schools based on the number and type of students in each building, better aligning dollars to student needs, and in doing so boosts equity and transparency. Schools then have flexibility to make trade-offs that do more for students with the money at hand.

We’ve seen schools choose not to replace a retiring vice principal or librarian and instead keep a counselor or chess team coach, as those positions are more important to the school community. When principals weigh the trade-offs for their schools, instead of the district, they are more likely to engage the community, factor in what matters most for their students and staff, and communicate the rationale for the compromise alongside a plan to mitigate any downsides. That’s why principals can pull off trade-offs that districts can’t. In controlling the budget from the top, as LAUSD continues to do, it’s no surprise that when tempers flare over finances (as they did in the latest teacher walkout), the district was a fair target of the fury.

In the decentralized model, the district can continue to maintain central services (such as transportation, HR and accounting). Since all the district’s funding gets allocated to schools, costs for these central services are then charged proportionately to each school’s account.

All schools contribute, and the charges are clear for all to see. Schools can be billed some fixed per-student amount for central leadership, some amount for nutrition services, for purchasing, for retiree costs and so on. If a district reports all funding by school, there can still be central or shared services, but those costs are on the up and up and there is no hidden money. Not only does this enhance trust in the district financials, but it helps schools see what’s at stake. When retiree costs hit a school’s bottom line, support for change may swell from school leaders and communities as they understand what investments hang in the balance.

Those who defend the centralized framework talk about . But those in schools know that when it comes to student learning, the many human variables at play are very important. Relationships between students and staff matter, individual teachers and staff matter, and community factors matter. What does that mean for districts? The biggest mistake is to establish centralized one-size-fits-all policies as if all this human stuff didn’t matter.

That’s why many larger districts have shifted to a model designed to harness — rather than ignore — each school’s unique human strengths. That recognizes that schools are best positioned to make decisions on how to leverage resources to maximize value for students. LAUSD should follow suit and commit to student-based allocation in return for receiving funding from the parcel tax. That would be a promise worth making.

Marguerite Roza is a research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Anthony Drew is a research analyst at the lab.

With last Tuesday’s school board election in Los Angeles delivering a for public education firebrand Jackie Goldberg, next month’s parcel tax vote is now center stage.

L.A. Unified’s next election — about two weeks away, on June 4 — will ask residents within district boundaries to support , a tax of 16 cents per square foot of developed property to raise about $500 million annually for the district. L.A. Unified is in three years and is at risk of a county takeover if it can’t stay out of the red. If Measure EE passes with at least a two-thirds majority vote, it would start generating revenue later this year.

Goldberg, whose campaign mantra underscored , quickly rallied her supporters Tuesday night to get out the vote to pass Measure EE. “We need a movement to make the changes we need,” Goldberg, who was backed by United Teachers Los Angeles, said Tuesday night in a posted by Kyle Stokes of KPCC and LAist. “And that’s why, as soon as this campaign ends, we’re starting tomorrow on EE.”

Board President Mónica García had told LA School Report on May 13 that the first priority for the new board member would be helping to get the measure passed. “There’s an opportunity to help us get her supporters out for Measure EE. There is an opportunity for that person to support more dollars going to school sites,” García said. “So that person gets to choose: Do we want to strengthen bureaucracy, or do we want to continue on the path of empowering leaders in the field?”

The parcel tax has been a unique point of common ground for UTLA and the district, which have long clashed over whether��L.A. Unified is in . Measure EE is the current epicenter of a movement to boost L.A. schools’ funding after years of at the state level. Calls for more money intensified leading up to January’s teacher strike and continued throughout the school board race. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was instrumental in ending the strike, has also been for the parcel tax.

The six current board members unanimously Measure EE in late February. The tax is progressive, meaning businesses and corporations would shoulder the brunt of the tax burden. Most homeowners would pay between per year; Measure EE would not interfere with existing or new rent stabilization ordinances. There would also be exemptions for senior citizens and those relying on disability payments.

The tax would be in effect for 12 years.

Passing Measure EE is not a slam dunk, however. A less costly parcel tax already to pass in 2010, and the school board another from the ballot in 2012. A�� on the heels of January’s teacher strike showed roughly 70 percent approval for a per-square-foot parcel tax,��just��above the two-thirds vote required to pass.

Measure EE has also faced , notably from business and taxpayer organizations who reform has to come first and who don’t believe the ballot language will ensure revenue is spent in the classrooms.

Board District 4’s Nick Melvoin LA School Report last month that people’s reservations about district accountability aren’t “crazy.” To help assuage concerns, the board passed a that would establish an independent taxpayer oversight committee for the parcel tax revenue.

But he added that he reminds residents who are voting next month “to be honest with themselves about where they stood during the strike.”

“There are a lot of people who were yelling … to do whatever the teachers wanted and not wanting to listen to the other side, which was that we didn’t have the money, who now are saying, ‘Well, I don’t support the tax.’” he said. “To say, ‘Give the teachers all that they want’ and then say, ‘Oh, but we’re not going to support you in the parcel tax’ is kind of contradictory.”

The latest contest to Measure EE is a filed May 7��from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to block the tax. The suit says Superintendent Austin Beutner ordered a significant change to Measure EE’s ballot language — from encompassing to — after the board had already voted on it. That change could subject a broader range of properties to the tax, going “beyond the scope of what the board voted for,” Pasadena-based attorney Kevin Moore .

A board passed that same day confirmed that the tax would exclude parking lots and garages. A judge nonetheless allowed the lawsuit to move forward, with a hearing date set for June 6 — two days after the vote. The hearing would ��determine if June 4’s election results should be certified.

Measure EE supporters like García don’t appear fazed. “Measure EE, board races, the work that L.A. Unified does is very, very important,” García said. “The Olympics are coming in 2028; those are our third-graders. The class of ’32 is coming as of July 1; they’re in our kindergarten. I think I would just encourage all parts of civic life to recognize the impact that L.A. Unified has on our families and our community.

“When we get it right, we change the world,” she added. “And so I know the best is yet to come.”

The voter registration deadline for this election is May 20. For more information, .

Esmeralda Fabián Romero contributed to this report.

Jackie Goldberg will rejoin L.A. Unified’s school board after a decisive win Tuesday in the Board District 5��runoff election.

, who represented the board district three decades ago,��clinched 72 percent of the vote while former mayoral aide and L.A. Unified parent����took 28 percent, according to semi-official results announced by the county late Tuesday. The Los Angeles Times����that Repenning had called Goldberg to concede.

“I do believe in the deepest part of my heart that it was the strike of the teachers … who woke up the public to what has happened to public education,” Goldberg told the Times.��She was United Teachers Los Angeles’s pick and has aligned with the union on calls for new funding for district schools and increased scrutiny of independent charters.

She quickly rallied her supporters to continue to fight for schools by getting out the vote to pass��, the parcel tax on the June 4 ballot that would raise $500 million a year for L.A. Unified schools.

“We need a movement to make the changes we need,” Goldberg told supporters Tuesday night in a����posted by Kyle Stokes of KPCC and LAist. “And that’s why, as soon as this campaign ends, we’re starting tomorrow on EE.”

Goldberg is expected to swing the board toward a more pro-union majority as members contend with the district’s deep����on charters’ future role in public education, its growing need for����sources and a lack of consensus on how to improve student learning.

Goldberg has said that a main driver of her running for school board was����from charter school proponents.��UTLA poured $1.28 million in outside expenditures into her campaign as of May 10, according to��.

Superintendent Austin Beutner, whom Goldberg has����for his “lack of transparency,”����his congratulations Wednesday morning. “Congratulations to Jackie Goldberg on her successful campaign to represent the students, families and communities we serve in Board District 5,” he wrote. “I know Ms. Goldberg will be a strong advocate for students and I look forward to working with her.”

Beutner and Goldberg��visited Micheltorena Elementary School together early Wednesday��— Goldberg’s first school visit as “board member-elect.”

Voter turnout as of Tuesday night stood at��7.69 percent, marking a notable dip��from March’s����showing in the primary election. School board elections����have lower voter turnout. A total of��24,159��ballots were processed and counted, the county reported. Of those, Goldberg took 17,218 votes��to Repenning’s 6,824.

Elections results won’t be official until the county registrar certifies them, which is scheduled for May 24 “barring any unforeseen circumstances,” a county spokesman told LA School Report on Tuesday. After that, Goldberg will join the seven-member school board, which decides on policies, budget and approval of����in L.A. Unified.

Throughout her campaign, Goldberg touted her deep roots and connections in L.A. education and politics. Goldberg taught in the����city of Compton for 16 years before an eight-year tenure on the school board from 1983 to 1991. She also served on the L.A. City Council from 1993 to 2000, then in the state Assembly from late 2000 to 2006. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, respectively. Goldberg lives in Echo Park, in the northern, more affluent part of Board District 5, known as BD5. She is married to longtime partner Sharon Stricker, with one adopted son.

Goldberg nearly won outright in the March primary, which came just weeks after January’s����where she’d been a prominent face on the picket lines and had criticized charters. She��secured about����of the����primary votes cast, despite a crowded 10-candidate race. That was just shy of the more than 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. Repenning had received about 13 percent of the vote, narrowly beating Huntington Park councilwoman Graciela Ortíz.

As Goldberg read the semi-official results Tuesday night — showing a similarly��gaping��lead — her supporters cheered, chanting, “Yes we did.”

As the new board member, Goldberg will����nearly 100,000 traditional and charter school students, who have not been represented on the board since former member and education reformer Ref Rodriguez����last July following money laundering charges. BD5 enrollment is nearly��, with about 67,000 students attending school in the more immigrant-heavy, lower-income southeast region. Seven schools in BD5 were recently identified in the����of schools in the state, and all seven are in the district’s southeast section. Nearly 4 in 10 of the board district’s elementary and middle schools are in the����in both math and reading on the state’s dashboard.

Goldberg is white and doesn’t speak Spanish — something that����of BD5 parents in a recent poll said was an important characteristic for their next representative.

Serving minority students and boosting student achievement weren’t the central tenants of Goldberg’s platform. She directed her energy on demanding enhanced charter school scrutiny and accountability, along with calls to tax the wealthy to mitigate statewide underfunding of schools. Goldberg’s positions align with UTLA in many cases: She believes L.A. Unified’s “fiscal cliff” is an��, supports the $500 million����parcel tax, opposes categorical cuts to��, and����the idea that more funding should be tied to higher accountability standards.

On Monday, Board President Mónica García told LA School Report one of her top priorities for the new board member was expanding equity. “Some places have been served very well, some places have not,” García said, noting that she’d ask the newcomer: “Are you going to support increased equity in supporting the highest-needs schools, or are you going to perpetuate a system that allows only for some people to get the highest services that the district offers?”

Former BD5 board member Yolie Flores in a����added that the new representative has to make “an explicit commitment to addressing the unique socioeconomic challenges” within L.A. Unified, such as addressing the “unacceptable third-grade reading proficiency problem” and supporting “the expansion of dual-language instruction.”

Read more:��

Much of that is��. When asked, she said she backs bilingual education expansion and more equitable supports for English learners. She believes undocumented immigrants should be allowed to vote in school board elections — something����in San Francisco. In a��, she also��suggested ideas for improving reading, such as getting “rid of hours of testing-based curriculum and have [teachers] actually teach kids to love reading, by giving them fun books to read, to enjoy and to talk about in class” and doubling up the number of teachers and teaching assistants based on a school’s budget.

One of her Day 1 priorities is visiting school sites in the southeast too. “I’m the least familiar with them,” she����LA School Report in March. “That’s really the best way to know what’s going on in the district — to get up out of your chair and go visit schools.”

Goldberg was endorsed by the��, which supports immigrant rights, as well as prominent Latino political figures Hilda Solís, an L.A. County supervisor and former U.S. secretary of labor, and activist Dolores Huerta.����include the California Federation of Teachers, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and state Superintendent Tony Thurmond.

Her most powerful ally, however, has been UTLA, which poured $1.28 million into her campaign before Election Day. Repenning, conversely, was heavily backed by SEIU Local 99 — a union representing non-teacher staff such as cafeteria workers — which spent about $1.1 million supporting Repenning and about $140,000 opposing Goldberg.

Both SEIU Local 99 and the��, which didn’t endorse any candidate this election cycle,��congratulated Goldberg on her win in press releases sent out Wednesday morning.

Goldberg’s ties to UTLA largely cost her the Los Angeles Times’s , which went to principal����in the primary and Repenning in the runoff.

To view the election results,��. To see when the county will be updating results,��.

In their last candidate forum in the southeast section of L.A. Unified’s Board District 5, the two candidates vying for the open school board seat in Tuesday’s election mostly stuck to familiar themes and gave few glimpses of how they differ.

Jackie Goldberg and Heather Repenning met Wednesday evening at Turner Hall Community Center in Cudahy, in the heavily Latino and poorer section of Board District 5, taking questions from parents and students in English and Spanish before an audience of about 50 people.

They did not engage in substantial debate on what they would do differently, nor did they address improving low-performing schools, school choice or ways to bring new revenues to the district besides the on the June ballot.

The candidates had a minute and a half to respond to questions from a panel of two parents, Luz Puebla and Jeannette Godina, and two student members of the United Way’s Young Civic Leaders program, Gabriel Rodriguez and Nazareth Gutierrez. The questions were projected in both languages and were based on a recent conducted by , which co-hosted the forum with . This was the third candidate forum organized by these groups in the District 5 board race. The took place in February when there were 10 candidates on the ballot in the primary election. In total, the two candidates have faced each other at about 10 forums this spring.

Goldberg, 74, reiterated her decades of experience as a public servant and a former school board member in District 5. “I believe those experiences are what you need,” she said. For many of the questions asked, her answers revolved around her message about “taxing the wealthy,” lowering class sizes and having more substitute teachers, counselors and nurses at every school.

Repenning, 44, highlighted that she would be the only board member with a child in the district, as well as her ability to communicate with more parents because she speaks Spanish. She said she would advocate in Sacramento and Washington for more funding, particularly for schools with the highest needs, the need for wraparound services for students, and college readiness and eligibility. “LAUSD should be measuring its success not just on high school diplomas but college diplomas,” she said. “The status quo isn’t good enough.”

Their only glimmer of differences came during questions about whether 16-year-olds should be able to vote in school board elections and how to better support teachers.

“Absolutely I think students should be able to vote,” Repenning said. “And I believe that undocumented parents and residents should be able to do that as well. At the end of the day, it’s important to me that true stakeholders in the district are able to have a real voice about who’s going to represent them at the school board.”

Goldberg said about 16-year-old voters, “I’m not sure. I have to look at that some more. I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She added, “What I have absolutely made up my mind about — and I already have a draft of — is what San Francisco did to enfranchise every parent and guardian in their schools to vote regardless of citizenship. That is something I do believe.”

To the question of how to better support teachers, Repenning said, “We can have a program where we offer teachers, school staff and administrators, people who have shown a lot of success, additional pay or other incentives to come and serve out some time in some of our more struggling schools.”

But Goldberg responded that “when you say to a group of teachers to come into another area, you’re implying that the teachers that are there are not very good.”

Goldberg added that the best way to support teachers is by reducing class sizes and having additional teaching assistants. “That combination costs money, and we need to think about how to get more money from Sacramento. Time to tax the wealthy in the state.”

When asked what their priorities would be for their first 100 days in office, Goldberg listed the topics of:

Equal school spending: “making sure schools are getting the same amount of money in L.A. Unified.”

Bilingual education: “I do believe that everybody needs to be bilingual, bicultural and biliterate.”

Special education: “A lot of parents are happy their students are in regular schools and regular classes, but they are unhappy with the services they have.”

Repenning said she would:

Advocate for more money for public education: “I will look for every possible source for new funding.”

High-quality afterschool tutoring at every school campus: “It’s very important for me as a working mother. Afterschool programs should be available for every child in the district.”

College access and eligibility: “I want to convene with UCs, CSUs, community colleges, private universities to find out how can we do better for our LAUSD graduates.”

When asked why Measure EE, the parcel tax on the June 4 ballot, was needed, Goldberg said, “Measure EE is a critical piece in changing the outcomes for children in our district. The contract with the teachers talks about a nurse in every school, adding a teacher each year for two years. That’s not going to reduce class sizes nearly enough. It tries to do more in the way of counselors. We need to vastly change the amount of money spent on children in the state, a very rich state. EE means that for the first time since Prop. 13 in 1978, the big landowners in downtown L.A. and in the city will be finally taxed for our children.”

Repenning said, “Measure EE is a direct outcome of the teacher strike. There is actually not enough money at the district right now to pay for all three years of the strike agreement, even though some of the changes reached in the agreement, the reduction of class sizes, the increase in counselors were more gradual than I think a lot of people were hoping for. The district still does not currently have enough money to pay for the whole package, so we actually need to pass Measure EE in order to be able to implement all three years of the strike agreement. I think it’s very important that we find and support new revenue for our school district. I believe whatever happens with EE, this effort shouldn’t stop there.”

If passed by two-thirds of the votes, Measure EE would raise about $500 million a year over a 12-year period for schools.

As the candidates were preparing to leave after the forum, an immigrant parent from Nicaragua pressed them both to listen to her concerns. “How are you going to fix low-performing schools?” Francisca Rueda asked in Spanish. “No parent wants their children to attend a low-performing school. What are you going to do to address that? I need you both to take that into account.”

Repenning responded in Spanish that “as a member of the school board, I will focus on how we can fix the issues that exist in the schools that are underperforming.”

After the Q&A, Elijah Cabrera, a father of four students, told LA School Report that he will vote for Repenning because “she has fresh and specific ideas on how to support students. She is in full support of our students. I think she will pay more attention to the underperforming schools because in this district there are too many of them and very few good ones, and that hurts. We need change, fresh ideas, that’s why I’ll vote for her.”

Patricia Covarrubias, a Cudahy resident with grandchildren in the district, said she will vote for Goldberg because “she has the experience that will help her bring many resources back to our schools, including art and music programs that are so needed in communities like this one. That’s very important for me.”

Goldberg came close to winning the seat in the March 5 primary but fell just shy of a majority, winning 15,935 votes — 48.18 percent of the 33,074 total primary ballots . Repenning won about 13 percent of the vote. Both are backed by unions: Goldberg by United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers and support service personnel such as counselors, and Repenning by SEIU Local 99, which represents education workers including cafeteria staff, bus drivers and teachers aides.

Before the candidate Q&A, the forum organizers shared a new report on the district’s disparities between the wealthier and whiter northern section of Board District 5 and the south and southeast sections. Northeast of downtown, the median income is $50,446, compared with $41,203 in the southeast section and $31,559 in the south section.

It also showed that the overall voter turnout in the last runoff election in the board district, in 2015, was 8 percent. Registered voters in the southeast voted at 7 percent, in comparison to 13 percent in the northeast.

Based on the input of more than 500 stakeholders in Board District 5, the report included five recommendations for the next elected board member, calling for:

—Increasing bilingual and dual language programs;

—Prioritizing the needs of special needs students and their parents;

—Prioritizing the needs of English learner students and their parents;

—Addressing the language barriers of parents; and

—Targeting funds for the bright spots of BD5.

It also requested that both candidates commit to meeting with parents and student leaders within the first 100 days of taking office, to which both agreed.