This month, the Los Angeles Unified School District faces what can only be called existential budget decisions, with revenue and spending so out of whack that a threatened takeover by the county Office of Education could almost be called the least of the school board’s problems.
Though such a move is usually reserved for smaller, out-of-the-way districts in L.A. County that have been mismanaged on a lesser scale, the nation’s second-largest school system indeed faces this kind of receivership.
LAUSD faces the same kinds of generational demographic and flight-from-public-schools challenges seen by other districts around the state and the country, it is true. Enrollment fell over 3% last year. And in California, with school budgets based on average daily attendance, smaller school populations are a big hit when overhead costs remain fixed or growing.
But in June, the district’s school board also signed a two-year agreement that raises teacher salary scales by an average of 11.65% to 13.86%, boosts starting teacher pay to $77,000 annually, and increases the district staff minimum wage to $28.49 per hour by January.
Over 11% is a big raise. And it’s one that the current shortfall and talk of takeover show the district can by no means afford. The pay hike will cost the district over $2.5 billion over the term of the new contracts with unions.
A July 2 letter from the county found that LAUSD’s financial plan does not show it can meet its future cash obligations. County officials project Los Angeles Unified will face a $231 million cash shortfall in 2027, Mallika Seshadri reports at the statewide news site EdSource.
So the board will meet in closed session next Tuesday, Aug. 11, to discuss the way out from its hole.
It is no secret that school closures are an inevitable part of the solution, and board members have said they will consider campus consolidation in the fall. Layoffs and furloughs of teachers and staff are inevitably also on the table.
How absurd, and how terrible for students and families, that union rules make seniority rather than quality the criterion for who gets laid off. And how absurd that Angelenos have allowed and enabled self-interested unions and incompetent school board members to drive the second-largest district in the country into the ground.