Math teacher Dan Chang and incumbent Scott Schmerelson are vying for the seat to represent District 3 on the LAUSD board, which includes communities stretching from Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood and Van Nuys to Woodland Hills and West Hills.
The seven-member LAUSD board oversees the nation’s second-largest school district with more than half a million students, 74,000 teachers and other employees. District 3 is one of three seats that are up for election on Nov. 5.
The key responsibilities of the board members include hiring and firing the LAUSD superintendent, and passing — and then deciding — how to spend the district’s nearly $18 billion budget.
Schmerelson said in a phone interview his top priorities include making sure “my schools are functioning well and giving the kids the best education possible.”
He said families in District 3 depend on him “to make sure that their schools are doing well … and have everything they need.”
LAUSD enrollment has been declining for years. During the 2015-2016 academic year about 640,000 students were enrolled at schools across the district. That number dropped by more than 15% during the 2022-2023 academic year, down to 538,295 students.
Schmerelson said, “It’s a shame that schools are losing enrollment.”
One of the solutions for the declining enrollment, he said, could be the district’s new Universal Transitional Kindergarten program, which is an early learning program for children who are 4 years old.
“These are our future students,” he said. “Their parents could not send their kids to transitional kindergarten because they had to pay. But we’ve gotten to a point where there’s no longer a fee for attending transitional kindergarten.”
When it comes to safety at school campuses, Schmerelson added, most of the surveys from parents and teachers in District 3 show that “they are more than content with our schools and the safety at our schools.”
It’s important to have police on campuses, he said, adding that “we have on campuses people who are in charge of safety, something called a ‘climate advocate’ that the district hires. They mingle with the kids and they hear what’s happening and they help the kids feel safe.”
Schmerelson emphasized the need for equal funding distribution between charter and non-charter schools.
“There’s always a bucket of money to make sure that our charter schools also get a modernization program,” he said. “We try to fairly fund the charter schools, so they can be competitive with us. No charter schools are going without LAUSD assistance.”
But his opponent Dan Chang recently wrote an op-ed in the Daily News, stating that LAUSD misappropriated $81,954.50 that had been put aside for an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley. Because of alleged misappropriation, Chang claimed, the school didn’t receive three additional arts teachers on their campus.
Prop. 28 passed by voters in 2022 and authored by former Los Angeles schools Superintendent Austin Beutner, was designed to fund arts education in California’s K-12 schools, including music, theater, dance and other arts education.
But Beutner said district officials took the funding, and instead of expanding arts programs used it for other purposes, according to a letter sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In the op-ed, Chang claimed that similar misappropriation took place at other elementary schools across Los Angeles while LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and board members ignored the issue.
In a phone interview, Chang said the district has “a history of just taking money away from local schools.”
In response to the claims made by Beutner and Chang, Schmerelson said he recently spoke with LAUSD’s inspector general about misappropriations of funds intended for the arts program. Carvalho agreed, he added, to have an independent audit of Prop. 28 funds.
“It will be done this year,” Schmerelson said, adding that the results of the audit are expected at the beginning of next year.
“I’m almost positive it’s going to come up that we are okay with distributing funds,” he said. “Schools that have lost enrollment have fewer children and get less Prop. 28 money.”
Chang said he felt compelled to run for the LAUSD board seat because he believes “we would be completely unleashed if we had a better system to work in. If all L.A. Unified system was more responsive, had fewer mandates, got more money to schools, and the bureaucracy wasn’t just so all-consuming, schools would be a lot better and teachers would be a lot happier.”
His top priorities include “making our school safer, cutting the downtown bureaucracy and getting more money back to our schools for arts, music, computer tech ed. And scaling success and improving all reading and math scores for all students.”
To reverse the trend of declining enrollment, he said, the district needs to make sure that “our schools are much more competitive and more exciting and joyful places.”
Chang added that it was important to restore public trust in the school system.
“The district has a history of fraud and waste and abuse (and) until that reputation gets better, until there’s more oversight of the school district, some of the things that I mentioned would be hard to do,” he said.
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It was important, he added, to make sure the district shared the resources effectively between charter and non-charter schools.
“L.A. is big enough for everyone,” Chang said. “It’s big enough for the charter schools; it’s big enough for the traditional schools, and our job is to make sure that those resources are shared effectively for the benefit of all public school communities.”
Nicolle Fefferman, a mother of middle school and high school LAUSD students, and co-founder of the largest parent advocacy group Parents Supporting Teachers, said she planned to vote for Schmerelson because “he has proven to be a reliable and responsible steward of our public school system.”
She added: “Scott has a really incredible expense at every level of the district. He is very focused on making sure that public money is being spent correctly and he was the first school board member to speak out about how the district is spending Prop. 28 money and the arts funding.”
Christie Pesicka, who is part of the United Parents Los Angeles group, said she supported Chang.
“Families are excited to actually get a parent of school-aged kids and a teacher who’s in the trenches in office,” she said.
Chang was in contrast, she added, to “board members who don’t even have school-age kids. Some of them don’t even have kids at all, and others are just finishing out their career.”
Having Chang on the board, she said, “would be refreshing because he knows what’s going on in the trenches.”
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