Show LAUSD a Fair Slice of the Money

There’s a serious crisis affecting California classrooms, a crisis most severe in Los Angeles.

Faced with deteriorating schools and 1 million-plus more students than there are classroom seats, the state Legislature is considering authorizing a new school bond. The numbers add up to an immediate need for at least a $27-billion statewide bond. The challenge is whether California can fund this need, in light of the state’s recent $18-billion energy bond commitment.

Whatever the bond amount, the state must take other steps to ensure that these critically needed funds are distributed in a way that is fair to students in the most severely overcrowded schools.

The Legislature placed the last such bond, a $9.2-billion issue, on the November 1998 ballot, and the voters overwhelmingly approved it. Those bonds were supposed to last through 2002, but they are already oversubscribed by more than $2 billion. The Legislature now is considering bills to put a $10-billion bond on the March 2002 ballot.

Last spring, the state Office of Public School Construction reported that by 2004 there will be more than 1 million “unhoused” students, as it calls them, a population that the Department of Education predicts will thereafter grow by the equivalent of seven classrooms a day. These students are children as young as 6 or 7 who are bused past their congested neighborhood schools to less crowded remote locales. They are high school students crammed into multitrack calendars in which they get three weeks less instruction at campuses so overburdened there is no opportunity for summer school remediation, much less curriculum enrichment. They are 90-pound students carrying 40 pounds of books because their schools have no working lockers. And they are disproportionately students at Los Angeles Unified, a district struggling with the difficult task of siting and getting environmental clearances for 80-plus new schools.

The 1998 bond, though historically big, was both too small and, equally troubling, initially unfocused. It sent money first to those districts that declared themselves ready to build, rather than targeting the limited funds to areas where the classrooms are most crowded. Consequently, by the end of last year, the state had given out $1.6 billion in new construction dollars. LAUSD received only a small fraction of the $1 billion-plus it was eligible for.

The distribution system changed with legislation passed two years ago, requiring the state to prioritize new construction funds on the basis of need. As a result, assuming LAUSD can clear the rigorous hurdles of school site approval, the implementation of that law could result in as much as $450 million in additional construction dollars for Los Angeles.

If two new bills (AB 1580 and AB 1430, both sponsored by Assemblyman Tony Cardenas) become law, school districts would be able to speed up their application process, especially on high school projects that are critically needed in Los Angeles. AB 1580 would allow a district to seek funding simultaneously with the state’s architectural review process. AB 1430 would allow districts to capitalize on land it already owns for building schools--a great aid to urban districts that can more quickly, efficiently and safely plan a school on land it can trust will be free of serious environmental defects. If passed, these bills will move Los Angeles up in the queue and help assure a fair share of the next school bond.

Without the adoption of this legislation and a new bond act with a sizable set-aside for Los Angeles and other urban and fast-growing districts, our children will remain on the bus to outlying schools or in severely overcrowded schools. These conditions will continue to limit learning and rob our society of the contribution that these young people would undoubtedly make if their school environments were safe, attractive and conducive to learning.