LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King signed off on new health benefits for teachers assistants and playground aides even though the agreement stated that it will help push district reserves into the red by half a billion dollars within two years.

And the question in the document asking how the district would replenish those reserves was left blank.

The collective bargaining agreement with SEIU Local 99 signed Aug. 10 by King notes that “the district will have to identify additional balancing strategies to address the cost of the agreement,” and that “program adjustments are needed to accommodate the additional costs.”

According to the agreement, the superintendent acknowledges that the impact of the agreement will cut existing unrestricted reserves in half next year, then result in a $506 million deficit in 2018-2019. The unrestricted reserves meet the state minimum reserve requirement for this school year and next year, but then a “NO” box is checked for the 2018-19 school year.

The new health benefits, which will cost the district an additional $16 million a year, was approved unanimously last week without discussion by the school board and helps 4,197 employees who make an average of $28,000 a year pay for their health benefits. The total cost for the certificated and classified salaries is $117 million a year before the agreement.

Some of the costs of the health benefits will be absorbed by the state’s Local Control Funding Formula and soften the blow to about $5.7 million a year, according to the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the union and the district.

Beginning next school year, teachers assistants who work 800 hours or more a year will get their medical, dental and vision benefits paid for, valued at $506 per month per worker. They will be able to enroll in the Kaiser Permanente plan or a comparable plan.

SEIU Local 99 members protest during negotiations over the new health benefits.

Playground aides who work 1,000 hours or more a school year will get half of their medical, dental and vision paid for, a benefit of about $253 a month.

Family members, who are fully covered in teachers benefits, are not insured by this agreement for these employees. This also does not involve retirement benefits.

In the district’s original counter-proposal, the superintendent and school board referred to the findings of the Independent Financial Review Panel, which suggested cutting health benefits and decreasing staff by nearly 10,000. Administrative staff increased this year.

In the document signed by King, “specific impacts” of the agreement were listed as: “This agreement impacts the purchasing power of school sites, especially for limited, restricted funding sources. Positive impacts could be claimed in improved quality staff and organizational climate.”

It adds, “The district will have to identify additional budget balancing strategies to balance the one-year deficit” of $5.7 million.

In the section titled “concerns regarding affordability of agreement in subsequent years,” the agreement states: “The out-year impact of this agreement compounds existing budget imbalances brought about by increases in fixed costs as well as decreased revenues due to enrollment decline.”

Teacher assistant Andrea Weathersby, who was on the bargaining team for Service Employee International Union Local 99, told the school board last Tuesday that the agreement is going to be a big help for her. She is an LA Unified parent, as are many of the other workers getting the new benefits. “Unfortunately, there have been times when my children have had to skip the arts classes they love because I need to pay for their health care instead. How can you tell a child, ‘You can’t’?”

It may not go as far as the union wanted, but the agreement helps, SEIU Local 99 executive director Max Arias said at the board meeting, and added, “These are the mothers and fathers of district students, educators committed to keeping our children safe and learning, LAUSD graduates, future teachers and members of our Latino and African-American communities who have historically suffered from unequal access to quality health care.”

School board President Steve Zimmer heralded the deal, pointing out that these workers have direct interaction with the children on a day-to-day basis, and the decision is making up for past staff and budget cuts. “I am proud to support the action which ensures that our workers, and their families, will have access to expanded health care options,” Zimmer said in a statement. “We need to make sure that the women and men who take care of LAUSD’s children by day can care for their own families by night.”

Michelle King and Steve Zimmer.

Board member Monica Garcia said, “I am proud to stand with every employee – from our bus drivers to our cafeteria workers, from our maintenance professionals to classroom support staff. You help make Los Angeles great, and we look forward to our continued partnership.”

And school board member George McKenna added, “Providing health and welfare benefits to our employees is the right thing to do and will further strengthen the relationship with vital members of our school families.”

King, who is working on a budget plan that she said she hopes will off-set the additional expenses in the upcoming years, said, “We are pleased to be able to extend health and welfare benefits to support more of the hard-working employees of SEIU Local 99.”

SEIU Local 99 represents nearly 30,000 employees throughout Southern California in public and non-public organizations in early education, child care, K-12 and community college levels and includes maintenance workers, gardeners, bus drivers, special education assistants, custodians, playground workers and cafeteria workers. Nearly half of the union members are parents or guardians of school-aged children, the union said.

King added, “We believe it is in the best interest of the district to support the teacher assistants and playground aides who are committed to providing a safe and nurturing learning environment for our students.”

LaRae Cantley, of Los Angeles, wants the State Board of Education to include school climate measures in the state’s new accountability system. (Photo credit: Steve Yeater for CALmatters)

By Judy Lin

More than 50 civil rights and education reform groups are using Jerry Brown to remind Jerry Brown of his pledge to help black and Latino students following an interview with CALmatters in which he suggested that disparities will persist despite government intervention.

In a letter dated May 3, dozens of advocacy groups asked Brown to recommit to closing the academic achievement gap for high-need students as he considers an opening on the State Board of Education and a new plan for measuring school performance later this year.

“California’s continued prosperity hinges on how well we educate our students,” the letter reads. “As you’ve clearly stated, the risks of not doing so are far too great.”

During his interview, Brown had said he hopes his signature education policy, the Local Control Funding Formula, will help some students improve by sending more money to schools with students who don’t speak English or come from low-income families. But he said, “the gap has been pretty persistent. So I don’t want to set up what hasn’t been done ever as the test of whether LCFF is a success or failure.”

That left many worried that the governor and the people he appointed to the state school board aren’t prioritizing low-income and English-learner students because some are destined to be waiters and window washers.

Click here for the full story.

The report by UC Berkeley and Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) coalition is slated for release on Monday and found that “the bulk of LCFF dollars has seeped into the district’s base budget with… little apparent regard to the students who generate the new dollars.”

Under the state formula foster care youth, students living poverty and those requiring special education programs earn the district additional funding to supplement their education.

While the board made commitments to distribute those funds — $700 million in 2013-14 and another $145 million in 2014-15 —to an array of initiatives targeting this student population, the money was largely invested in special education efforts as well as restoring staff positions. According to the study, few of those re-hires were directly tied to instruction, especially at the elementary school level.

Research for the study was gathered through student surveys, focus groups with pupils, teachers and principals, and analyzed school-by-school budgets. 

Several improvements were made over the current school year. Spending on new instructional aides for English learners is up; programs benefiting foster care youth were launched; and funding for restorative restorative justice programs got a boost.

Other key findings included:

• LCFF “investment dollars” equaled less than 3% of LAUSD’s total budget in 2014-15
• The majority of LCFF investment dollars — $145 million — went to high schools in 2014-15
• Distribution of LCFF investment dollars to elementary schools did not follow the equity formula established by the district

The analysis concludes that the district has no coherent strategy for how new positions and program dollars supposed to spur discrete improvements at the school level. Further, district officials have no method of tracking which endeavors are successful and which need modifications.

Gov. Jerry Brown had a few words to say about public education in his State of the State address today.

In effect, he saluted his effort to return more control over spending to the state’s school districts. Here’s what he had to say:

“Last year, I spoke of the principle of subsidiarity, a rather clunky word that nevertheless points to a profoundly important principle, namely that in our federal system there are separate layers of government, each with its own distinct responsibilities. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a “central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”

“No better example of this can be found than in your enactment last year of the Local Control Funding Formula. This was a major breakthrough in the way funds are allocated to California’s schools so that our laws explicitly recognize the difficult problems faced by low-income families and those whose first language is other than English. As a result, those with less are going to receive more and that is good for all of us.

“But something else is at work in this Local Control Funding Formula. Instead of prescriptive commands issued from headquarters here in Sacramento, more general goals have been established for each local school to attain, each in its own way. This puts the responsibility where it has to be: In the classroom and at the local district. With six million students, there is no way the state can micromanage teaching and learning in all the schools from El Centro to Eureka – and we should not even try!

“Last week, 324 people from across the state traveled to Sacramento to speak to the State Board of Education about the merits of this new law and the regulations which should be adopted under it. Principals, teachers, students, parents, religious groups and lawyers, all came forward to express their views. Now that shows interest and real commitment! But their work is just beginning. Each local district now has to put into practice what the Local Control Funding Formula has made possible. That, together with new Common Core standards for math and English, will be a major challenge for teachers and local administrators. But they are the ones who can make it work and I have every confidence they will.”

In effect, the state would have the right to place a cap on how much money a district can keep in reserve, which sounds simple enough. But LA Unified and other big school districts are opposed to it because if shifts the right to manage savings and spending to Sacramento.

So much for local control.

“The reserve proposal is counter to the spirit of local control in the LCFF in that it fails to allow local school communities to make fiscal decisions that best serve the needs of their students,” said Edgar Zazueta, LA Unified’s chief lobbyist.

The provision was tucked into Gov. Jerry Brown‘s state budget Sunday night. It’s part of a rewrite of a ballot initiative that has already qualified to go before voters that revises the state’s rainy day fund plan. Basically, each school district would be given a cap — a set percentage of the budget — that it can keep in reserve. LA Unified’s would be three percent. Currently, it’s at five percent.

The measure is more complex than that, with a lot of if-this-then-that provisions. But essentially, it would require districts to spend money in better economics times, rather than save it. The mandate would only apply in years the state puts more money in a Prop 98 fund, under a rationale that if the state is saving more, districts don’t have to. Prop 98 sets the amount of money the state spends on K-through-12 public education.

Two percent of LA Unified’s $7 billion budget is the equivalent of $140 million. That would pay for a lot of teachers, librarians and counselors, which is why the California Teachers Association (CTA) has been such a strong proponent of the measure.

After years of layoffs and flat salaries, teacher unions across the state want raises for current personnel and the return of those laid off during recessionary years — although at this point, it’s hardly clear how districts would spend the money.

LA Unified and other districts around the state object to the change for two major reasons: One, as Zazueta said, it reduces dollars districts would rather have for long-term and emergency spending. Second, it seems to countermand the new spirit of local control build into the overhaul of state spending on public education.

Approval largely depends on whether voters think school districts should be spending more money or saving it. What they would spend it on is a fight for another day.

Alberto Retana, Executive Vice President of Community Coalition

Among the challenges poor kids in south LA are forced to overcome just to meet the most basic learning conditions in schools, are cockroaches.

Not in their classrooms. In their bodies.

LA Unified students in neighborhoods like South Gate and Watts regularly visit health clinics to have the insects that crawl inside their ears, plucked out,  Alberto Retana, Executive Vice President of Community Coalition, one of three groups that developed the Student Need Index, told LA School Report.

“How can you learn in a classroom if you have a cockroach in your ear that stems from poor housing conditions in the community?” he asked rhetorically. “You can’t. There is a link there.”

And it’s one of several links Retana hopes Superintendent John Deasy makes today when the LA schools chief unveils his plan to distribute $837 million in supplemental and concentration funding for three groups of students with specific needs for academic achievement — foster youth, English learners, and those from lower-income households — to the district’s neediest schools.

Deasy has been instructed by the board to devise a formula using his own set of indicators and data to target the money where the need is greatest and where it will have the biggest impact on academic outcomes.

The board approved the idea of establishing an index to allocate money in a way that would more faithfully meet the spirit of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), based on research by three community groups — Community Coalition, the Advancement Project and InnerCityStruggles.

The schools were identified by calculating a dozen factors, including neighborhood conditions that can affect the lives of students, like gun injuries; access to childcare and asthma rates, graduation rates and 3rd and 8th grade test scores. They found the district’s 242 “highest need” schools are located in south and east Los Angeles and the Pacoima area in the San Fernando Valley.

“He is going to use our index as a model, but he doesn’t have to follow it,” Retana explained.

One aspect he expects Deasy will hang onto is “the notion that if you’re a foster kid and an English Learner and poor, that should count three times as opposed to once because the conditions are unique and have a greater impact on a child’s learning.”

Under LCFF, the grants are not duplicated if a student qualifies in more than one category.

Deasy initially opposed establishing additional metrics to divert more money to the districts poorest and poorest performing schools, arguing that they were unnecessary because the district was already considering several poverty factors for the 2014-2015 budget.

But in less than two months, as the community groups mounted an intense campaign to convince the board more specific metrics should be considered, he became a champion of the community groups’ measures.

Retana says one of the reasons Deasy and five of the six board members — Board president Richard Vladovic, Monica Garcia, Steve Zimmer, Bennett Kayser and Monica Ratliff — all came around to support the index because it is tied to outcomes. Tamar Galatzan was the lone dissenter.

“This is not a blank check,” Retana said. “The district needs to demonstrate, over the course of three years, that our high needs schools are improving, and that makes this unique. It hasn’t been done before.”

Another reason was the undeniable public support from LA Unified families. Between February and April the coalition gathered 4,300 signatures on a petition supporting the index, then delivered it Vladovic’s office (though he wasn’t there to accept it).

“We built the community base and pressure that created the space for [board members] who are often on opposing sides, to say, you know what? on this particular issue I’m going to do the right thing,” Retana said.

Without thousands of signatures being collected, he added, it never would have happened.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the the California legislature reached a deal on a $108 billion budget for the 2014-2015 fiscal year.

Here, as examined by John Fensterwald of EdSource, are some of the major education components:

Proposition 98: $60.8 billion for K-12 schools and community colleges in 2014-15 through Proposition 98, the voter-approved school funding guarantee; $53.6 billion of that will go to K-12 districts. This will be $3.6 billion more than appropriated for them in 2013-14.

Local Control Funding Formula: $4.75 billion more than districts received this year. Gov. Jerry Brown had projected it would take seven years to fully fund the formula. The additional money for 2014-15, the third year implementing the formula, will bring districts more than halfway there.

Common Core: $450 million that the Legislature said is intended to help implement the new standards in math and English language arts, although districts would be able to use the money however they want. This differs from the $1.25 billion for Common Core this year, which had to be spent on materials, technology and teacher training related to the standards.

Career Technical Education: An additional $250 million in competitive one-time grants for individual and multiple districts that build partnerships with community colleges and businesses.

Early Childhood Education: Transitional Kindergarten will remain as is, but early education programs will get $264 million more, with $155 million to enable 11,500 additional low-income children to attend preschool. Parent fees for part-time preschool programs will be eliminated.

CalSTRS: Brown proposed and lawmakers agreed to a 32-year plan to eliminate the $74 billion unfunded liability for teachers’ and administrators’ pensions. Districts eventually will pay about 70 percent of the $5.35 billion in extra annual costs, with the state contributing 20 percent and teachers about 10 percent. Districts’ increases will ramp up over seven years; next year’s first installment will be $175 million.

Late payments: Late payments of state money, known as deferrals, created a hardship for many districts and grew to $9 billion during the recession. Brown has made wiping out this obligation a priority. Only $500 million in deferrals will remain after next year, and Brown has made eliminating what’s left the top priority if state revenues run higher than projected.

Read the full story here.

The revised budget is in the hands of the LA Unified Board of Education, but the public has a final opportunity tomorrow to weigh in on how the district’s $7 billion budget will be spent.

The board has set a limit of 30 speakers to address the six members for two minutes each, to advocate for their causes célèbres.

But in all likelihood, the budget presented last week by Superintendent John Deasy and the spending plan that reflects the new revenue from the state’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) will not change significantly after parents, students and community leaders have their say. In fact, there’s very little the board members can do, either, as the budget approaches a final vote on June 24 and presentation to the LA County Office of Education before July 1.

School board members cannot veto line items. To adjust spending in a particular area, a member must raise the issue for discussion, make recommendations on where to find an offset, then persuade a majority of colleagues to agree to the changes.

“I don’t think that’s going to be happening,” Chris Torres, Chief of Staff for board President Richard Vladovic, told LA School Report. “The board members have expressed everything they’ve needed to express in the past meetings.”

The only item on the agenda that may impact the budget is Bennett Kayser’s resolution to invest $44 million over the next three years in early education. His motion would earmark $10 million for the upcoming school year, $14 million in 2015-2016 and $20 million in 2016-2017.

Meanwhile, the teachers union, UTLA, is pressing for more changes. Union leaders are planning a noon press conference at district headquarters to campaign for major changes in Deasy’s budget, including money to return teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians and social workers who were laid off during the recession.

“The Superintendent’s budget does not do enough to restore these key positions,” the union said in a press release. “The 640,000 students in this district deserve the type of support system that exists in many other districts across California and the nation.  This inequity cannot be ignored.”

Among other issues tomorrow, Kayser has a motion before the board, to keep Stuart Magruder, an architect, on the Bond Oversight Committee. Magruder’s reappointment for a two-year term was blocked last month because of his opposition to using bond money for iPads.

Deasy is expected to deliver on his promise to provide the board with a final formula for the Student Need Index, which is supposed to identify the district’s neediest schools by taking into account such factors as graduation rates, local crime and environmental health conditions.

The Index was passed in a 5 -1 vote last week, on the condition by board member Monica Ratliff that the superintendent quickly come up with a plan to identify the schools that will be getting additional LCFF dollars as a result of the new plan.

The board is also considering final spending plans for the district’s 53 affiliated charter schools.

For board agenda, click here, and here (for special meeting agenda).

For board materials, click here, and here (for final budget proposal).

Adds details about UTLA press conference.

The LAUSD student population currently includes between 8,500 and 11,600 foster youth, as much as 12 percent of the total foster youth in the state.

Starting in the 2014-2015 school year, the district is budgeting $8.82 million for foster youth programs, expanding the financial support from almost nothing, according to budget documents submitted to the board yesterday by Superintendent John Deasy. The money will be used primarily for hiring 75 counselors.

For the 2015-16 school year, the support jumps to $9.82 million with 10 additional hires, and a year later, the spending rises to $10.82 million, with another 10 hires for a three-year total of 95.

All the new funds come through the state’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).

“We’re really excited about the expansion of our foster youth program because this is the first time our school district will be able to really provide the service that our foster youth need,” Erika Torres, LA Unified’s coordinator of pupil services, told LA School Report.

The new social workers will be placed at school sites with the highest concentration of foster youth and at 17 education support centers across the district to focus on providing intensive services and comprehensive support for the students and their families. The goals are to reduce dropout rates and connect the students with services available to them throughout the county.

Torres says the expanded program will make sure that every student has an individualized academic plan and a psychological, social and academic assessment provided by a pupil services attendance counselor, who will act as a liaison between LA Unified and the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

The assessment will help determine if a student needs mental or physical health services, tutoring, mentoring, among other services, and counselors will make sure the student can access that resource.

Patricia Armani, LA County’s Department of Children and Family Services administrator, whose agency has teamed with LAUSD to help implement the expansion, said a majority of foster children suffer from mental trauma, caused by neglect and abuse at their home. Some children, she said, move in and out of several foster homes and schools in one year, adding to their trauma.

Armani said children placed with new foster parents and a new school often struggle with issues such as living with strangers, fitting in, making new friends and concentrating on new school work.

But Armani said she believes the new added funding will have a huge impact by providing dedicated, committed adults at schools who will act as mentors, offering guidance and support and helping the students stay focused at school and connected to services.

“You have someone now paying attention to these kids and holding them accountable,” she said, adding that each counselor will be responsible for 100 foster youth.

Depending on each case, mental and other services will be provided by the county, leaving LAUSD services available for other students.

“I can’t tell you how encouraged I am by LAUSD’s commitment to our kids,” Armani said.

LAUSD and the county also intend to share data and information about foster youth, including previous schools attended, to ensure that schools have all the necessary background information on the foster youth, including their transcripts, to help them stay on track to graduate.

“Our ultimate goal is to help our students be successful in school,” Torres said.

Torres said the district hopes the program’s long term impact will be improved attendance records and graduation rates to put foster youth on a path to college.

Passage would signify a major political triumph for Deasy, winning board approval on his version of a near $7 billion budget, eight months after friction with the board left him considering resignation.

As part of the budget, Deasy also presented the board an updated and revised version of the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), a state-mandated action to demonstrate how districts will spend new money from the state for low-income students, foster youth and English language learners.

The new proposal was supposed to be the culmination of months of input from community groups, educators, parents, and students who have expressed their spending preferences at public meetings and board meetings. But it included only minor changes from the initial plan, presented in April.

“The dollars portion of the LCAP haven’t changed; it’s the goals of the plan that have been expanded,” Edgar Zazueta, LA Unified’s chief lobbyist, told LA School Report.

Among the district’s added priorities are increasing student engagement and ensuring that all high school seniors complete the Federal Application for Free Student Aid, or FAFSA. The district will also begin tracking the progress of English language learners and follow the trajectory of students coming out of remedial camps — neither of which has ever been studied by the district.

“These are all initiatives that will take some time to produce results,” Zazueta said. “It’ll be a couple of years before we start seeing the impact of these measures on student outcomes, but that’s why we have to start establishing metrics right away.”

Deasy told the board he is “remarkably proud of this budget,” and congratulated the members of his administrative staff who helped construct it.

“What you have is what we’re able to do with what we’ve gotten,” he told the board.

School board president Richard Vladovic said that although “budgets limit your dreams,” he believed in Deasy’s vision for the future. “It’s not perfect but, doggone it, it’s better than I’ve seen in seven years!” he said.

The only debate regarding LA Unified’s $4.73 billion LCFF budget was over $5.5 million that Deasy wants to shift from the district’s plan to give every student an electronic tablet to providing more services for English learners and Standard English students.

“This trade off doesn’t fundamentally reduce investments we’ve promised but may slow investments we’ve promised,” Deasy said.

The district has purchased sufficient devices for future assessment testing, thereby removing the superintendent’s previous sense of urgency for getting a device into the hands of every student.

He called it a modest but important investment. However, board member Monica Ratliff, who chaired the board’s technology programs committee, disagreed. She proposed diverting some of those funds toward hiring more full-time custodial employees. Board member Bennett Kayser continued his years long quest to add more health classes throughout the district, and he requested expanding programs for homeless students.

The board handed a victory to groups pushing for the so-called Student Need Index. The members approved the “Equity is Justice” resolution that directs Deasy to develop an “equity-based” index that identifies the neediest schools to guide the state’s allocation of new supplemental and concentration funds.

The Index considers the number of foster care students and English language learners at a school, drop out rates, poverty rates, reading levels and environmental health factors to identify which schools suffer from the worst neighborhood learning environments.

Board member Tamar Galatzan cast the lone dissenting vote against the index. She has about 18 schools in high-risk areas of her West San Fernando Valley district where at least three-quarters of their enrollments are comprised of low-income students. She said the index will divert LCFF revenue from those campuses to schools that are deemed needier.

“It’s not fair that because the state changed the funding ratios that they end up with less dollars,” she said of the schools. “Hopefully, this board will say to schools across this district that we are going to set a floor below which no school will fall.”

Immediately following the vote, hundreds of students and community organizers who were leading a demonstration outside district headquarters, rallied in celebration. A dance troupe of about 30 students performed a choreographed routine and they cheered as board member Steve Zimmer, who co-sponsored the resolution, delivered news of their victory.

The board also approved salary increases for 9,000 district employees to offset higher pension costs.

A new state statute requires workers to shoulder 100 percent of their individual contribution to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which many of the labor unions had previously negotiated for the district to pay.

As result, LA Unified is picking up the tab by tacking the cost of the pension contribution increase onto employee paychecks. The raises range from 1.2 percent to 9 percent.

“It was very important for the district and superintendent to make sure the employees were made whole,” said Vivian Ekchian, chief labor negotiator for the district. “Otherwise, it would have been a pay cut for the employees.”

These raises are completely unrelated to the salary increases labor unions are currently negotiating with the district.

Parents and administrators at Citizens of the World Mar Vista demonstrated impressive fortitude, waiting nearly seven hours to address the board. Outfitted in “I love CWC” T-shirts, they pleaded with the board to roll back a decision by the Charter Schools Division to end its co-location at Stoner Avenue Elementary School in Del Rey.

The state deadline for both is July 1, which means much of tomorrow’s school board meeting will continue the process of reconciling the wish-lists of a variety of stakeholders into a single, comprehensive budget and a justification of that plan.

“There is a lot we don’t know, and time is running out,” Sarah Bradshaw, chief of staff to board member Bennett Kayser told LA School Report.

“[Board members] still don’t have a final draft of the budget, and we’ve never seen a school by school breakdown of how much money each school is going to get,” she said.

While the board will not dive into the weeds of the 2014-2015 budget tomorrow, Deasy will present an updated and revised version of the district’s LCAP, which sets out its goals and priorities, with special attention to high-needs students, who are bringing in additional funds to the district as a result of LCFF.

The draft is the culmination of months of input from community groups, parents, students and even gadflies, who have expressed their spending preferences at public meetings and board meetings in over recent months.

In addition to Deasy, seven speakers will be heard on the topic tomorrow. Still more speakers will get the chance to weigh in on June 17, with board’s final vote for approval on the budget and the LCAP now expected to be taken on June 24.

Another LCFF related item before the board is the “Equity is Justice” Resolution, co-sponsored by board members Steve Zimmer, Monica Garcia and President Richard Vladovic. The resolution urges Deasy and the board to apply the “Student Need Index,” a data-driven, comprehensive tool for use in allocating funds that identifies precisely which schools suffer from the worst neighborhood learning environments.

If adopted, the Index would send millions in new education dollars to the highest needs schools in LA Unified — those with high concentrations of English learners, students from foster homes and those from low-income families — and could impact the allocation of billions of dollars in the coming years.

Officials with the Advancement Project, Community Coalition, and InnerCity Struggle expect “hundreds of student leaders from the city’s poorest neighborhoods to lead a major demonstration” outside LA Unified headquarters to encourage the board to approve the motion.

As usual, the board will consider a variety of other issues at the meeting, including facilities renovations, charter school revisions, renewals and one charter revocation hearing. The Charter School Division is recommending the board issue the “Final Decision to Revoke” the charter for Urban Village Middle School in Baldwin Hills.

Board member Monica Ratliff’s resolution to add new full-time custodial employees and restorative justice counselors by cutting the budget currently earmarked to expanding the district School Police Department is also up for action.

An issue not on the agenda but which is likely to gain some attention is the controversy surrounding the co-location of Citizens of the World Mar Vista at Stoner Avenue Elementary. Parents from CWC plan to show up en masse to protest the school’s eviction from the west side campus.

CWC school officials have been offered space at Horace Mann Middle School some 15 miles away, but they have rejected the idea. Parents and administrators hope to convince the board to reverse the Charter School Division’s decision to force a move.

For board agenda, click here.

An open letter to the Los Angeles Unified school board from five district students:

Dear board members:

We are students who live in South Los Angeles and attend South L.A. High Schools. One of us wakes up early every morning to take two buses to attend Hamilton High School in West L.A. so that she can have access to academic opportunities – like extra A.P. courses, and strong college preparation – that aren’t offered at her neighborhood school. For the rest of us, we struggle everyday with violence around our schools, lack of enough support services, and inadequate resources and materials.

From studying our history, we know that south L.A. students have struggled with being provided enough resources so that African American and Latina/o students can reach their full potential. We don’t think it’s right that in 2014 we are still struggling with an issue that should be a basic civil right. It makes us upset to know that students who attend schools in wealthier areas of town have access to more educational opportunities than we do. Two weeks ago, we recognized the 60th Anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that was supposed to end segregation in our school system, but from what we see in our community, it looks like “separate and unequal” still exists.

This is why many of us got involved with student organizing, so that we could make a difference in our community. For some of us, we’ve been fighting for change for years. Others of us got involved more recently because we learned about an important campaign called “Schools We Deserve.” We found out that thanks to the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), for the first time, LA Unified will receive more money from California to help high needs students. Our “Schools We Deserve” campaign is an effort to make sure that the schools with the highest needs in LA truly get these resources. That’s why we were so excited when you introduced the “Equity is Justice Resolution” at the May 13th school board meeting.

Your resolution directs the Superintendent to adopt the “Student Need Index,” a tool that uses data to rank all the schools in LA Unified based on need. The national civil rights organization, Advancement Project, developed this tool with support from Community Coalition and InnerCity Struggle. When we first learned about the Student Need Index, we were really excited because for the first time there was something scientific that could measure and describe our experiences.

We’ve been talking about the conditions in our community and schools for years, but now the index actually backs us up by using numbers. For example, the index found that students in high needs schools are nearly five times as likely to be exposed to gun violence. We knew this intuitively, as all of us know someone who has been shot, and in south L.A., gunshots, police helicopters and sirens are a regular part of life. This violence interferes with our schoolwork because it’s hard to concentrate when one is scared, sad or angry. We hope that the Student Need Index will direct more money to our schools, so we can have wellness counselors and trained adults on campus to help us deal with these problems.

The Student Need Index also looks at stuff like the number of foster care students and English language learners at a school, drop out rates, poverty, reading levels, and even considers environmental health factors. Another big thing the index looks at is the numbers of expulsions and suspensions at a school. That’s important to us because last year we advocated for the passage of the “School Climate Bill of Rights” resolution that ended suspensions for non-serious offenses, like forgetting school supplies.

If the Student Need Index passes, some of the funding could go toward “restorative justice” programs on our campuses, where alternatives to suspensions – such as community service, dialogue, mediation and restoration – are used to deal with problems. These programs are better because they keep students in school and learning, and get at the root of what was causing the bad behavior in the first place.

We believe through the passage of this resolution, we can decrease the dropout rates, increase graduation rates and college rates by using LCFF dollars for increasing support for students who live in the communities with the harshest conditions. Our long-term vision is for all students to have the opportunity to achieve their dreams, graduate from a four-year institution and enter a living wage career, regardless of where they live and what school they go to.

Board Members Monica Garcia and Steve Zimmer and Board President Richard Vladovic, we thank you for your support, but we have not yet reached victory. We need all board members to support this resolution. We attended a debate the other night with the four leading candidates for the open District 1 seat. We asked the candidates if they support the “Student Need Index,” and all four said they do! It’s our belief that if we had a voting representative right now for that seat, this resolution would pass.

Board members Tamar Galatzan, Bennett Kayser and Monica Ratliff, it is our hope that one of you will stand up and be the voice for South L.A. – and do what’s right for Los Angeles – by supporting the Student Need Index!

Sincerely,

South Los Angeles Youth Leaders with the Community Coalition,

• Cristian Gaspar, 11th Grader, Fremont High School

• Ryan Bell, 11th Grader, Dorsey High School

• Timothy Walker, 11th Grader, Crenshaw High School

• Jathan Melendez, 10th Grader, Manual Arts High School

• Siria Diego, 12th Grader, Hamilton High

As a teacher who worked in a high-poverty high school and is now spending a year observing classrooms across the socioeconomic spectrum in L.A., here’s how that funding could help:

Giving teachers time to plan multi-level lessons for each class.

One of the biggest differences I’ve seen between classrooms in affluent communities and in high-poverty communities is the range of skill levels. In affluent communities, students generally read at or near grade level and have a history of positive or neutral experience with school, as well as at least one parent at home always available for help.

In high-poverty communities, in any given class, you’ll probably have a handful of kids who fit that description and who need and deserve all the challenge and stimulation of a fast-paced class to compete for spaces at top colleges alongside more affluent students.

But right next to them, you’ll have kids who are still learning English.  Those kids need “scaffolded” lessons with shortened readings; they also need writing assignments with fill-in-the-blanks support so that they can learn academic phrasing.

Right next to them, you’ll have kids with serious behavior issues, sometimes from growing up in multiple foster homes.  All over the classroom you’ll have kids who, in the absence of libraries, bookstores or books at home, have never read a book. And you’ll have several empty seats because of the kids who, despite your pleas and phone calls home, are truant for large chunks of time.

I once had a 12th grade student who read “The Golden Compass” as part of an in-class reading program and told me it was the first book he’d ever read.

Lowering class size and reducing teachers’ class load would help enormously in allowing teachers time to plan multi-level lessons. It would also give us time to read our students’ work with care and give prompt, thoughtful feedback, something we all know is essential for writing growth but which you never have time to do if you’re planning every moment of every lesson at multiple levels — and you have to, or students will get bored, check out and act out.

Giving in-class support to kids who are way ahead or behind.

Most of the canonical texts on any syllabus will be incomprehensible to English learners and other high-needs students unless a teacher slows down to define words in nearly every sentence, then checks to make sure everyone in the room understands what’s going on, an essential practice that will bore the gifted students out of their minds.

Having a classroom aide who can pull out small groups and run enrichment lessons for struggling or highly proficient kids would be a godsend.

Giving extracurricular support to struggling students.

In-class support will help, but the truth is, when students come in several years below grade level, the time they actually spend in class is nowhere near enough to get up to speed. When kids read at, say, fifth grade level, it doesn’t just affect their understanding of a text, it affects the speed at which the whole class reads that text, which in turn affects how much everybody learns.

Kids in poverty, certainly kids in foster care, often do not have a place at home to read and many times live in chaotic, stressful situations; for many English learners, the text has too much unfamiliar vocabulary to access independently.

If kids way below grade level are going to get up to speed, they need to be making up for lost time by reading after school and in the summer, too. Funding for reading intervention programs outside the school day would help bump boost literacy while still allowing teachers to support kids in class with close reading.

Giving support to kids with behavior issues.

Children in high-poverty communities, especially kids who live in foster care, are often suffering from trauma that can cause them to act out in class. This acting-out inevitably has a ripple effect on everyone else in the class, intimidating or demoralizing other students. If I can’t persuade that student to calm down, I need someone who can help, such as a classroom aide who can take the kid out for a walk or a counselor who can dig deeper.

I’m hearing very positive reports about Restorative Justice circles, groups working to help kids heal from trauma and handle their issues constructively. Frankly, as a teacher, I’d love to get that Restorative Justice training myself, which currently costs $500; if that’s not possible, I’d love to see at least a couple of people on every campus trained to administer these circles and train staff in understanding the practice so we can better collaborate to help our most at-risk students.

In other words, what this money might give is the gift of time—time for students to work closely with a trusted adult and for those adults to collaborate to better serve their students. We have a generation of students in poverty who have grown up in an era of funding cuts, overcrowded classrooms and testing gone wild. We need time to rebuild, time to learn, time to get to know families and communities. We need time to listen.

That’s not shiny and fun like a gadget. But it may be the most valuable commodity of all for the money.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

Song Lyrics composed by youth at BHC Boyle Heights (Photo by Gaby, age 15, from the Las Fotos Project)

Community groups big and small, have responded collectively to the extra $332 million coming into the district via the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), Governor Jerry Brown‘s signature K-through-12 education initiative.

For now, only a few schools have complete autonomy in deciding how the money should be used although more will gain the freedom over the next few years.

At Building Healthier Communities (BHC) Boyle Heights, which is part of a 10-year, $1 billion program of The California Endowment, the youth have composed a song that asks LAUSD, “Where does all the money go?” in reference to the distribution of LCFF money.

The song will be presented at Saludarte, an event produced by our collaborative in partnership with the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, on April 26 at Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights. LA School Report has transcribe the lyrics below for your reading pleasure.

(Verse)

Where does all the money go?
To our children? Bureaucracy?
Or to the “Fat Cat”?

It’s a political mirage, an illusion,
That a gift is being given.

(Refrain)
(A slight of hand that’s the trick)

Wait a minute! Lights on!
Recognize you have to deal with us
Our presence, our collective dreams
For our children

(Lights on!)

We will not surrender,
Physically, mentally
We are present!
Answering the call to action
In our homes, in our schools,
In our communities, in our board rooms.

Vivian Ekchian, LA Unifie’d chief labor negotiator

Within LA Unified’s proposed budget for 2014-2015, Superintendent John Deasy includes a line item for teacher raises.

However, in the absence of a contract for the last three years between the district and the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, labor talks remain at a complete standstill, raising questions about just how much remains “TBD.”

“Neither UTLA nor the District has initiated negotiations for any re-opener or successor agreements at this time,” Vivian Ekchian, chief labor negotiator for LA Unified, told LA School Report.  

Teachers are working on a temporary contract. UTLA’s last agreement with the district ended in 2011, and Ekchian says their contract is extended on a day-to-day basis.

“It’s difficult to estimate a timeline with an ending date, but it certainly will be very sensitive to the needs of our employees,” Ekchian said.

UTLA is seeking a 17.6 percent salary increase over an unspecified amount of time, though the average contract lasts three years.

“It’s been more than a year since California voters approved Proposition 30, the tax increase that is bringing millions of new dollars into the District,” UTLA said in a statement shortly after voting for the salary boost.

The state’s new school Local Control Funding Formula is also generating hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue over the next seven years.

Union members last received a cost of living increase in 2007. They also agreed to 16 furlough days throughout the recession, with “each day equaling about half a percent of pay,” according to UTLA President Warren Fletcher.

Deasy, yesterday, thanked all district employees for their “sacrifices” during the budget crisis.

After walking the school board through his budget, he added, “Many employees have not had raises in six to seven years and it’s important to address that.”

Superintendent John Deasy, explaining the budget

Months in the making, LA Unified’s $6.8 billion budget, along with an extra $332 million through the Local Control Funding Formula, finally reached the school board today, as Superintendent John Deasy walked the members through its highlights, pointing to dozens of areas where the new money is going.

His presentation was the featured attraction at a monthly meeting that included Sylvia Rousseau addressing the six members for the first time in her capacity as temporary, non-voting representative for the board’s District 1. She gave an overview of the needs of her district as guidance for the budget negotiations ahead.

Overall, the board members appeared reasonably receptive to Deasy’s approach to using the new money for three specific groups of students, as required by California law — those from low-income families, foster youth and English learners.

The budget, he said, “will restore and improve targeted resources for the youth who need the resources the most,” he said.

But members’ questions, although laden with compliments for such a massive undertaking, reflected a consensus that they want to see him go further faster.

Board member Monica Garcia asked why only a fraction of district’s 1,000-plus schools — 71 pilot and network schools — have been directly awarded their respective LCFF revenues generated by students while the rest of the district is still under central control.

“Why don’t we put it all into a per-pupil strategy?” she asked.

That’s the plan, Deasy explained, pointing out that over the next two years every elementary and middle school will have fiscal autonomy over a per-pupil budget, a key objective of the spending plan. High schools will adopt the new funding plan at the end of three years.

A concern raised by board member Steve Zimmer was how the district identifies low-income and high poverty schools that are at the top of the list for receiving resources from new budget.

“When we consider level of risk and peril our student are living in, should we just consider the free and reduced lunch application or other indicators of poverty?” he wanted to know.

Deasy assured Zimmer the district is constructing a formula that takes factors outside of school into account, including neighborhood crime levels and access to public libraries, a a way to assure that the money follows need.

“You should expect iterations of that to take place over time,” Deasy said. But he added, the district will not wait to help the schools already identified as the most needy.

The superintendent also went out of his way to highlight how many people are going to get hired over the next three years, a key point for the district’s labor partners who have weathered layoffs since the 2008 recession began. More than 1,200 new jobs will be created in the next academic year with the surplus created by LCFF, but new positions will also be paid for by the district’s base budget.

On the subject of raises, which the teachers union has been clamoring for, he told the board they are on the horizon.

“Many employees have not had raises in six to seven years and it’s important to address that,” he said.

LAUSD Supt. John Deasy unveiling budget

The budget proposal LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy will present to the school board tomorrow has won lukewarm responses from three of the district’s biggest labor partners — the teachers union (UTLA), the principals union (AALA) and the support workers union (SEIU Local 99).

After reviewing documents the district released on Friday, each group expressed cautious optimism that Deasy’s fiscal vision for the next three years — boosted by new money from the state — is heading in the right direction but with more that needs to be done.

In short, because the proposal includes new hires and at least a suggestion of raises for current employees, the unions viewed the proposal as potentially good news for their members.

“Superintendent John Deasy’s proposed 2014-2015 budget does not go far enough to help the District’s students or educators, but it is a start,” UTLA said in a statement that seemed to capture the consensus response.

The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents principals and other school administrators, said, “Based on the limited information AALA has to date, it appears the superintendent will bring budget recommendations to the board that will begin to restore services and personnel which are in support of schools and students which were markedly reduced and eliminated over the last six years.” And the SEIU Local 99 said, “While we are encouraged by the District’s strong investment in serving students with special needs, we urge Board Members to build standards in the LCAP to ensure that all students can learn in a clean, safe, healthy and supportive environment.”

LCAP stands for Local Control and Accountability Plan, which every district is developing to account for the new state money.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, who is facing UTLA President Warren Fletcher in a runoff election for union president this month, echoed the moderate tone of his union’s response and called attention to greater needs, saying, “As we urgently try to address the social and emotional needs of our students, prevent drop-out, and prepare students for college in an era of ever-more-restricted college access, LAUSD remains profoundly below the national average in counselors, nurses, librarians, and social workers per student.”

Deasy’s formal presentation of the budget to the six board members tomorrow kicks off a 10-week period in which lobbying, debate and compromise will shape the district’s $6.8 billion budget. It includes an extra $332 million that state requires be spent on helping children from low-income families, foster youth and English learners.

While the budget proposal includes hiring 1,210 new employees — and 3,417 over the next three years — it allows for pay raises but omits any specific numbers, largely because that’s a matter for contract negotiations between the district and its unions.

The UTLA statement took note of that, saying, “What is conspicuously missing is any significant reduction in class sizes across the District. And, this budget does not include any proposed salary increases for employees who have not had a raise in 7 years.”

Caputo-Pearl said the absence of a specific pay raises was “a dramatic blow to retaining excellent educators and stabilizing schools, and to the idea of fairness and equity.”

The budget is the biggest item on tomorrow’s agenda, and a debate among board members is likely to continue until June 17, the deadline for a final LCAP and budget.

Complicating the process is the very real possibility that the debate will play out without an equal voice from District 1. If no candidate wins a majority in the June 3 special election, a winner will not be declared until after an Aug. 12 runoff.

District 1 has a non-voting advisory representative sitting with the board, Sylvia Rousseau, and her input will carry weight in deliberations. But she cannot vote.

Besides the budget, the board has the usual long list of items to consider tomorrow, including a possible vote on a resolution from Steve Zimmer, calling for a non-voting student voice to the board by mid-2015, as part of a wider effort to get input from students on matters before the board.

Superintendent John Deasy

LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy made public today the first draft of a $6.8 billion budget for the 2014-15 school year, a presentation that offered the first glimpse of how the new Local Control Funding Formula is going to work.

The budget will be formally presented to the school board on Tuesday, after which the six current members are expected to engage in a lively debate over how to tweak, change or blow-up Deasy’s initial foray into this year’s budget negotiations. At the same time, interest groups around the city who have already been lobbying the members, are expected to intensify their efforts.

The district is required to have its final version in shape — the Local Control Accountability Plan — for the board’s final approval on June 17.

The budget proposal includes spending plans for an extra $332 million in state funds, which has been the object of intense lobbying from interest groups because much of that money is earmarked to serve students in high needs categories: those from low-income families, English learners and foster youth.

That additional money includes $137 million above the state’s standard per pupil spending.

The district current serves 11,604 children in foster case and 154,110 who are English learners. Overall, 80 percent of all LA Unified students are from low-income families.

While Deasy’s proposal reflects more money for lots of programs and people, including more teachers, nurses, librarians and counselors — it’s probably not enough to satisfy most.

For example, the budget includes money for 1,210 new jobs, many of them teaching positions. Next year, the budget provides for another 1,672 new positions and 534 in the year after that, for a three-year total of 3,417.

It remains to be seen whether those totals will satisfy the various unions whose members are LA Unified employees. UTLA, for example, has made rehiring all teachers laid off prior to the 2008 recession a major objective with a new collective bargaining agreement about to be negotiated.

In a letter to the school board members that accompanied a package of documents that provides details of the budget proposal, Deasy said, “While we are all happy with the new funds, I remind all that even with these new funds we do not have nearly enough to accomplish what we desire or to fully provide youth with a justice-based education in California. Not by a long shot! But it is a start.”

Under his plan, one of the largest allocations of the new money — $85 million — will go directly to schools, distributed in proportion to the target student population. Schools can autonomously decide how to spend that money within the spirit of the funding formula, and they have no impact on additional services provided by the district.

A group of 71 pilot and network partner schools already use the per pupil funding formula so they will continue to operate their budgets independent of the district’s guidelines. And, with the exception of their share of the $85 million, they are opted out of other districtwide initiatives.

Here are a few line item examples from the budget:

• $9.9 million for foster youth. Next year, the district plans to open a series of Family Source Centers and to increase the student counselor/psychiatric worker to student ratio to 1 per 100, which mean 75 new full time employee. Currently the district employes three full time foster care case workers, for more than 8,000 foster youth.
• 15 new librarians and 192 library aides who would work a 3 hour/day
• 60 new middle school teachers, a result of reducing math and English Language Arts class sizes by two students
• 70 new high school teachers using the same formula
• 15 new nurses
• 25 new custodial staff member

Deasy is meeting with reporters to unveil his spending priorities plan for an estimated $390 million the district will receive in extra resources, before he presents it to the school board on Tuesday.

It’ll be the first glimpse of how well (or how poorly) competing interests have lobbied for a piece of the pie, and it’s likely to kick off of an intense debate over dollars as the district — like all school districts in California — formulates its Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) over the next couple of months.

A preview of the pressures came into view today when Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) and various constituencies outlined their wish-list for some of the districts’ neediest schools.

Under the new plan, districts will receive a base grant per student. Beyond that, students who are either low-income, foster youth or English learners earn supplemental money. Additionally, schools with more than 55 percent of low-income students get concentration grants.

Elmer Roldan, education program officer at United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said the group is calling on Deasy to allocate 80 percent of the supplemental and concentration funds for use in educating students with the highest needs.

“Because these students are the reason that LAUSD is receiving this extra funding, then we want that to be the priority for the district,” he said.

United Way is also urging the district to allow spending decisions to be made locally — by principals, teachers and community members  — and not centrally by district officials. Furthermore, they are asking the district to reserve an additional $50 million for foster care services and $25 million for English learners.

Roldan called unfair an argument made by school board members whose districts cover more affluent areas, that the district should invest the extra revenues in districtwide initiatives since more than 80 percent of LAUSD students are high need.

“This would make sense of all kids came into the classroom living in the same conditions with the exact same opportunities, but we know that that’s not the case,” he said.

Angela Vazquez, a policy analyst with the Advancement Project, wants a plan that puts foster youth students front and center. Her group is staging a rally on Monday

As an example of the need, she says there are only three staff people dedicated to serving more than 8,000 foster care students in the district.

“We know that foster youth are the least likely to graduate, the most likely to drop out and the most likely to change schools during the year,” she said. “They face an achievement gap on statewide tests, even compared to other LCFF target populations.”

Once Deasy shares his proposal with the board, the lobbying for priorities is expected to intensify and probably continue until the LCAP plan is complete.

By the current formula, which calculates how much money goes to districts based on student attendance, about $292.4 million will no longer flow to LA Unified’s public schools in the 2014-15 school year.

At a special school board meeting today, during which the board members discussed the district budget for this year and next under California’s new Local Control Funding Formula, Megan Reilly, Chief Financial Officer for LA Unified, said district projections indicate the enrollment problem is only going to get worse.

In the 2015-16 school year the district expects to lose another 2.9 percent of non-charter students, bringing that group’s enrollment down by 72,000 students over two years. It would make it the 12th straight year of enrollment decline.

Reilly attributes the steady loss of students to the increasing popularity of charter schools. “About 44 percent of the movement has been to charters,” she told school board members.

But the majority of the decline is due to demographic changes as Southern California birthrates decline, and people are moving out of the area.

As a result, Reilly warned board members to “pay special attention to the district’s fixed costs which don’t change when enrollment declines.”

“They can start taking up more of your budget,” she said.

That’s especially true when it comes to paying out pensions and health benefits for retirees which continue to grow.

Board member Steve Zimmer tried to provide a ray of sunshine on the gloomy news.

“You’re basing these figures on charter enrollment that we’ve already approved,” he said, perhaps suggesting that the school board may want consider restricting charter application approvals, something the board has been accused of not doing.

Although he acknowledged “we have work to do in terms of children being born,” Zimmer suggested the board could devise strategies to boost enrollment and retain more area students.