L.A. Unified’s nearly half-a-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 failed 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 expressed support for Schools and Communities First, a statewide November 2020 ballot measure that would increase commercial property taxes, some of which would go to public schools.

Beutner has repeatedly said new revenue is needed to sustain the three-year teachers’ contract the district signed in January, ending a six-day strike. The district is also looking to address insufficient annual per-pupil funding ($16,000 in L.A. compared to $29,000 in New York, Beutner pointed out). While the district’s $7.8 billion budget is balanced through 2021-22, its surplus is projected to drop from $837 million this year to $10.5 million in 2022.

L.A. Unified

The district intends to collaborate with United Teachers Los Angeles on future funding efforts, Beutner said, adding that, “We all need to work together.” Education Dive reported 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 L.A. Times reported last week.

Board District 4’s Nick Melvoin told the Times that the system could be in effect by October. It isn’t a sure-fire 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 spoke out passionately at school board meetings in June and even filed 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 reporting requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act or goes beyond the mandates of the federal K-12 education law.

● Read more: Parton: School-Level Spending Data Is Coming Under ESSA. Here Are 5 Things States Must Focus on When Creating Their New Report Cards

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

Local District East and Local District South — two of L.A. Unified’s six local districts — are piloting Beutner’s recently unveiled “The Work Ahead” plan. The plan entails restructuring local districts into six “communities of schools,” which officials say shifts power away from the traditional centralized bureaucracy and prioritizes 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.

Color-coded communities of schools in LD East and LD South. (L.A. Unified)

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.

Read more in depth about the plan here.

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 on this site 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 1505 and 1507. 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.

California charter school regulations pass Senate Education Committee after marathon session and intervention by Gov. Newsom

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 one in six 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 it would instead bar more marginalized students from attending.

Access already isn’t universal, with less than half 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 filed by two parents 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 in a Monday news release. 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 voted to study the possibility of using district property to house homeless students and their families, despite split public opinion. A district spokeswoman said Friday that staff “is currently finalizing the report,” which the resolution had initially requested be done by May.

● New safety policy: The school board in June voted to eliminate 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 in April 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.

A group of parents, including Mariela Lepe, in red sweater, received help from Choice 4 LA with applying to LA Unified’s magnet programs. Lepe attended a roundtable discussion in December that was organized by Parent Revolution to share their experiences with the new unified enrollment system.

A record number of parents this year are trying to get into LA Unified’s magnet and dual-language programs, and for the first time, they were able to use a new unified enrollment system that simplifies the application process. District officials said most parents who used the online system gave positive feedback. But some parents encountered errors while others needed outside support to navigate it.

The new enrollment system allows parents to fill out a single online application for the 260 magnet schools and programs and the 132 dual language and bilingual programs, the district’s popular “choice” programs that allow students to attend an LA Unified school other than their neighborhood school. Independent charter schools in LA Unified were not included in the unified enrollment system. 

More than 62,000 applications were received during the month-long open enrollment window in October, up 14 percent from the previous year. Magnet applications increased 6 percent, to 54,000.

Of particular importance for a district struggling with persistent declining enrollment, 18 percent of the applications were for students not currently enrolled in LA Unified. The district is losing about 12,000 students a year as rising rents force families out of the city, birth rates decline, and growing numbers choose charter schools. Expanding its magnet and dual language programs is a key district strategy to retain and attract families.

George Bartleson, chief of the district’s Office of School Choice, credited the increase in applications to the “faster, more intuitive, and mobile friendly” way to apply.

Including bilingual programs also contributed to the increase, he said. The district received 4,200 applications for dual-language programs for the 2018-19 school year. And it expects that number to rise through this spring as applications continue to come in through the spring application window, which opened Feb. 1. The number of dual language programs in the district has more than doubled in the past five years. Last year there were 101 programs, and 31 more are being added throughout the district this spring. The number of seats available in dual-language programs for next year are still being determined.

There are 34,463 magnet seats available for the 2018-19 school year; about 1 in 3 applicants to a magnet program were accepted last year. Students who aren’t awarded their first choice may be placed in their second or third choice selections. Some parents apply to magnet schools they do not want to attend in order to accrue wait-list points.

LA Unified has been aggressively growing both its magnet schools and dual-language programs, as their magnets have been proven to outperform district neighborhood schools and charter schools, and research shows that dual-language programs are the most effective model to educate students who have limited English skills.

Bartelson said 87 percent of the applicants gave positive feedback when submitting their applications, but some parents ran into problems.

“It has been a frustrating process,” said Christina Nairn of Westchester, whose son attends Open Charter Magnet, which is both a charter and a magnet school, so she already was familiar with the district’s application process. But when she tried to enroll her daughter for kindergarten at the school, her application was kicked back.

“I don’t remember the application being different. I filled it out the same way I did last year. I made sure everything was correct, so I was very surprised when I got a letter from the district in December, saying that my application was void because my daughter was not eligible for the grade I applied for,” Nairn said. “I also noticed they were not giving me the ‘sibling points’ I was supposed to get. Then I thought, there’s something really wrong.”

She believes those two mistakes in her application could have been fixed over the phone, and despite waiting an hour and a half on hold, it still hasn’t been fixed. She was told by the district employee who took her call that she had to send a correction request by certified mail. She mailed the document Jan. 10 and has yet to receive a response.

“It made me upset that they were not able to correct it faster. And I heard I wasn’t the only one.”

Nairn said the magnet program coordinator at the school she is applying to told her she was not alone, as there were many complaints about the sibling points issue and the grade levels. “She even told me she had her own list of corrections to submit to the district. Mistakes happen, I just hope next year they are able to make it a lot less frustrating.”

Bartelson said he wasn’t aware of any technical glitches during the enrollment period. “If there were any problems or errors, our office is working on those already.”

Other parents, like Mariela Lepe from South LA, couldn’t even get into the system by herself.

“I always heard that the magnets are the best options for children like my daughter, but every time I intended to fill out an application I got discouraged because I wouldn’t know how to fill it out and no one at school would help me, ” she said. “That’s why when Ruth told me she could do the online application for me and come to my home, I thought It was too good to be true.”

Ruth Olivares is a community organizer with Parent Revolution, a parent advocacy organization in Los Angeles that helps families in underserved communities navigate the school choice process by evaluating school quality, understanding their options, and applying for schools. Through the group’s Choice4LA program, she helped Lepe use the new unified enrollment system.

“So far we haven’t met a parent who doesn’t want to explore school options for her kids,” said Olivares during a parent roundtable organized by Parent Revolution in December.

Choice4LA helped 450 families complete 350 applications in the fall using the new unified enrollment system, said Seth Litt, executive director of Parent Revolution. “About 80 percent of those families did not know about any of their options before engagement.”

With help, Lepe was able to apply to a magnet program for her fourth-grade daughter, Jazmine. The idea of having Jazmine attend a high-quality school moved Lepe to tears.

“I know my daughter deserves to excel in a good school. I can’t wait to know my application was accepted,” the mom said in Spanish.

A second application window opened Feb. 1 for slots that are still remaining, and parents can apply through the echoices website. They will begin to be notified in mid-March. Those who applied online will receive notifications in their apply.lausd.net parent account. Parents who submit a paper application will receive a letter in the mail.

Parents can request free, personalized support to find quality public schools for their children through the Choice4LA program at https://choice4la.org.

The late application window is now open for Magnet and Dual Language/Bilingual programs. Apply now for Magnet and Bilingual Schools at https://t.co/2W1bTHGUdm pic.twitter.com/2juyV7XuKz

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) February 6, 2018

As a one-stop portal, it’s designed to give parents access to real time student information and district resources as well as services that are specific to their children to help them better support their child’s success in the classroom.

Through PASSport, parents and guardians will also be able to access a variety of online tools where parents can monitor attendance, view grades and assignments, track standardized test results, submit online forms and applications for district programs, and help guide their student in preparing for and graduating from high school. Parents will be able to email their teacher with questions or concerns.

“One of the biggest hurdles for parents to obtain information is navigating the numerous offices responsible for all of services offered throughout our district,” LAUSD’s Chief Operating Officer Enrique Boull’t told LA School Report.

“After an initial registration similar to an online banking experience, LAUSD PASSport links the parents’ children to them and follows them throughout the resources connected in the application,” he added.

Boull’t said that PASSport will make the application process for school meals and volunteer programs easier because forms will be pre-populated, saving parents time in completing the application.

But PASSport also assists schools, allowing parents to update their phone and emergency contact information online, eliminating the need to have an administrator enter the information into the system.

Boull’t said that the PASSport represents the district’s new approach for entering, managing, analyzing and reporting all data connected to any student. It’s part of the district’s larger effort to increase parent participation in their children’s academic growth.

“Most schools utilized their websites to share activities happening on their campuses, but very few were interactive and provided live information pertaining to attendance, assignments and progress toward graduation,” he said.

The district, which leveraged existing resources for PASSport, had the parents in mind when designing the site, Boull’t said.

“The design was totally parent-driven based on focus group responses to what our parents felt was most important for them to stay connected with their children and schools,” he explained, adding, “Our District is 100 percent committed in involving our parents in their children’s education. Obviously, the best way for parents to be engaged at school is for them to be informed on what and how their children are performing in school.

“We believe LAUSD PASSport will assist them with this effort.”