LAUSD students participate in the optional “acceleration day” during spring break on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at Liggett Street Elementary School in Panorama City. Third grade students at work early Tuesday in teacher, Joanna Fellbaum’s class. The Los Angeles Unified School District adopted an $18.4 billion budget on Tuesday, June 25, staving off layoffs, maintaining funding for mental health support and Black student achievement initiatives, and increasing funds for arts education.
On the first day of the spring semester LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho leaves a New Year’s resolution at Carpenter Community Charter School in Studio City on Monday, Jan. 8, 2024. A LAUSD school bus outside an elementary school on May 11, 2023. Another cost-cutting measure by the district is a reduction of the percent of “carryover funds,” which refer to the unused money that a school is allowed to keep from one year to the next.
The district expects to see 403,000 students enrolled in the 2024-25 school year, losing 83,000 students since the pre-pandemic 2018-19 school year when 486,000 students attended. Because funding for schools is based on enrollment and student attendance, the dwindling student numbers pose a challenge for district leadership.
“ is something that school districts are grappling with, because if you have fewer students, you have lower funding,” Lafortune said. “Eventually, you have to downsize, and I think the problem becomes, how do you do that efficiently?” Despite these fiscal challenges, the district is committed to zero layoffs, and has avoided them in part by eliminating many vacant positions and reassigning some employees to different roles or schools.
Blanca Gallegos, a representative of SEIU Local 99 Education Workers, which includes LAUSD service staff, said, “Staffing levels are key, and maintaining and ensuring that there’s sufficient staffing for student services is important to us. Even with the wage increases that workers won, they’re still at poverty level. We are working to address that and believe that the district’s budget needs to address that as well.
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