LAUSD students head back to school. Ambition is high but enrollment is down and money is tight

As another Los Angeles Unified school year starts Wednesday, district leaders say they hope to maintain recent academic progress while they also contend with a series of budget cuts needed to make ends meet.

“The decisions will be hard, but we cannot lose sight of what defines us,” said Andrés Chait, the district’s new superintendent, in a July speech kicking off the start of the new academic year. “We are the system that lifts students to opportunity, turns potential into achievement, creates spaces of belonging, healing [and] growth.”

The country’s second-largest school district resumes classes as federal immigration raids continue along with the detention of area parents and children.

What we are hearing

For the most part, LAUSD students told LAist they’re experiencing the usual mix of nerves and excitement associated with the first day of school.

They’re also aware that local and national politics are reshaping their education, including who is in the classroom.

Andrea, a sophomore at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School in Lincoln Heights, said there were days last year when so many students were absent that teachers would pause their lessons.

“What’s the point of teaching it if half the class is gone?” Andrea said. “That really makes everybody behind.”

Educators have patrolled the neighborhood near Andrea’s school to notify families of any ICE activity nearby.

“That definitely made us feel more safe and more respected in the school,” she said. Throughout the year, she noticed more of her peers return to class.

A looming shortfall

LAUSD’s spending is budgeted to exceed revenue by $2 billion this school year. For the third consecutive year, the district plans to pay the difference with reserves that were largely built up by one-time federal pandemic relief dollars.

The district’s financial projections show LAUSD will be short $231 million by November 2027.

The L.A. County Office of Education, which oversees the finances of local districts, intervened in July after the board approved new labor contracts for LAUSD’s largest unions.

“The financial reality before the District raises serious concerns regarding its ability to meet its financial obligations,” wrote Debra Duardo, L.A. County Superintendent of Schools, in a July 2 letter.

If district officials decide to request an emergency loan from the state, it would trigger a rare takeover that would strip LAUSD’s board of decision-making power and likely take years to undo.

The county appointed a fiscal advisor to the district, but did not grant that person the authority to override the board or superintendent’s decisions.

The county directed LAUSD to provide more details about the district’s plan to stabilize the budget through $3.6 billion in cuts spread out over three years. District officials said their plan envisions furloughs for all employees in the 2027-28 school year — a move that requires negotiating with the unions that represent those employees.

“I think what they expect to see from us… is frankly a prove-up around the fiscal stabilization plan,” Chait said. “They want to see that we can actually implement what we put into that plan.”

District staff have previously said that plans to stabilize the budget could lead to more than 6,000 layoffs, amounting to more than 10% of LAUSD’s current workforce.

One unknown is how future state funding will change the district’s budget projections. While California education funding has risen in recent years, the state plans to hold back $3.9 billion for schools and community colleges in the most recent budget.

“No one is asking the state for anything more or less than what we are due,” Chait said. “We are not asking for a handout.”

New, but familiar leadership

Though Chait is new to the district’s top job, he is familiar to many from his nearly three-decade tenure as a district educator and administrator.

District principals greeted Chait with a standing ovation at his first opening-of-schools address in July.

“As I was preparing for this talk, I was thinking about how to introduce myself,” Chait told a crowd of several hundred administrators at James A. Garfield High School. “But then I realized you don’t introduce yourself to family.”

Chait highlighted preliminary results from the state’s standardized reading and math tests that show a third consecutive year of improvements.

However, even with that progress, the majority of students do not meet the benchmark for either subject. It’s unclear how LAUSD’s performance compares to the state because those results have yet to be released.

Chait is the first LAUSD insider to serve as superintendent in a decade. His hire came after two high-profile external hires — Alberto Carvalho, a former Miami schools leader, and Austin Beutner, an investment banker and former publisher of the L.A. Times.

LAUSD’s elected seven-member board, which has the final say on the district’s financial decisions, is unchanged. Voters re-elected incumbents to this year’s three board races from a sparse field of candidates in June’s primary contest.

Ongoing enrollment challenges

LAUSD is projected to enroll 378,000 students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade this school year.

As birth rates decline, fewer students are enrolling at schools throughout the state. The drop in enrollment is steeper in areas with high costs of living, such as L.A.

California funds schools based on an average of how many students show up to class each day, with additional money for every student in the district who is low-income, an English-language learner, unhoused or a foster youth. Over time, fewer students could lead to less funding.

District leaders attributed last school year’s larger-than-expected drop in students to the “fear and instability” associated with federal immigration raids.

Even students who continued to attend school reported changing their behavior in response to the raids.

Alvira, a junior at Lake Balboa College Preparatory Magnet K-12, is an immigrant from Bangladesh. She started carrying a photocopy of her passport until she could get a REAL ID.

“Just in case anything happens, I can prove that I’m a citizen,” Alvira said.