June 2020 – Los Angeles Education Examiner

This Week’s Headlines: School’s Out for Summer, How Should It Reopen?, and #DefundTheLASPD

If we thought the 2018-2019 school year was a weird one, we had no idea what this past school year would have in store. It started out normal, and then the virus hit, and two months later people were in the streets asking for the school police to be disbanded.

But the school year is finally over, with classes not scheduled to start again until August 18. In the meantime, Summer school will start next week, The Grab & Go program will continue through the summer, and parents are being asked to take this survey with their opinions on when and how schools should re-open.

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers estimates it will cost $116 billion to open schools safely across the county before a return can be thought about.

UTLA Calls For School Board To Defund The Police (LASPD)

Yesterday, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Board of Directors voted on a motion demanding that the school board de-fund the Los Angeles Schools Police Department (LASPD), the largest school police department in the country. While the full details of the motion and its reach are not public information as of this writing, UTLA has a long history of supporting major reforms in school policing and the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles.

The vote can be understood as support for the Black Lives Matter protests. Concern for the experience of our BIPOC students everywhere – in our schools and on our streets – has taken over the discourse across the country following the murder of George Floyd and the eruption of police brutality in response to protests.

The UTLA is hardly alone in calling for radical changes, or even a complete abolition, of the LASPD. Groups such as the Community Corporation of South Los Angeles, the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, Students Deserve, and the Labor Community Strategy Center (known for projects such as Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in L.A. High Schools and the Bus Riders Union) have been working for change in how middle and high schools mediate behavioral issues with students for years. And that change would include either de-funding or completely abolishing the school police.

The LAUSD Budget Under Covid: An “Economy of Care” or of Institutional Protection?

Now we have seen manifest the power of budgets.

In the wake of the profoundly inequitable calamity of Covid19, has grown an international paroxysm that Black Lives Matter. In Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti is calling for “$250 million in cuts from city departments, including the LAPD, … steer[ing] the funds to invest in job programs, health initiatives and other services supporting the Black community and other communities of color.” And since it is the city council that is in charge of the purse, more weighty still is a resolution from Council President Martinez co-introduced with CD10’s Wesson and CD9’s Price instructing identification of least $100m-$150m to be cut specifically from LAPD’s budget.

The teacher’s union board, UTLA, has voted to reallocate school police funding.

So it is that a budget is proverbially “a political document”: what politics are reflected in Superintendent Beutner’s Revised May 2020 Budget for LAUSD?

In a Big News Week, Updated Schools and Communities First Quietly Qualifies for the November Ballot

Back in April, backers of Schools and Communities First submitted a record-breaking 1.7 million signatures to the Secretary of State to qualify the funding measure for the fall ballot. While the state had to verify the signatures, less than 1 million were needed so it was all-but-certain the measure would earn its ballot spot.

And over the weekend, the state made it official. Schools and Communities First will be on the ballot.

“With the steep cuts in our county budget we’ll be faced with really difficult decisions that will jeopardize people’s access to these critically needed services,” writes Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheilia Kuehl.