Category: Budget

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?

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

Portfolio Management At LAUSD: Private Security, Promotional Hats, Outsourced Instruction, No-Bid HighTech Contracts

In mid-May, 2020 the LAUSD board reviewed the Deputy Superintendent’s weekly lists of purchases and contracts for March 16-May 8, 2020, part of “the $540m in expenditures for Covid19” approved through the LA County Office of Education (LACOE).

That $314m is detailed below, authorized under the emergency conditions declared two months earlier at the board’s special meeting of March 10, 2020. This is also when last the board met in regular session prior to 5/19/20; three days later the District shuttered ordinary operations on March 13, 2020.

Under this “Emergency Resolution” the Superintendent may “…enter into necessary contracts to respond to emergency conditions.” That is, these expenditures are subject to neither venerable bidding protocols that control waste, fraud and abuse, nor oversight by the school board, which sets District policy. LACOE now approves these expenditures but according to what directives?

Continue reading “Portfolio Management At LAUSD: Private Security, Promotional Hats, Outsourced Instruction, No-Bid HighTech Contracts”