During this season of fiscal blood-letting and drastic budget slashing, KCET’s SoCal Connected thought it was worth questioning LAUSD’s $20 billion dollar school construction binge.
We know that many of the district’s schools are sorely in need of upgrading, and there is still over-crowding on middle and high school campuses. We also know that there are LA charter schools that have being denied the district facilities they were promised by law.
But are huge building projects really the best use of limited funds when district enrollment has fallen and continues to fall, and when the district is planning to lay off thousands of teachers?
The questions are complicated since dedicated school bond money cannot be used for much else. Yet not all the high costs of building are not covered by the bond money. There is, for example, the matter of the outside consultant boondoggle that was reported late last month.
And there are other issues. For instance there is the controversial elementary school building project in Echo Park, where So Cal Connected found that several local elementary schools have empty classrooms due to drops in enrollment. This has caused unhappy residents to wonder why the district needed to force them from their houses using eminent domain in order to construct a school that may or may not have been needed.
LAUSD Superintendent Ray Cortines and other school officials bring up the fact that the construction programs create jobs at a moment when jobs are in desperately short supply.
A fair point. but one that would be a lot more persuasive if so many teachers were not in danger of losing their jobs.
The show airs Thursday night at 8 p.m. and Friday at 8:30 p.m.
You can also watch SoCal Connected online here.
Well, that’s government for you, wrecklessly feeding at the trough of the taxpayers and our kids. Don’t expect these people to solve problems in our schools.
The building program may not have been as well managed as one would like, but there are still schools on the year-round calendar. Remember, these schools were planned years ago based on current and projected enrollments. Some LAUSD kids have left for charters, but there have also been many families that have left L.A. due to the high cost of living. Those two factors account for the enrollment dip, but just as numbers have fallen, they can also rise again.
I’m not sure that any of the costs Celeste mentioned came from the general fund, and the bond funds cannot be used for anything other than school construction.
In a program this large, with the school age population always in flux, there was always a danger of overbuilding toward the end of the program. Worst case scenario: Move kids from old campuses to new ones and mothball the old schools rather than upgrade them.
They could bus a bunch of rich white kids into the ghettos to utilize vacant desks. Another great liberal solution.
Woody, you sound like Rush Limbaugh’s parrot. Do you ever say anything of substance?