A Los Angeles Unified School District reeling from potential layoffs, shrinking enrollment and mounting sexual abuse payouts is without its top boss after an eventful February.
If you haven’t been following the news from the nation’s second-largest school district, you’re in luck. Howard Blume, my colleague and intrepid education reporter, has been documenting the turbulent month.
Enough preamble from me; let’s get into his reporting.
LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho was placed on indefinite administrative leave, officials announced Friday, just two days after FBI agents raided his home and office related to an undisclosed criminal investigation.
Andres Chait, a senior LAUSD administrator who has served as chief of school operations, was named acting superintendent.
The FBI has not accused Carvalho of wrongdoing, but sources told The Times that Carvalho is a target of an investigation into AllHere. The defunct company designed a chatbot unveiled in March 2024 that was quietly withdrawn from limited service within three months — about the time that AllHere collapsed financially.
The length of Carvalho’s leave was not set in a statement released by the board.
For more on the developing situation, check out the full article here or here for more information on the FBI raids.
With costs mounting for alleged sexual misconduct cases, the LAUSD board recently approved $250 million in bonds — on top of $500 million already authorized less than a year ago — to fund payouts to victims.
The cost of both bond issues, including financing, is expected to be more than $1 billion and will be paid out of the district’s general fund over at least a decade. The gradual repayment will lessen an immediate budget strain.
The additional money is needed, said Carvalho, because “we are exhausting funds available to us to satisfy sex and molestation cases that have been brought against the district, in many instances, reflecting cases that go back decades, that the district is not willing — not able — to successfully defend.”
The sex abuse liability is linked to Assembly Bill 218, passed in 2019, which opened a three-year window, concluding at the end of 2022, that allowed adults to file lawsuits over childhood sexual abuse going as far back as the 1940s.
Dozens of cases against L.A. Unified have been settled or dismissed, according to district data. More than 275 claims were active as of the middle of last year, the most recent update provided.
Click here for more about the bonds.
The Los Angeles school board — confronted with deficit spending and an internal forecast of insolvency in three years — narrowly voted to send out 3,200 notices of possible layoffs, launching a process that is expected to result in 657 job cuts.
Even at the lower number, the job losses would be significant in a school system that began the current school year with a $5-billion reserve as part of an $18.8-billion budget. The board vote was 4 to 3.
Despite this large reserve, Carvalho said that the cuts are necessary because the district is spending more than it is taking in — and that the seemingly healthy reserve is expected to disappear within three years.
“Delaying actions would not solve the problem,” Carvalho said during the meeting. “Kicking the can down the road will actually magnify them.”
Carvalho emphasized that the cuts for the next academic year do not include classroom teachers or an increase in class size.
Also, no school closures are in the current budget plan despite an enrollment decline from nearly 500,000 in 2018-19, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to about 390,000 this year.
Click here for more about the layoffs.
(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)
(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by SiriusXM)
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