LAUSD Candidate Forum: Governance

“I fundamentally believe that school based decision making is crucial to academic success.”

– BD3 Incumbent Scott Schmerelson

In prior months, the Candidate Forum has focused on specific subjects like PROP-39 co-locations and Special Education policies. This bypassed the more basic issue of how the potential candidates for the four contested LAUSD School Board seats feel the District should be governed. For the November edition of this series, the questions focused on how policies are created and then implemented.

The LAUSD covers 710 square miles, more than any other school district in the country. With traffic, it can take hours to get from one edge of the district to the other. It serves the City of Los Angeles, portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County, and several adjoining cities.

The District has 419,749 K-12 students enrolled in 784 schools. It also provides Transitional Kindergarten and Adult Education classes. Only New York City’s school district has more students.

For the 2023 - 2024 school year, the LAUSD’s budget is $ 14.7B. This is larger than the budget of the City of Los Angeles.

The bureaucracy needed to run a District of this size is massive. Some argue that education could be delivered more efficiently if the District was broken up. The candidates were asked:

• Do you agree with the statement: “The bureaucracy of the LAUSD is too big to be managed effectively.”?

One alternative to breaking up the District is to increase the number of Board Members. Currently, each Board Member represents over a half of a million people. Could they provide better representation if this number was reduced? The candidates were asked:

• Should the number of Board Districts be increased beyond the existing seven?

A frequent complaint is that Board Members offload too much of their responsibilities to the unelected Superintendent. To help understand how the candidates view the relationship between the Board and the Superintendent, they were asked:

• Would you agree with the statement: “The elected LAUSD Board is responsible for setting policy. The job of the Superintendent is to ensure that the bureaucracy follows this policy.”?

Currently, the Board evaluates the Superintendent monthly during its closed-door meeting without the public knowing what criteria are being used. To find out if candidates believe that this policy should continue they were asked:

• Do you think that the evaluation of the Superintendent’s job performance is something that the school board should do in full view of the public?

To increase opportunities for the public to engage with the Board during its meetings, I proposed the “Board Meeting Accessibility to the Public” resolution. This proposal would ensure that meetings are not held during school hours so that parents, teachers, and students could participate. The candidates were asked if they would support this idea:

• If elected would you introduce the proposed “Board Meeting Accessibility to the Public” resolution?

The candidates were asked to reply with a “Yes” or a “No.” The following charts summarize their answers:

The candidates were also given the opportunity to clarify their answers. These are available in the following articles:

Board District 1:

• John Aaron Brasfield

Board District 3:

• Andreas Farmakalidis
• Janie Dam
• Scott Schmerelson

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Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.