EDUCATION LA - The LAUSD filed lawsuit on Wednesday opposing California’s trigger cuts to school bus transportation.
It sounds like a horror movie: Thousands of students stranded on the sidewalks of Los Angeles and surrounding cities with no way to get to school. Yet, that is what the State is pressing us to do. We have been told by Governor Jerry Brown to live within our means.
LAUSD cannot afford one more single solitary cut. We live within our means every single day and yet the cuts keep coming year after year because the money isn’t available from Sacramento to fund education.
California legislators bet that our state’s economy would improve and that if it didn’t, there would be trigger cuts as a consequence. The financial picture improved but not enough to spare us from the worst of the trigger cuts. The State is cutting $38 million from our home to school transportation services, effective Jan.1, 2012. Next July, the state is wiping out the home to school transportation budget entirely.
This cut impacts our neediest students. It is also unconstitutional as it effectively creates an untenable choice: cut services that we must provide based on the 1981 court order in Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles, which brought about desegregation programs like the Magnet Schools and Permits with Transportation, or cut federally mandated services to our Special Education students.
So, which students should we serve and which should we turn away? The answer: We must serve all students.
That is why we filed a lawsuit against the State to block these cuts and seek a temporary restraining order as they hinder our ability to provide equal education services to every student.
We will stand together with our students to say enough is enough.
(Monica Garcia is the President of the Los Angeles Board of Education.) -cw
Tags: education, schools, Los Angeles, LAUSD, trigger cuts, school bussing, school bus transportation, law suit, unconstitutional
CityWatch
Vol 9 Issue 100
Pub: Dec 16, 2011
