“Stronger Schools Together”: LAUSD’s Smokescreen for Keeping Families Ignorant
LAUSD - Superintendent Andrés Chait unveiled LA Unified’s new public awareness campaign on upcoming campus closures—a sugar-coated request for community input which ignores the underlying financial realities requiring massive staff layoffs and operational restructuring—without acknowledging how labor contract raises impacted the bottom line.
How can parents and community members provide coherent input on potential school closures when they don’t have the facts—in hard dollars and cents—of how we got here and the extent of the financial hole?
Parents were not directly notified that the Los Angeles Unified School District has a formal plan, conditionally approved by its county supervisor, to cut 5,690 full-time equivalent positions and reduce expenditures by $2.4 billion over the next two school years. Parents were not told that LAUSD was assigned a Fiscal Expert, a direct supervisor from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, to provide advisory input to the financial restructuring process.
Source: LAUSD’s 2026-27 Adopted Budget / Fiscal Stabilization Plan
Parents were not told the county called the LAUSD Board of Education’s approval of labor contracts a “severe fiscal event” after they granted unaffordable raises to teachers and other staff to avoid a labor strike this past April. This was the last straw which caused LACOE to designate the district as “Lack of Going Concern”—an accounting term which indicates lack of financial stability and questions its ability to meet financial obligations.
These are significant financial events, yet LAUSD keeps parents in the dark about the history and the upcoming impact to students.
The clock is ticking. By October 8th, LAUSD must submit a revised plan to LACOE detailing timelines for implementation of the layoffs and all the other budget cuts.
In the meantime, the “Stronger Schools Together” campaign launched via a video to parents and a board presentation.
Source: LAUSD’s “Stronger Schools Together” Presentation September 22, 2026
Superintendent Chait paints potential campus closures as a benefit to students attending under-resourced, low-enrollment schools lacking economies of scale. He blames decreasing enrollment for program limitations at certain campuses and states the new goal is for “stronger”, “well-staffed”, but fewer schools. He makes commitments to transparency and says they will listen to parent input prior to making decisions.
But he doesn’t tell parents how much the April salary increases cost or how they impacted the financial meltdown. He doesn’t tell parents that LAUSD pays the entirety of health benefits for employees AND their families. He doesn’t tell parents that LAUSD staffed up using temporary Covid dollars, knowing they would have to cut those positions when the money ran out.
The icing on this cake are the options presented for repurposed campuses. On offer are affordable housing, parks, daycares—all on the taxpayers’ dime. There is no acknowledgement that these options come with costs, costs which cause more of the same high tax burden responsible for the high cost of living blamed for decreasing enrollment—as we cycle further into the economic and social quagmire.
Source: LAUSD’s “Stronger Schools Together” Presentation, September 22, 2026
Where is that transparency without financial data? The slideshow presented to the Board of Education on September 22nd included not a single dollar amount. LAUSD staff stated this will be the same slideshow for the upcoming parent meetings.
LAUSD is asking parents to tell them what they feel, what they would prefer, like children in a candystore… without a grounding in cold, hard facts.
Facts don’t have feelings, but people have feelings about facts. When financial facts are withheld, uninformed conclusions are reached and actions are taken based on feelings. Elected officials later call these “unintended consequences”, not having learned the basic economic principle that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Are we supposed to believe there are educators running LAUSD?
(Maria Luisa Palma is the founder and Executive Director of Oleada, Inc., a non-profit organization which promotes parent involvement in Los Angeles public schools, and a former federal and state financial industry regulator.)
