Under SCF "John F. Kennedy Senior High School in Granada Hills would lose the most, more than $3 million." - Capital And Main
John F. Kennedy Senior High School was built to ease overcrowding at Granada Hills High School, which at the time was a high-performing public school operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Today, the two schools serve student bodies that are vastly different despite the fact that they are only three miles apart. By discouraging the enrollment of children with special education needs, Granada Hills, which converted into a charter school, has managed to limit this population to 8.5% of its student body. As a public school, Kennedy accepts all students and 12.5% of its population has these needs. Granada's enrollment practices have created obstacles for families that are experiencing homelessness while the LAUSD has a unit that searches for unhoused students and provides them with additional resources, resulting in a higher percentage of these students at Kennedy. There is also a higher percentage of English learners at Kennedy.
The two schools approach the challenge of educating students with special education needs very differently. While Granada reportedly separates its students with severe special education needs from the rest of the school with a chain-link fence, Kennedy has an inclusion program that integrates students with their general education peers. Granada claims that 100% of its "students take three years of mathematics and two years of foreign language A-G coursework." Kennedy has classrooms that support children with moderate to severe disabilities who require training in life skills to help them reach their full potential.
Given the federal government's failure to fully fund special education, the district's costs for providing these programs are paid for by taking money from the general education budget. This puts schools like Kennedy that step up to the challenge of educating every student, regardless of need or likelihood to achieve high test scores, at a budgetary disadvantage. To compete with a charter school like Granada that can cherry-pick its student body, they need access to additional funding. Instead, the district is set to reduce the school's funding.
With a board majority controlled by the charter school industry, LAUSD has embarked on a funding plan that will cut Kennedy's budget by more than $3 million. This school's administration will not be the only one scrambling to fill holes in their budget under Betsy DeVos' Student Centered Funding (SCF) scheme. Particularly hard hit will be the schools in communities that were most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the schools with 95% to 100% of students qualifying for free lunch, 29 will lose money under SCF.
This right-wing scheme to defund public education is so toxic to the public that the LAUSD School Board hastily canceled a vote last week that would have given permission for the district to seek exemptions from Title I that are needed to fully implement the SCF. The lack of a vote has not stopped LAUSD bureaucrats from forging ahead with the plan. Even without approval from the elected school board, the district's website still states that SCF is "beginning in the 2022-23 school year".
The effort to implement Betsy DeVos' plan is being led by Erik Johnson, who came to Los Angeles via Denver. When Johnson helped implement this funding scheme in Denver, it resulted in a teacher turnover rate of 20% and "schools that [did not] have full-time nurses in the middle of COVID."
Johnson is being well compensated for his work in depriving our neediest public schools of funding. His initial contract as a consultant for the district lasted from May 15, 2020, to October 29, 2020, for which he was paid $211,200, an amount just under the $250,000 that would have subjected the contract to more board scrutiny. The contract was then extended through December 31, 2020, for an additional $70,400. On an annualized basis this contract is for more than $466,204. It was funded mostly with COVID-relief funds.
Knowing that they are facing the voters next year, it is understandable that Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez do not want a vote on this proposal to be on the record. However, allowing the bureaucrats to continue implementing the DeVos plan is a cowardly act that seeks to avoid blame for the damage that will be inflicted on schools like Kennedy. It is time to put Kids First and rein in the overreaching bureaucracy that is supposed to be implementing the policy set by the board, not developing their own.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for students with special education needs and public education. He is an elected member of the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and serves as the Education Chair. 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.
