In an interview with LA School Report in early May, Carvalho said he was confident 30 schools will offer classes in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab — a not-for-profit program that brings remote classes taught by professors and facilitated by high school teachers to low-income schools across the country. 

As of last week, 15 LAUSD high schools had signed up, according to officials at the National Education Equity Lab. But an LAUSD spokesperson said just 10 schools are registered to offer the classes.

“Now that we have an established footprint, we can rapidly scale up,” Carvalho said early last month. “And I see no problem with actually reaching that goal … considering the needs and demands so far, [the] goal of 30 is a very tangible goal and aligned with our strategic plan goals that are rapidly expansive, high-level choice opportunities for students.”

When Carvalho first arrived in 2022, seven schools offered National Education Equity Lab courses, he said. This past semester, classes were offered at nine schools, said John Dixon, the National Education Equity Lab’s senior director of high school partnerships. 

High schools have until the end of June to sign up to offer the classes, said Dixon. 

Last year, Carvalho said he planned to “forcefully” expand the district’s partnership with the National Education Equity Lab. At the time, he lauded the partnership as a way to bring families back into L.A. Unified and boost enrollment. For the 2022-2023 school year, enrollment dipped by nearly 2% — a continued decline from recent years but not as bad as the 4.1% drop that was projected.

Carvalho told LA School Report he sees the partnership as a way to guarantee students have increased graduation rates, opportunities for academic enrichment and post-secondary success. 

“National Education Equity Lab provides just that,” he said. “Our students really have an opportunity to catapult ahead through meaningful, high-level, rigorous coursework. It also allows them to experience and visualize what their post-secondary careers can be through college instructors through the support of Los Angeles Unified staff.”

At the Miami-Dade County school district, Carvalho doubled the number of schools in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab from 11 high schools to more than 20.

LAUSD’s partnership with the not-for-profit began in 2019, but was formalized last November with a contract that will expire in 2025. Five different courses were offered through the partnership last year including “Introduction to Computer Science” through Stanford University, “Map of the Modern World” through Georgetown University and “Introduction to Microeconomics” through Barnard College. 

Earlier this year, the National Education Equity Lab announced a partnership with the University of California system. 

Now that the contract is in place, there is a formal process for incorporating National Education Equity Lab courses into school schedules for students to choose from and receive high school and college credit, according to Dixon. 

Prior to the contract, there had been issues with classes not being offered in some master course lists or during the school day, leading to the most motivated students signing up and some teachers being the ones to select their own students. 

Last year, LAUSD and National Education Equity Lab officials promised that all partnership classes in the 2022-2023 would be held during the school day in order to be accessible to all students. However, at Santee High School courses remain outside of school hours, according to Dixon.

“The expectation at the lab is that 100% of our schools are going to offer the courses during the school day,” Dixon said. “Depending on if there are some challenges with teacher capacity or teacher shortages, there are times when we might have to make an exception … that was the case for Santee, but we are working with the district and with the school to ensure that all of our schools in LA are running the courses during the school day.”

Carvalho said the early scheduling kink, which was partially there because of time zone differences, has been worked through.

 “We were able to iron out those challenges and we have not had a challenge since then,” he said.  

Dixon said that one of the major obstacles the district and National Education Equity Lab have had to work through is ensuring that university timelines for approving courses align with when students need to select courses and enroll. Carvalho said the district’s ability to scale up the program is limited only by the slots available from partnered universities, but he hopes it becomes a major facet of the district’s strategic plan.

“It is ultimately our goal to ensure that every single high school students in every single high school has an opportunity to enroll in high level, rigorous coursework that allows them to graduate on time but also simultaneously earn college credit — whether that is through dual enrollment programs here locally, through Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or the National Education Equity Lab offerings,” he said.

Earlier this year, an LAUSD senior enrolled in a Stanford computer science course through the National Education Equity Lab earned the highest score in the nation and received college credit she will use in her plans to enroll in a university next fall. 

“At the end of the day, what this comes down to is really helping our scholars see themselves and the opportunities that they have available to them and expanding what they know to be possible for themselves, for others within their communities,” said Ariel Murphy Bedford, the chief academic and impact officer at the National Education Equity Lab. “Ninety-nine percent of our teachers who we’ve surveyed have mentioned that offerings have prepared their students to be ready for college level work.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.

Projected on the whiteboard are clip art images of a gold coin and a pot of gold against a rainbow background. St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, and the students at the neighborhood school in Venice are getting ready. 

The story goes like this: A leprechaun has two pots of gold, each with ten coins in it. 

So far, so good. The students have seen this type of problem before. But their teacher, Adriana Mackavoy, adds a twist. In addition to the pots, the leprechaun has three extra coins. 

“I see those looks you guys are giving me,” says Mackavoy. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.” 

With two pots of ten, plus three extra, how many coins does the leprechaun have? 

Compared to California’s math standards, the multi-step problem is relatively complex for a kindergartner. But some students solve it quickly. A girl in a faux-sheepskin vest displays her worksheet, which consists of a drawing — two clusters of ten circles, with three on the side — and her answer: 23. 

Her tablemate, however, is stuck. 

He stares at the worksheet, his blond bangs in his face. He’s gotten most of the way there — he knows there are 20 gold coins in the pots. But the extra bit isn’t making sense. The school’s principal, who’s observing, kneels down to help, but at no point intervenes to show the boy how to solve the problem.

And that is quite intentional. 

Coeur d’Alene is one of 220 elementary and preschools at LAUSD in a nearly $6 million pilot math program called Cognitively Guided Instruction, or CGI. Administered through a partnership with the UCLA Mathematics Project, CGI trains teachers to let student instincts guide math class, often resulting in hands-off instruction.

LAUSD’s 2022-26 Strategic Plan calls for moving elementary and middle school students an average of 40 points closer to proficiency in math on the Smarter Balanced Assessment. 

And L.A. Unified’s continued investment in CGI comes as districts nationwide try to recover after math scores saw unprecedented declines during the pandemic.

The district would like to expand CGI. But there are doubts about the wisdom of making young learners with little math foundation solve new problems with minimal guidance. The debate echoes the recent reckoning over balanced literacy, an approach to reading instruction that often deemphasized basic skills like phonics. 

LAUSD board members are asking for evidence that CGI improves math achievement at pilot schools. So far, there isn’t any. In fact, as in all district elementary schools, math scores at CGI locations remain low. 

Beyond L.A. Unified, education researchers say that a student-guided approach like CGI, when taken to an extreme, can be less effective for struggling learners than more explicit, step-by-step instruction.

“Is it fair to let some students flounder while other students succeed when we know that with just a little bit of teacher intervention or teacher modeling, all students could likely succeed?” said Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas-Austin who spends a lot of time with math students like the kindergartner at Coeur d’Alene. 

Powell is also the founder of an advocacy group that seeks to raise awareness of research-based math instruction — much like the science of reading movement has done for literacy, resulting in efforts to move away from balanced literacy.

There is evidence that CGI, which is primarily a teacher-training program, helps math teachers feel more confident and creative in their practice. Some research into its potential impact on student achievement is ongoing. But Powell points out that it’s hard to measure the effect of teacher training on student performance.

“It’s quite easy to impact the people that you directly work with,” she said. “But it’s much harder to see those results diffuse to another level of people, and many times that’s students.”

Other California schools also use CGI, including some in Riverside County and Downey Unified School District. The California Math Framework lists CGI as one of seven “general instructional models” that teachers might use to help their students reach standards. CGI is also used in Florida schools, such as those in Okaloosa County and Lee County. 

At LAUSD, the program is extremely popular among teachers and administrators. By deemphasizing the rote memorization of facts and algorithms in favor of conceptual understanding, they say, CGI welcomes students who might otherwise come to dread math class. 

“CGI is a movement. You feel the passion right in people,” said LAUSD administrator of elementary instruction Carlen Powell at a January 26 presentation before the school board’s curriculum and instruction committee.

“It’s not a religion, but it’s something,” she said. 

The nation’s second-largest school district, where just over a quarter of fifth-graders met or exceeded math standards in 2022 state testing, is considering bringing CGI to all its elementary schools at an estimated cost of $10.3 million. 

Board members, however, would like to see more data. Board president Jackie Goldberg and Tanya Ortiz Franklin have asked for a comparison between CGI and non-CGI schools. 

“I wouldn’t want to encourage growing the program if we can’t compare,” said Ortiz Franklin at a recent curriculum and instruction committee meeting. “Just looking forward to a little further analysis there.”

Research background and LAUSD data

CGI is based on research from the 20th century about how young students approach math operations.  

The program was articulated in a series of papers in the 1980s and ‘90s. An early study involving 40 classrooms in Wisconsin showed a small positive effect on student achievement. A core intention of CGI, and one that today’s practitioners emphasize, is to empower young people to see themselves as good at math.

At LAUSD, CGI started at 10 schools in 2016 and has since expanded to 220 of the district’s nearly 600 elementary schools and preschools. Teachers and principals at participating sites receive year-round training in how to recognize children’s ideas about math and leverage them for problem-solving.

LAUSD administrators and board members have expressed interest in growing the program, but the division of instruction is waiting on data to justify further investment. 

The data they do have are basic and preliminary, and district officials caution that there’s not a causal relationship between CGI and test scores.

At schools that have been using the CGI approach for five or more years, 30.28% of students met or exceeded standards on the math portion of state tests. LAUSD officials declined to share specifics on that figure, but for the purposes of a rough comparison, in 2022, 37.23% of third graders, 30.7% of fourth-graders, and 25.24% of fifth graders in all LAUSD schools (excluding charters) met or exceeded the standard. 

“Thirty percent’s not that great,” conceded Frances Baez, LAUSD’s chief academic officer.

“But overall, L.A. Unified, and across the nation, there is a need to improve outcomes for students in math,” she added. “And so CGI is looking promising, but there’s more to be done in terms of revamping our math program.” 

The program’s promise, she said, is based on its popularity among teachers who use it and high appeal for teachers who don’t. “Schools that don’t have it are seeking it out,” she said.

Baez also said the district is waiting on a study from the Los Angeles Education Research Institute at UCLA, or LAERI, to decide whether the pilot is worth scaling. However, a representative from LAERI, which is not involved in administering the pilot, said the study is not yet sure to happen.

“We are currently exploring the feasibility of an evaluation,” wrote LAERI’s associate director Carrie Miller in an email. 

Beyond LAUSD, what does the research say? 

Decades of research into math instruction suggest that a more hands-off approach like what might be found in a CGI classroom is not the most effective way to teach when embraced at the expense of other teaching methods. 

The hands-off approach requires “extensive planning” from teachers, said Russell Gersten, a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon’s College of Education and executive director of the Instructional Research Group. 

But for “many teachers, it just doesn’t work, the implementation can just be problematic. And that’s been more or less the history of these approaches,” he said.

A 2008 research review published by the U.S. Department of Education found that explicit instruction involving “clear examples” and “extensive practice” had consistently positive effects for students who struggle with math. Other studies and research reviews have found that struggling math learners benefit from more explicit instruction as opposed to less. 

Depending on how LAUSD teachers implement their training, students at CGI schools might not receive that explicit instruction.

Robert Schoen, an associate professor of math education at Florida State University, appears to be the only researcher currently studying the effectiveness of CGI through large randomized controlled trials.

Since 2018, Schoen and his research teams have published four studies on the effects of CGI training on students’ math achievement. 

One study found that the program had a potentially positive effect on first-grade achievement and a potentially negative effect on second-grade achievement, though neither were statistically significant. Two other studies measured significant positive effects on some grade levels, but not others. The fourth study found no significant effects. 

Schoen looks forward to producing more conclusive research, even if it doesn’t answer what he calls the “billion dollar question”: Determining the right balance between the open-ended and explicit instruction, and how to adjust it based on the situation. 

“I think everybody is trying to figure out, where’s that balance between intervening and telling versus staying back and letting [students] be where they are and on their own journey,” he said. 

At LAUSD, not all CGI classrooms are the same

Educators at LAUSD grapple with the question of balance too, and the result is that not all CGI classrooms look the same. 

The district’s chief academic officer Baez described CGI as a “supplement” to the district’s adopted elementary math curricula, Eureka and Illustrative Mathematics. 

That’s how Kiana Cotton, a second-grade teacher at Lovelia P. Flournoy Elementary, uses CGI. She uses the Eureka curriculum’s more structured approach as a way to build upon concepts her students might have explored during more open-ended, CGI-informed instruction at the beginning of the lesson.

“It’s going pretty good,” said Cotton. “I see the students taking ownership of the strategies. They get excited about coming up to present. They want to show their work.”

Other pilot sites, like Coeur d’Alene Avenue School, embrace the student-guided approach more tightly.

After the kindergarten class, The 74 visited a fourth- and first-grade lesson, which proceeded similarly.

The teacher presented the problem. The students worked on it independently. Some solved the problem — some quickly and creatively — while others were stumped. Then they conferred with their classmates. The teacher might have stepped in to guide a struggling student, but gave no explicit direction on how to solve the problem.

“We don’t really, like, push in and say, ‘This is how you do it: step one, step two, step three,’” said Danielle Grasso, Coeur d’Alene’s principal. 

The future of the CGI program

Were the LAUSD to expand the CGI pilot today, its main justification would be the huge popularity of the program among teachers and administrators. 

This enthusiasm was especially evident at a January 26 meeting at which the school board’s curriculum and instruction committee heard from UCLA leaders and district administrators about the pilot. 

LAUSD principals spoke about CGI’s influence on teacher morale. CGI is “a mindset,” not “a curriculum,” said Christina Garcia of the Amanecer Primary Center. Cynthia Braley of Coldwater Canyon Elementary spoke about the pandemic’s damaging effect on student math performance, but said of CGI that “we just can’t live without it.” 

Board president Jackie Goldberg called the presentation “inspiring” and said she’d been recently impressed observing students solving problems at a CGI school — though, along with Ortiz Franklin, she did request more data. 

“We have people clamoring to be a part of the work,” said Carlen Powell, the administrator of elementary instruction. 

“The work,” said Powell, “speaks for itself.”

Delilah’s reporting in her community and school led to her selection as California’s 2023 Student Journalist of the Year. Last month, Delilah was recognized as one of five finalists for the Journalism Education Association Journalist of the Year and awarded a $1,000 scholarship. 

“This four year journey as a journalist has been really life changing and having all these people behind me has made it even more amazing…” Delilah said. While jumping over countless hurdles, Delilah realized the importance of advocating for your work and supporting fellow journalists.

When Delilah’s class at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School faced censorship from the school administration, journalism teacher Adriana Chavira defended them, ultimately leading to an unlawful suspension. Rather than being silenced, Delilah and her classmates found their voices through journalism.

After writing nearly 100 stories for her school newspaper, Delilah found a sense of purpose and passion as a student journalist. She will be attending the prestigious Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this fall.

In an interview, LAUSD student Delilah talked about what led to her becoming California’s Student Journalist of the Year: 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

How did Ms. Chavira and your experience at Daniel Pearl help you get into Northwestern? Do you owe part of your success to her?

Ms. Chavira is one of the most important people in my life. She has impacted me not just by being my teacher, but supporting me in my journey. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably be a completely different person! I am so thankful to her.

She doesn’t lead our newspaper; she lets us take the reins. She supports each and every one of us in any way she can. We always joke that she’s super strict or passive aggressive, but she’s just a great person who wants to see you succeed. She definitely is one of the biggest reasons I got into Northwestern, but beyond that, she’s one of the biggest reasons I know what I want to do in life.

Looking back at her suspension last year, what are some things you can take away from that experience?

I think that the censorship incident was really, really scary and stressful, but at the same time, it did teach me a lot. It taught me more about journalism law and journalism ethics. It taught me that it’s important to stand up for my work and to know that if my work is solid, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I didn’t write the story that caused the censorship but the student who did, who’s also my friend, did a great job reporting, so there was nothing to be afraid of. 

The fact that LAUSD tried to censor us was kind of a punch; it was out of the blue. It took nine months of behind the scenes fighting and organizing and all that kind of stuff. While it taught me to be more confident and careful in my work, it also showed just how much Ms. Chavira was willing to fight for us. 

I think most journalism advisers would at least second guess potentially losing their job for a story their students wrote, but it was never even a question for her. Ms. Chavira was there for us, and she said, “It is your decision. And I will go along with it. Whatever it is. If you want to take down the article, if you want to adjust the article, if you want to leave it up exactly how it is, it’s all up to you.” 

We were scared of her losing her job or being suspended. A lot of us even wanted to bend to the district’s will because of it. But we also knew that if we did that, we were just showing them that they can continue to censor us like they can continue to censor other schools. That was the biggest reason we decided to continue fighting after we made the initial decision to keep the article the way it is.

I want to talk about your achievement as California Student Journalist of the Year. Congratulations! Tell me more about that. 

I think one of the biggest things I learned is that people are watching you and the impact you’re making in your community. As I was putting together my portfolio with almost a year’s worth of work, seeing people respond to all of it was so amazing. I knew that the reporting I was doing, whether it be about my school district’s bus driver shortage or about a new club at my school, the readers cared, and people do care about student journalists.

Another thing I learned as I was putting my portfolio together is that I have done a lot more than I thought I have done. I’ve written almost 100 articles! As I was combing through thousands of photos, it was really mind blowing to just see my work all together. It’s easy over four years to get used to what you do, because you care about it. It was nice to step back and be like, “Wow, I’ve grown a lot.” So that was really great.

The way I found out was great, too, because my adviser threw me a little surprise party. That day, we were passing out our magazine, so I was very stressed because magazine distribution is always a hectic time. As I was coordinating, Ms. Chavira kept telling me how we had a magazine critique at 10 a.m. and emphasized how I needed to be there. So I went in and saw my principals and counselors and staff writers who are in other periods, but I didn’t think anything of it because I was still stressed.

We go on Zoom where Mitch Ziegler from the Journalism Education Association starts actually talking about our magazine, kind of playing the role, and I didn’t think much of it so I started listening and taking notes. He then calls out my name and asks me to raise my hand. I do and that’s when he tells me, “you’re the California Student Journalist of the Year.”

I was so confused and stunned that I didn’t even get to scream or jump. The disbelief left me speechless, it was just absolutely incredible. My staff and Ms. Chavira being there for me was very special.

What would you say would be one of the most memorable experiences that you’ve had as a journalist?

One of the most memorable stories I’ve covered was when I was interning with the LA Times High School Insider this past summer. I noticed my friends and myself really struggle with the college application process. I saw other students from all different walks of life: first generation students, low income students, wealthy students, students from all over the state, all of us were just struggling with the process. I wanted to look more into that, so I started to do some research into things like the teen mental health crisis and how college applications played into that, especially because the process is now so much harder than in past years.

After connecting with other students, I was able to write an impactful piece on how teens are not just dealing with the college application process, but also how they’re overcoming their difficulties. And I think that it was really impactful. 

I was able to have that story published in the Los Angeles Times, which is crazy to me! The fact that such a big news outlet would publish my work, and also that that work got to be read by such a huge audience was amazing. I especially think it was beneficial for adults to read the piece, because a lot of times they don’t know what goes on in teens’ lives.

Congratulations for being published in the LA Times, and congratulations on getting into Northwestern. What is something that you look forward to when you enroll in the fall? 

I think the biggest thing I’m excited about is joining the newspaper. I want to learn from all these amazing college students and hone my skills, so I’m really excited to join that community. I think that going halfway across the country is so scary, but having that community I know be able to form makes it more exciting and less terrifying.

What has been your journey as a journalist? What has shaped you into the reporter that you are today? 

I go to a journalism magnet school, but at first, I had no interest in journalism. I argued with my school counselor about being put in the class at all, actually. It was at that time, as a freshman, that I began to explore storytelling almost against my will. But as I learned how to write well and take photos while doing all of this really exciting work, I realized my work was really impactful. Ms. Chavira, my journalism instructor, really helped me start to find my voice in journalism, and so has my newspaper staff, because after I finished my freshman year, I was completely hooked.

Tell me more about the types of journalism that you’re interested in. What are some formats you may want to try in the future?

The main thing I do is write more long form pieces. I do a lot of both breaking news and investigative and a lot of newsy feature pieces. I also love photography. While I’ve done a couple of videos through PBS Student Reporting Labs with my school, I want to learn more video journalism. I think that it’s really important for journalists to have multimedia skills and to be able to tell stories in unique ways. Another thing I want to branch more into is audio journalism. One of my best friends runs the podcast for our school, and I want to learn more about what she does. Overall, I’m interested in becoming more of a multimedia journalist because that’s really important in today’s media landscape.

To close this interview, I want to ask you how you find value in journalism. In your opinion, why is journalism important work?

I’ve always heard that journalists are the voice for the voiceless, and I have to say I disagree with that. I think journalism is a way to amplify people’s voices, not to speak for them. I think that’s what’s so impactful about journalism is that through interviews, people shine through and tell you their most important stories. 

I recently wrote an article for the LA Daily News, which I’m freelancing for. The story was about pollution near the Van Nuys Airport and I interviewed some residents who lived right next door. I had an hour-long conversation with a mom who was worried about her kids because in the past three years, the pollution has become a lot worse. Throughout the interview, I was able to hear this complete stranger open up to me, and I was able to publish her voice. And I think that’s so impactful.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.  

Bryan Sarabia is a junior at the University of Southern California, originally from Houston, Texas. He is majoring in journalism and Spanish.

On April 13, the district made what it called a “historic offer” of 19% in pay hikes over three years. The union promptly rejected it as inadequate but five days later accepted what it called a “groundbreaking” agreement with increases of 21%.

By January 2025, it will bring the average Los Angeles teacher salary to an estimated $106,000 a year.

The post-deal reactions from the district and the union were a contrast in styles.

“Proud of what we can do with our labor partners when we negotiate in good faith and come to an agreement that serves our hardworking employees as well as our students and families,” tweeted Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

“While Carvalho and the district spent the past year ignoring and undermining educators, students and parents, UTLA members fought for a fair contract that meets the urgent needs of today and builds a strong foundation for public schools,” read the union statement.

Carvalho is sanguine about the district’s ability to bankroll these deals. “The state has provided two back-to-back, very solid budget years with a cost-of-living adjustment that allowed us to compose these offers,” he said. Nevertheless, he made a trip to Sacramento earlier this month to lobby for more school funding.

It has been widely reported that the district has $5 billion in reserves, which, for a total budget of $14.2 billion, is excessive. Less widely reported is that half of the reserve is already committed or is one-time federal COVID relief money. The district has yet to release data on the total cost of the new contracts.

Los Angeles also has 35,000 fewer students than it did two years ago, and the district forecasts the loss of another 121,000 by 2030. Since state funding is based on enrollment, that is going to make it difficult to sustain the district’s spending levels.

Carvalho may think he bought himself at least a year of labor peace, as the support employees’ contract expires in June 2024 and the teachers’ contract in June 2025. But the unions don’t seem eager to beat their swords into plowshares.

“We still have a long way to go,” said SEIU Local 99 steward Jennifer Torres. “This is the foundation.”

“We have maximum power right now, and it’s going to keep evolving from this point on even further,” said teachers union Secretary Arlene Inouye.

So did Carvalho get “schooled” by the unions, as Politico believes, or — to further the metaphor — is he planning to “graduate”?

Carvalho is flashy and at ease in front of the camera. He has often been rumored as a candidate for higher office, and if he has any aspirations in California, he must at least hold the public employees unions at bay. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Carvalho is somewhere else when the district’s bills come due.

The implications for Los Angeles are only part of the picture, since other teachers unions may now see the last few months as a model to follow.

The Oakland Education Association is currently holding a strike vote, which would be an “unfair labor practices” walkout similar to the one that shuttered Los Angeles schools for three days last month. The state labor board has still yet to determine whether that strike was legal, and a faction with the Oakland union is planning a wildcat strike if the authorization vote fails.

Intentionally or not, Carvalho and the Los Angeles school board have reset the market for public school employees. But if the enrollment figures are any indication, parents will continue to take their business elsewhere.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Now, three organizations are working with students in LAUSD high schools to increase the district’s college enrollment, with strategies such as helping students write college essays, hear from professionals, and be mentored through high school into college. 

Despite a 2.5% increase between the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years, LAUSD had just a .1% increase change in students attending four-year colleges between the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 academic year.

LAUSD college counselors are faced with a daunting task – letting students know about their post-graduate options and helping them get there. An obstacle they face, said college counselor Tricia Bryan, is ensuring students are aware of how to reach their goals.

“I would like to see a little bit more support in the alignment between career and college so that students have a better understanding of what their pathways can possibly be,” said Bryan, the only counselor at John Marshall High School. 

“Usually students will say, I want to go to a good college or get a good job, but they don’t really know what the pathways are for that.”

College Path LA brings in volunteers to assist Bryan to help with applying to college. Roughly half of John Marshall High School students attend a four-year college while the other half attend junior college, she said. 

A key element of College Path LA is essay writing. Mentors help students with their essays while also providing guidance beyond the college process, often checking in on students as they attend college. 

Because John Marshall High School is located in the heart of Los Angeles, a city full of writers, lawyers, and other professions, College Path LA utilizes these people as a source for students. 

Research conducted by UCLA and Claremont Graduate Institute found only 25% of those LAUSD students graduated within six years.

LAUSD A-G Intervention and Support provides resources for the college application process, focusing on those who need additional intervention to complete the A-G requirements, which allow students to apply to California State Universities and UC schools. More than half of the students in the program reported learning about college majors, academic requirements for college admission, and financial information. 

UCLA EAOP, “expands postsecondary education opportunities for California’s educationally disadvantaged students,” working to take students beyond the minimum requirements for college admission, with 72% enrolling in 4-year institutions. 

But UCLA EAOP officials say there is still value in attaining a community college degree. 

“What many families still don’t know is that their son or daughter can attend a community college for free for two years after graduation,” said Hugo Cristales, a first-generation college graduate and associate director of UCLA EAOP.

The organizations – College Path LA, LAUSD A-G Intervention and Support, and UCLA EAOP – differ in their methodologies and missions, but have the shared goal of ensuring LAUSD high school students are ready to apply to college and get the assistance they need. 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

In the 2021-2022 school year, 55.4% of students in Board District 2 (BD2) were chronically absent, according to the LAUSD Open Data portal. It was the highest among LAUSD’s seven local districts, higher than the 45.2% of all LA Unified students that were chronically absent that same year. 

At a press conference earlier this year, Carvalho said chronic absenteeism has decreased by 10% this academic year. 

Schools in BD2 are located in the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, Downtown Los Angeles, El Sereno, and Lincoln Heights, with a predominantly Latino population and low-income families, which community advocates say have been hit harder by the pandemic. 

The neighborhoods BD2 serves are still areas with the most reported COVID-19 cases per 10,000 residents in Los Angeles County. 

“The data shows that district 2 is in a crisis,” said Maria Brenes, a senior advisor to InnerCity Struggle, an advocacy organization based in East Los Angeles. “I would compel the district to develop an adequate response, to call for a state of emergency.”

Brenes said the lack of affordability in L.A., income inequality, and the housing crisis are ongoing issues that impact these communities. With COVID, shutdowns resulted in the displacement of many families, and some still experience its repercussions.  

“Loss of income, loss of loved ones, distance learning, all together directly impacts attendance and engagement,” Brenes said. “Many families feel like they’re on their own, depending on what school their child attends, there’s different levels of support and relationships.”

Many district 2 schools are experiencing staffing shortages and struggling to address the needs of many families.

By comparison, 35.3% of students attending schools in Board District 3, which covers the communities of San Fernando Valley, largely Latino and white populations, were chronically absent last school year. 

“We have working class communities, we have foster youth, we have unhoused communities,” said LAUSD Board District 2 member Dr. Rocio Rivas. “The pandemic really allowed the district to really see the vulnerable areas in our communities and how that affects education.”

Rivas and community advocates said that chronic absenteeism is a repercussion of the difficult circumstances surrounding these communities, exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The district has really implemented structures and procedures and tool kits for principals,” Rivas said. “They’re really reaching out and trying to understand the resources and services that communities need.” 

Despite ongoing efforts, other factors have also prevented students from attending school. Community advocates have noticed a common pattern among families. 

“Some of the biggest challenges we’re hearing from families are around transportation,” said Icela Santiago, the Senior Director of Operations and Strategy at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an in-district partner with LAUSD. 

She said that in many instances, when there is just one car in a family, it’s used to go to work, leaving children without access to transportation. Santiago also said that when walking to school doesn’t feel safe, it deters students from attending classes. 

Santiago also attributed fear of COVID and general illnesses, especially among elementary students, that have made many parents more inclined to keep their children home. After recovering from an illness, families are also unsure when they should send their children back to school. 

iAttend, launched by Superintendent Carvalho in August, is a district-wide effort to address chronic absenteeism across LAUSD. Carvalho said that three iAttend events have been conducted since it began, in which over 9,000 doors were knocked, and thousands of students were brought back to school. 

Asked the number of households visited in District 2, an LAUSD spokesperson could not provide the information.

To address the challenges of attending school, community engagement is a priority for Rivas, and organizations like InnerCity Struggle and the Partnership LA.

“Although it’s gone down… we need to re-engage them, so that these students who are engaged, don’t leave once again,” Rivas said. 

Since she joined the school board, Rivas said her staff have been researching chronic absenteeism policies and other support systems, and providing information to schools, especially to parents who are unfamiliar with district policies.  

Earlier this month, she and her staff visited schools to speak with principals and community representatives, an effort to understand the issues specific to each school 

“I’m really looking at community-based partnerships,” she said. “We have a lot of providers… that are connected to families and know more of the circumstances that a lot of the families are facing.” 

“If families are not well, then that means their city is not well,” Rivas said, “and that means we have a lot more work to do.”  

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra days. Then, after negotiations, the district rescheduled them for winter and spring breaks, irking SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support workers. And whatever benefit the extra days might have brought was undone by the three-day walkout organized by both unions March 21 to 23.

One would think that, going forward, the district might try a different approach to adding instructional days, and that the teachers union might consider a different response.

But who are we kidding?

Last week, the L.A. school board approved the district calendar for the next three years. “The new instructional calendars address the need to mitigate learning loss by shortening the winter recess and extending options for summer programming,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. The plan is to shorten the three-week winter break to two weeks.

The seven-member school board unanimously approved the changes, and the press release includes positive comments from five of them. It also states that the district “undertook an extensive process of gathering input through surveys, focus groups and presentations from families, staff and labor partners.”

Unfortunately for Carvalho and the board, those surveys, focus groups and input from labor partners all indicated an overwhelming preference for a three-week winter break.

The district justified the change on the grounds that three weeks off “creates challenges for our neediest families that must be considered in decision-making.” Also, most large districts in other states have a two-week break, as do most districts in southern California.

Not one to overlook an opportunity for activism, the teachers union immediately filed an unfair labor practice charge, created a Twitter hashtag and ramped up an organizing drive against the change.

“School calendar changes are mandatory subjects of bargaining and UTLA leadership immediately sent a demand to bargain to the district,” reads a statement on the union website. “This calendar move exemplifies Carvalho’s refusal to bargain in good faith and his willful disdain of worker rights. By openly disregarding labor law and ignoring the voices of parents and staff, Carvalho continues to prove that he is not a leader. The school board’s approval demonstrates a failure to hold Carvalho accountable.”

A district representative told EdSource that calendar dates are “at the sole discretion of the superintendent and the Board of Education,” and that the district held two meetings to discuss the calendar with its unions — but UTLA sent a representative to only one.

Carvalho and the board seem to have learned nothing from their previous encounter on this issue and are blithely waving the red cape in front of the charging bull. The union will gore them again, but one wonders how often it can continue to place itself on the side of less school versus more.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

So it went last week with Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Carvalho was forced to shutter schools while the district’s 30,000 support employees, led by SEIU Local 99, went on a three-day strike. Members of United Teachers Los Angeles walked out in solidarity.

The day after the strike ended, Carvalho and the union announced a tentative agreement. The three-year deal raised salaries by a reported 30%. Carvalho called it a “precedent-setting, historic contract.”

It’s historic, in the sense that most of it takes place in the past.

The agreement contains a 6% pay hike retroactive to July 2021, another 7% retroactive to July 2022 and yet another 7% to take effect this July. In January 2024, the district will raise all support employee wages by $2 an hour. The district and the union both say this constitutes another 10% increase for the average employee.

Nevertheless, it’s not the amount that’s going to cause headaches for Carvalho, the school board, parents and students in the near future. The district and the union weren’t oceans apart on the money before the strike occurred. Where Carvalho went wrong was in the timeline of the settlement.

Lost in all the happiness and relief about the contract is that the strike supposedly wasn’t about wages and benefits. Such a walkout would have been illegal, since the union hadn’t completed all the procedural steps before calling a strike. SEIU did so to protest the district’s alleged unfair labor practices. 

SEIU accused the district of interrogating workers about union meetings and threatening to fire them if they walked out. The union even claimed that food service workers were locked in a cafeteria to prevent them from voting on a strike. Taking these accusations at face value, the district could not have prevented the strike, short of admitting it had committed these violations.

The strike might end up being deemed illegal anyway. An unfair labor practices strike is legal if unfair labor practices have occurred. These haven’t been adjudicated, and if they’re found to be baseless, the union will be penalized.

But it won’t matter. The reality is that the walkouts prompted Carvalho and the board to settle on the union’s terms. So what happens to the district’s future?

There isn’t going to be much of a lull. “Carvalho has been put on notice that he better move on our demands,” read an email from the teachers union to its members. “If that movement is not enough to settle the contract that UTLA members deserve, we will move to the next round of this fight.”

The union wants a 20% raise over a two-year contract. But the contract expired in June 2022, so the two years are this school year and next. It’s clear the teachers aren’t reluctant to strike, and SEIU Local 99 will be sure to back them up. So we might see a repeat of last week’s actions, only this time it will be the teachers union organizing an unfair labor practices strike, with SEIU striking in solidarity.

Carvalho might be able to head it off by caving early, but the reprieve would be only temporary. The new contracts would both expire in June 2024, right about the time all federal COVID subsidies will have run out. How much labor peace will Carvalho be able to buy then?

He seems unaware of his impending fate. “This agreement’s going to make a lot of superintendents very nervous,” he said. “And that’s a good thing.”

We’ll see who is the most nervous superintendent a year from now.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In a poll conducted in the 2021-22 school year by GPSN and the Loyola Marymount University Center for Equity for English Learners, parents expressed the need to close learning gaps caused by the pandemic with access to high quality tutoring and emotional enrichment programs. 

The poll — first conducted by GSPN on 500 LAUSD families in the 2020-21 school year — indicates the majority of Black families were not committed to keeping their students enrolled in L.A. Unified schools. 

Parents said they wanted expanded summer school instruction, more college/CTE courses and better access to high-quality tutoring programs.

“This year’s poll was an opportunity to revisit the goal of strengthening their influence on the decisions our educational leaders make about the future of students and Los Angeles schools,” the report stated. “We dove back into questions we asked the previous year to see how families’ perspectives changed after returning for a full year of in-person learning during the ongoing pandemic.”

Here are five key findings from the report:

1. Parents showed increasing support for social-emotional learning:

After a full year of pandemic learning, 47% of families reported wanting tools to meet students’ emotional and mental health needs. Last year, just 26% of families expressed interest in social-emotional learning tools.

2. Families of color were less likely to report having access to individualized tutoring and more likely to want more tutoring:

Only 59% of families of color report having access to individualized tutoring, 18 percentage points lower than white families. Additionally, 27% of white families and an overwhelming 73% of families of color report wanting to see one-on-one tutoring provided at their school. 

3. Black parents were less committed than other parents to keeping their kids enrolled in LA Unified schools:

When asked whether they planned to keep their children in Los Angeles Unified schools longer term, 82% of families said they were very or extremely likely to stay in the district. But there are slight differences when families of different groups are asked this question: compared to 90% of white families, only 67% of Black families were committed to staying. This news comes after LAUSD reported decreasing enrollment in its campuses, losing students who moved out of state because of the rising cost of living in California; and students switching to non-LAUSD schools with looser COVID restrictions. 

4. Transparency on curriculum is a priority:

Across families of different income levels and racial backgrounds, there was a 22 percentage point increase in the number of families that want more access to information on what is being taught in their schools and a 13 percentage point increase in the number of families that want to see information on their child’s access and progress on grade-level, high quality curriculum. 

5. New Superintendent Alberto Carvalho needs to be held accountable and be evaluated:

91% of families agree the superintendent should be evaluated on the new strategic plan. The plan prioritizes providing students with the support, knowledge, and skills to reach their full academic potential, graduate college and be career ready. 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.

Judging from the rain and official rhetoric, it was a dark Tuesday morning in Los Angeles.

Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District were predicting a rough three days for 420,000 students and their families as the district buckled in for a strike led by SEIU Local 99, which represents custodians, bus drivers, special ed assistants and other support staff. With members of United Teachers Los Angeles joining in solidarity, all schools were shut down.

Nearly 80% of district parents work for a living, and about 22% of families live below the poverty level. To support these families in particular, the district partnered with the city and county of Los Angeles to run food distribution sites and staff recreation centers for child care. 

But despite the gloom, a range of positive attitudes were on display: joy, good humor, conviction, hope. Local 99 and teachers union members huddled under tents against the rain at nearly 500 schools and sites across the district, according to Local 99. 

The 74 visited a handful of them and has these sketches to share. 

Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School, 6:46 a.m.

Strikers arrive slowly at Susan Miller Dorsey High School, still shaking off their sleep.

A squad of teachers union members wrestles a cover onto the extendable frame of a lawn tent. 

Special education teacher Stacia Trimmer, whose 15 years with the district have done little to blunt her Brooklyn accent, works hand in hand with special ed assistants, one of the units represented by Local 99. 

“They work hard, and they love the children,” she says.

The theme of the strike is respect, and Trimmer wonders whether everyone in the district, including teachers like herself, could better appreciate the contributions of Local 99’s members. 

“Maybe we’re all guilty of it,” she says. “Maybe we don’t speak to them enough.” 

Another teacher puts on Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” and Trimmer starts dancing.

The choice of music down the block, at the Local 99 tent, is a bit more subtle: Bob Marley’s “Duppy Conqueror.” Don’t try to show off… For I will cut you off …

Fourteen strikers from both unions are gathered under two tents. 

Local 99 member and special ed assistant Stephanie Smiley has been with the district for 29 years. As a school system veteran, she’s in a relatively comfortable position, though she would be making more if she were paid for 40 hours a week. As it stands, her contract calls for only 30.

“I’m here fighting for the ones who need help,” she says.

She also feels the pressure of short-staffing, saying she sometimes works on the de facto security detail at Dorsey, monitoring the cafeteria and recess areas for “potential altercations.”

There’s a collective gasp from the strikers when a commuter in a gray Prius rams the curb, and sigh of relief when the motorist drives off, apparently unharmed. It’s about 7:20, almost an hour into the scheduled picket. 

The wind and rain are picking up.

Baldwin Hills Recreation Center, 8 a.m.

Volunteers in yellow vests and rain gear stand under tents in the Baldwin Hills Rec Center parking loop. Stacked around them are boxes of food meant to tide families over for the next three days.

Jake Varner, a 23-year-old substitute teacher, says there was a steady stream of cars right when they opened at 7:30. By now, traffic has slowed.

He’s working with Luis Clarke, a community member, and Lauren Brooks, a senior at King Drew Magnet High School. 

“My mom signed me up,” Brooks says. “‘ ‘Cause they’re on strike, I didn’t have anything else to do.” 

A man pulls up in a white Jeep. “Two kids,” he says. The volunteers hand a sack of fruit through the window and place boxes in his trunk — 12 meals total for the three-day strike.

Among some staples (cereal, applesauce, pizza), his kids might be pleased to find a strawberry creamsicle and mango sorbet. 

Clarke, who says he’s a mentor for kids in the community, suspects it was God who brought the three volunteers together, pointing out that both Varner and Brooks love science and want to be doctors.

“Who did that?” he asks. “Who orchestrated this? We didn’t even know we was going to be on the same team.”

Grand View Blvd. Elementary School, 8:43 a.m.

Car horns are honking. Music is blaring. There’s talk among the picketers of moving down to Venice High School, a mile away. But Grand View Elementary, where a large crowd has gathered, isn’t lacking for action.

Local 99 member Carlton Van Vactor, a health care assistant at Grand View, cradles a to-go cup of coffee at his chest.

He says if there’s one thing he’s fighting for, it’s better staffing. 

As a health care assistant, he works with some of Grand View’s highest-needs students. They have breathing devices, feeding tubes.

While feeding one student through a tube attached to his belly, which can take up to an hour, he has to keep an eye on another student who “bites, scratches, throws tantrums, everything” — someone whom, in other schools, a special ed assistant would attend to.

“I do a job probably for about three people right now,” he says. With the district since 1989, he makes $26 an hour, working seven hours a day.

Los Angeles Public Library, Mar Vista Branch, 3:09 p.m.

Many on the picket line are district parents or grandparents. Some say they were lucky to have found child care for the three days of no school.

Other parents might depend on local resources. In addition to local recreation centers and parks, L.A.’s libraries made space for kids in the event of a strike. 

It’s starting to rain again, and outside the Mar Vista Branch of the L.A. Public Library, Marianne Justus hurries in with her mother and two young sons. Her oldest is a first-grader at Short Ave. Elementary School.

“I lucked out,” she says. Her mom, who lives in Newport Beach, drove up to help Justus and her husband with the kids Tuesday, and is taking her oldest back down to Newport for Wednesday and Thursday.

While her family can bear three days with no school, she fears a longer work stoppage. Remote schooling — especially for her oldest son, who needs speech therapy — was “horrendous.” 

“Most kids are still trying to catch up, and kids with special needs are really trying to catch up,” she says. 

“I totally understand why they’re striking,” she says. “They need higher pay. I just hope it doesn’t go longer than three days.”

With rain falling this morning, teachers marched, volunteers braved the elements to assist with meal pickup sites, and local institutions made accommodations to welcome some of the 400,000 students who may have had nowhere else to go today. 

A brief collage of what this morning looked like with no schools in session: 

A Los Angeles public school playground stands empty as Los Angeles public school support workers, teachers and supporters walk the picket line.

LAUSD tweeted this statement early Tuesday morning:

The Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Aaron Donald and other community members spent the morning assembling packed meals for LAUSD students.

What happens to the kids while schools are closed? The district posted student activities and resources to Schoology:

Many Los Angeles institutions opened their doors to parents in need of childcare. The Department of Public Social Services shared a free, drop-in recreation program from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. across 16 Los Angeles County parks for students to attend through Thursday:

The Natural History Museum of L.A. and Zoo also stepped in to provide free admissions for parents scrambling to find plans.

And this reporter noted more kids out than usual while on a grocery run:

Outside of Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, a signs reads “School resumes Friday, March 24” as UTLA President Cecily Mart Cruz addresses a press conference.

Bookmark this page to follow rolling strike updates from LAUSD.

But there are no sides to pick. What there is is a labor problem that needs to be solved and an education-interruption problem that must be avoided at all costs – namely closing schools and disrupting the education of 420,000 students.

Families throughout the district need the adults to sit in a room and get to a resolution so that their children can be in school and continue learning.

For many families, their urgency is more than we can ever imagine – these are the families whose kids were already struggling pre-pandemic and are further behind now because of school closures. And these are parents, many of them LAUSD/SEIU employees, who will struggle to find and pay for child care or go without pay to stay home with their children.

Our families want LAUSD to be fair and respectful to its employees – they want a good contract with living wages. They also want to see good faith negotiations, which means SEIU needs to return to the bargaining table to hear what more LAUSD will offer and keep negotiating until a resolution is reached.

But, above all, our families want their schools to deliver on the promise of a good education. They want their kids to learn to read, to be critical thinkers, to go on to college if they choose, be prepared to succeed in life, to be happy and healthy.

They desperately want to see more progress by a system that has denied too many children – especially low-income children, English learners, foster kids, special needs kids, and children of color – the opportunity to reach their dreams and aspirations.

We will never deliver on this dream if we close schools. That option should never be on the table. What we must do is work together to end poverty wages – starting by immediately returning to negotiations – and hold each other accountable for delivering on the promise for our students.

Our families expect no less and our students deserve better.

The terminology is important, because a strike for economic reasons during contract negotiations has certain procedural requirements and time-consuming steps, including mediation and fact-finding. The two unions’ contracts also have no-strike provisions, which is why both notified the district they were terminating their expired contracts.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to negotiate around the clock to avert the strike, then requested an injunction from the state labor relations board — all to no avail. The two unions had no inclination to call it off.

I believe the timing and length of the walkout is a calculated effort on the part of the unions not only to apply bargaining pressure to the district, but to undo Carvalho’s signature effort to address the effects of lengthy pandemic school closures: acceleration days.

In April 2022, Carvalho and the school board proposed adding four instructional days to the school calendar that would be optional for both students and teachers. Teachers who participated would receive additional pay, and students would receive additional instruction.

The teachers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint and called for a boycott of the first acceleration day, asserting that changes to the school calendar were a mandatory subject of collective bargaining.

After negotiations, the union agreed to the four days, to be held for two days each during winter and spring breaks. This didn’t please SEIU Local 99, which preferred the original plan of four Wednesdays spread throughout the school year.

The final two acceleration days are scheduled to be held April 3 and 4, but they are hardly acceleration days anymore, due to the unions’ decision to hold deceleration days this week.

Holding a strike on a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday almost certainly guarantees that a large number of students (and school employees) won’t show up Friday, either. There go your four days of additional instruction.

The district could add make-up days to the calendar, but as UTLA reminded its members, “they will have to negotiate that with us as a union.”

The unions seem unperturbed by school closures of any sort. The teacher strike in 2019 closed schools for a week. Unions were largely responsible for in-person instruction being delayed until late August 2021. Both SEIU Local 99 and UTLA are ready for traditional, open-ended strikes unless significant raises and other demands are met.

As showing up at school has taken a backseat to other concerns among district employees, many students have followed suit. Enrollment has fallen dramatically, and chronic absenteeism continues to be a problem.

Teachers union President Cecily Myart-Cruz notoriously claimed, “There is no such thing as learning loss.” She’s wrong. The only thing kids learn from closed schools is that neither they, nor the schools, are important.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

During an afternoon press conference, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the two sides were never able to be “in the same room,” but that the district’s latest offer of a 23% raise was still on the table. “We’ve run out of time,” he said.

After Alberto Carvalho’s first three months as superintendent of the Los Angeles schools, Nery Paiz, president of the district’s administrators’ union, predicted the job would only “get exponentially harder.”

He was right. 

Thirteen months into his post as chief of the nation’s second-largest district, the former Miami-Dade superintendent has had to contend with declining enrollment, opioid overdoses and a cyberattack that exposed students’ mental health records. Now the district’s two largest unions are poised to walk off the job for three days, closing schools for the system’s 430,000 students.

Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents roughly 30,000 custodians, cafeteria staff, bus drivers and other service workers, announced the strike last week. United Teachers Los Angeles, also in contract talks with the district, is joining in support. 

Last week, Carvalho braced families for another disruption.

“You deserve better,” he said in a statement. “Know that we are doing everything possible to avoid a strike.”

But some education advocates say Carvalho — who never faced a strike in his 14 years as Miami-Dade schools superintendent — hasn’t done enough to avert the work stoppage and may have underestimated the strength of California’s labor unions. While observers give him credit for trying to polish the district’s image and fill teacher vacancies, they say reaching an agreement with the employees who served meals, sanitized schools and delivered devices to students’ homes during the darkest days of the pandemic should have been one of his first priorities. 

“This is a defining moment for the superintendent and for LAUSD. This is a union town and that’s a huge lesson,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that serves many students whose parents are Local 99 members. “When we were praising school employees for their bravery, this is who we were talking about.”

Local 99’s leaders say their three-day stoppage is technically not about money. The union called the strike because they said supervisors have tried to prevent or retaliate against them for participating in union meetings. They were offended that Carvalho referred to the union’s organizing activities as a “circus” in a Feb. 10 tweet that was later deleted.

On Sunday, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board denied a Friday request from the district to seek a court order to prevent the strike. The agency’s general counsel is still considering the district’s allegation that the strike is illegal. Officials contend the union hasn’t exhausted efforts to resolve its differences with the district.

Carvalho’s latest offer, made Friday, is a one-time 5% bonus for 2020-21 and a 19% raise spread over 2021-22 though 2024-25. But the union, whose members earn an average of $25,000, wants a 30% increase, increased staffing levels and more full-time work. 

They argue that with almost $5 billion in reserves, the district can afford to meet their demands. But district financial data shows that all but $140 million of that money is spoken for. Carvalho has also warned of an impending fiscal cliff — “Armageddon,” he called it — as enrollment continues to decline and federal relief funds run out. 

Local 99 has been without a contract for nearly three years, but relations with Carvalho began to sour after he rescheduled four optional “acceleration days” to help students catch up from learning loss due to school closures. Originally scattered throughout the school year, Carvalho moved them to coincide with winter and spring break after UTLA pushed back.

Local 99 leaders said they weren’t consulted and that almost half of their members wouldn’t be able to work on those days. They filed an unfair labor practice charge in October over the move, calling it “disrespectful” and a violation of collective bargaining laws.

Carvalho, meanwhile, said during a Wednesday press conference that Local 99 has not responded to the district’s last two offers. Jackie Goldberg, the school board’s pro-union president, said she’s confused by Local 99’s determination to strike even though the district was willing to increase the offer.

“This is the first time since I’ve been doing this that there’s been no back and forth,” she said. “That’s not negotiation. It makes me very disappointed.”

The district declined to make Carvalho available for an interview.

‘Relatively rare’

Unlike Local 99, UTLA hasn’t reached an impasse yet and was in a bargaining session with the district on Friday over its demand for a 20% pay increase. 

The teachers union’s involvement in this week’s strike, however, could complicate the narrative that the action — and another disruption for families — is primarily about demanding respect and wage increases for low-wage workers. 

State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s “highly unusual,” for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“They may issue statements of support, but to join in strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter,” he said. UTLA, he said, “can jump in and leverage it to influence their own bargaining negotiations without much fallout in terms of public perception.”

The joint walkout is further surprising because the two unions are often at odds politically. Just last fall, they supported different candidates for a highly contested seat on the school board. UTLA’s candidate Rocío Rivas, defeated Maria Brenes, who was backed by Local 99.

The solidarity over the strike, however, doesn’t mean there’s no division in the ranks. Paiz, the administrators union head, said he thinks some UTLA and Local 99 members will report to schools this week along with the administrators, secretaries, plant managers and others not on strike. The unions, he said, are “portraying 100% buy-in from both groups, but I don’t think that’s the case.”

Even so, Carvalho’s troubled relationship with the two unions makes it tougher for him to keep the district moving toward the ambitious goals set last year, including 70% of students earning a C or higher in college-prep courses and increasing the percentage of third graders proficient in reading by 30 percentage points.

“This unprecedented moment has consequences beyond the relationship between the district and its labor partners,” said Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, the advocacy organization formerly known as Great Public Schools Now. “The successful implementation of the strategic plan is potentially at stake,” she added, as staff and families try to “navigate the tensions.

Board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin said the board has given Carvalho the go-ahead to negotiate “a significant raise” and she said Carvalho has been handling the situation “prudently.” But she acknowledged the need for repair.

“There are important lessons to be learned about communication and respect that I hope can be used to improve relationships crucial to serving our students, families and employees,” she said.

Early Friday morning, after the Medusa gang’s countdown clock on the ransom deadline struck zero, the files weren’t readily available for download on its dark web leak site. Instead, a “Download data now!” button directs users to contact the ransomware gang through an encrypted instant-messaging protocol. Attempts by The 74 to reach the gang have been unsuccessful.

Files from previous Medusa victims are available on a website designed to resemble a technology news blog — a front of sorts. Unlike the Medusa blog, this site is not relegated to the dark web and does not require special tools to access. Download links are also posted in a channel on Telegram, the encrypted social media service that’s been used by terror groups and far-right extremists. Yet as of Friday afternoon, the files purportedly stolen from the Minneapolis district were not available for download on either platform. 

Data breaches from previous victims appear to be uploaded to the faux technology news blog about a month after their ransom expires, suggesting that the Minneapolis files could become available online after a brief lag. 

Still, in a statement on Friday, the district said it “is aware that the threat actor has released certain MPS data on the dark web today.” 

“We are working with cybersecurity specialists to quickly and securely download the data so that we can conduct an in-depth and comprehensive review to determine the full scope of what personal information was impacted and to whom the information relates,” the district continued. “This will take some time. You will be contacted directly by MPS if our review indicates that your personal information has been impacted.” 

Early indications suggest the files contain a significant volume of sensitive information about students and staff. Leading up to the Friday deadline, Medusa posted a short-lived video to Vimeo that previewed the files in its possession and published a file tree on its dark web blog that purportedly showed the names of the compromised documents. The file tree suggests those records involve student sexual violence allegations, district finances, student discipline, special education, civil rights investigations, student maltreatment and sex offender notifications. As of Friday afternoon, the dark web blog post showing the file tree had amassed more than 3,100 page views. 

Should the files become available at some point, an analysis of the file tree points to the trove of stolen records being extensive. The file tree lists more than 172,000 individual records including large backup files. Though it’s unclear how many of the documents contain personally identifiable information and other sensitive data, the files add up to a startling 157 terabytes. 

“Yikes, that’s a lot,” said Doug Levin, an expert in K-12 cybersecurity incidents and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. “It’s a very significant exfiltration.” 

By comparison, last year the Los Angeles Unified School District suffered a ransomware attack and a cache of stolen district files — including thousands of current and former students’ sensitive mental health records — were uploaded to a dark web leak site. The files in that leak, which drew national attention to cybersecurity vulnerabilities in K-12 schools, total some 500 gigabytes. There are 1,000 gigabytes in one terabyte. 

The records stolen from the Los Angeles school district could fit on the hard drive of just one laptop. The scope of records stolen in Minneapolis, meanwhile, are more akin to “entire IT systems,” said Levin, who was especially concerned about the breach of district backup files. “You’re probably looking at some of the more sensitive data that the district maintains — sensitive enough that they are backing it up and maintaining those files.” 

The data leak deadline comes a little more than a week after Medusa listed the district on its dark web blog and two weeks after Minneapolis school officials attributed “technical difficulties” with its computer system to an “encryption event.” That euphemistic characterization left the public in the dark about the incident’s severity, cybersecurity analysts and community members said.

Such experts said Medusa’s pre-leak efforts were a particularly aggressive attempt to increase public attention around the attack and coerce the district to meet its ransom demand. 

Medusa’s decision to upload its stolen files to the faux technology news blog is likely a tactic to elevate the privacy risks to potential data breach victims and convince hacked organizations to pay the ransom, said Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the cybersecurity company Emsisoft. 

Despite Medusa’s extensive steps to publicize the ransomware attack prior to the Friday deadline, the group has been  “unusually uncommunicative,” since the clock struck zero and its dark web blog listed the Minneapolis records as published, Callow said. The cyber expert said he also reached out to the group Friday to inquire about the Minneapolis breach but didn’t receive a response. 

People who don’t work in cybersecurity may not know how to access dark web sites, he said, while the technology news blog is more accessible to the general public. Therefore, dark web sites “would concern organizations less than the data being released from the “clearnet” where it is easily accessible and links to it can be shared via Twitter and other social platforms. It’s much easier for people to access.”

Callow agreed the volume of data purportedly stolen from the Minneapolis district constitutes an outlier among ransomware attacks — but he offered a caution. 

“Just because they published a file tree doesn’t mean they necessarily obtained all of the data it shows in that tree,” he said, noting that organizations like school districts can shut hackers out of their systems if they’re caught in the act. 

In a March 9 statement, the district said it had “taken a stance against these criminals and has fully restored our systems without the need to cooperate with the criminal.” 

During a school board meeting Tuesday, interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox said the district’s computer network “was infected with an encryption virus that was first discovered” Feb. 18. Secure backups allowed the district to restore many of its systems, Cox said, and while sensitive data has now been released publicly, the district is unaware of any evidence that the information has been leveraged by criminals to commit fraud. Once the district identifies impacted individuals, Cox said it will provide them with credit monitoring and identity protection services. 

Yet as Cox credited the district’s technology department for responding swiftly to restore district systems after the attack, Levin, the K-12 cybersecurity expert, said the sheer volume of files purportedly stolen point to the threat actors possibly lurking around inside the MPS computer systems for weeks — if not months. 

“Exfiltrating this amount of data without detection certainly is concerning,” Levin said. “This sort of mass exfiltration is something that cybersecurity experts look for when they are defending systems and this is certainly not something that is downloaded in an hour or two.”

As the district works to analyze the scope of the attack, it’s advising district families and staff to avoid interacting with suspicious emails or phone calls, to change their passwords and warned them against downloading any data released by cyber criminals because it plays into their hands “by drawing attention to the information and increasing our community’s fear and panic.” 

They sympathize with the workers. Some plan to join them on the picket line at LA Unified schools. 

But when it comes to union and district leaders, LAUSD parents are skeptical and angry.

SEIU Local 99, LAUSD’s 30,000-member union representing employees like custodians, bus drivers, and special education assistants, plans to strike next Tuesday through Thursday. In solidarity, United Teachers Los Angeles has asked its 35,000 members not to cross picket lines.

All district schools would shut down, affecting 420,000 students and their families.

Leaders from both unions say they are fighting for students. Better pay and working conditions, they reason, translate to a healthier learning environment. District leaders say the same. Closing schools during the work stoppage will keep students safe, they say, while refusing the unions’ full demands will safeguard the district’s financial health.

And then there are the families caught in the middle.  

“Anytime someone says, we are for the students, or students are first priority, and it’s all about the kids, I just have to take it with a grain of salt,” said Paul Robak, chair of LAUSD’s Parent Advisory Committee. “Because clearly, the ones who would lose most in any work slowdown of any union in the school district are the students.” 

The three-day strike would be the latest in four years of major disruptions across LAUSD, beginning with the six-day teachers strike in January 2019 and rolling through more than a year of fully remote schooling, during which enrollment sagged and chronic absenteeism spiked. 

Parents sympathize with Local 99’s members. With an average salary of $25,000 a year, they struggle to make it in LA, and many are parents themselves. But they are also exhausted and fear the consequences a strike could have for their children and the district as a whole, especially after the pandemic kept district schools closed for a long time, and students’ academics and mental health suffered.   

They blame union and district leaders for the shutdown.

“It’s both the district’s fault and their labor partners’. They put parents in the middle of it,” said Christie Pesicka, a leader in the groups California Students United and United Parents LA.

Diana Guillen, chair of LAUSD’s District English Learner Advisory, said a strike “violates kids’ rights” on the heels of the pandemic. “I think it’s an ethical failing from the unions,” she said, speaking in Spanish. 

Parents’ immediate concerns, however, are more basic. Where will working parents send their young children? How will students who depend on school-provided meals eat? After years of academic setbacks, how will students avoid further losses?

At a Wednesday press conference, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the district is partnering with community organizations to make food available at 60 locations across the city and to provide childcare. As for academics, students will receive homework packets to keep them occupied. 

The LA Times reported community groups and agencies, from the Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor to the LA County Department of Parks and Recreation, are preparing for an influx of students during the day.

Some students, whose parents fully support the striking workers, will spend at least part of the week on the picket line.

“When the teachers originally went on strike a couple years ago, I was all for it. My kids were out there marching,” said Yazmin Arevalo, whose 4th grader attends Gates Elementary in Lincoln Heights. “I would do it again…because they deserve it. If they haven’t been able to come to an agreement, then why not?” 

But she added other parents at Gates Elementary, who also supported teachers in 2019, felt betrayed when many of their children languished through remote schooling. This time, they’re wary of supporting striking workers. 

Based on recent messaging alone, Carvalho’s chief concern is the safety and wellbeing of students.

“We should not be depriving our students of an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to feel safe, or an opportunity to receive social and emotional support — and food,” he said at Wednesday’s press conference.

But that evening, at a massive joint rally held by Local 99 and UTLA that filled up Grand Park in front of Los Angeles City Hall, union members demonstrated their commitment to students in a way Carvalho, on his own, could never match. 

Among the thousands of rally participants, there were children everywhere. 

They clambered over playground structures, and held their parents’ hands as they threaded clusters of attendees. Some wore UTLA red, others SEIU purple. When UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz shouted over the loudspeaker, asking parents in the crowd to identify themselves, a wave of hands shot up. Local 99 often points out 43% of its members have school-age children.

Attending the rally was Jesus Flores, a special education assistant at 75th Street Elementary who’s worked in the district for 18 years. He spends six hours a day on the district’s clock and picks up extra work as an Uber driver. 

Flores has three kids, ages five, six, and eight, all at LAUSD schools. He considers striking a short-term sacrifice that’s in their long-term interest.

“At the end of the day, I’ll be thinking about my kids’ future,” he said. 

Next week, he and his wife, also a special ed assistant with the district, will be switching off on childcare duty. But he said he hopes the union and district will come together before Tuesday to work out a deal. 

“Let’s hope it doesn’t happen,” he said of the strike. Missing that pay “really does take a toll.”

The district meeting Local 99’s demands would mean a 30% wage increase for Flores and other union members, among other benefits.

So far, the district’s core offer includes three 5% wage increases, the first two retroactive, respectively, to July 1, 2021 and July 1, 2022, and the third to take effect July 1, 2023.

UTLA, which is further behind in negotiations, is asking for a 20% raise over two years, part of its sweeping “Beyond Recovery” platform.

Local 99’s scheduled three-day strike is what’s known as an unfair practice charge strike, meant to protest allegations of harassment by district officials. 

The union’s other weapon is an economic strike, which would last indefinitely, but is only legal once the state-facilitated negotiation process has been exhausted.

At the district’s Wednesday press event, Carvalho and board president Jackie Goldberg urged union leaders to meet them at the negotiating table before Tuesday, where they would be ready “24/7” to hash out an agreement that goes beyond what has already been offered. 

“I’m ready, willing, available to meet nonstop, day and night, with our labor leaders to avoid a strike by finding a solution where everyone is a winner, beginning with our kids,” Carvalho said. 

“We have more resources to put on the table. There is time.”

Information for families — including where they can pick up meals for their children during the work stoppage — can be found at this LAUSD website: https://achieve.lausd.net/schoolupdates. 

The leadership of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City engineered a major shift in retiree health insurance by voting to move its members from traditional Medicare into Medicare Advantage, a parallel system in which private insurers provide coverage.

The Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group representing the city’s 102 public-sector unions, approved the change for all retirees in a weighted vote, with UFT’s concurrence crucial to the result. However, 25 unions voted no, 10 abstained and 14 didn’t vote. Opponents have vowed to go to court to block the move.

The city’s unions were bound by a 2018 agreement to find health insurance savings, and so drastic action was required. Some retirees oppose the change because they believe Medicare Advantage is a form of privatization. Others simply feel traditional Medicare provides superior coverage. However, it seems unlikely that the teachers union will effectively go to war with its own retired members without hope of some substantive gain from the city.

This gain will probably not come in the form of large salary increases. The teachers’ contract expired in September, but wage expectations are limited by New York City’s system of pattern bargaining, meaning that one union’s contract establishes a pattern the rest must follow. This year, District Council 37 approved a five-year contract with a total of 15.25% in raises. This means UFT will be hard-pressed to achieve much more than 3% per year.

So in what way will the teachers union improve its lot? UFT President Michael Mulgrew is playing things close to the vest but suggested in an interview that increased funding for teacher recruiting and retention will be a major focus of negotiations. This would make sense under the circumstances. If you can’t get much higher pay for your members, you might as well try to get more members.

Whether this will mollify angry retirees is an open question, but despite organized internal opposition, Mulgrew’s slate has a stranglehold on power within the union, and that’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

On the other coast, United Teachers Los Angeles emerged from a period of relative inactivity to help organize a massive demonstration March 15. Both UTLA and SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support employees, are in the midst of contract negotiations.

SEIU is demanding a 30% raise across the board, while UTLA is calling for 20% over two years. The Los Angeles Times reports the two unions are planning a joint three-day strike later this month.

The teachers union has a long list of demands, which includes class size reduction across all grades and school types, more staff of all types and a freeze on school closures (despite collapsing student enrollment), elimination or dramatic reduction of standardized tests not required by the state or federal governments, systematic inclusion of social-emotional learning in all curricula and stronger limits on and regulations of charter schools.

The union’s demands come in the context of the district holding more than $3 billion in unrestricted surplus funds. However, that money is short-lived, as federal support will end in 2024. The union has a solution for that: It wants the district to “publicly call for and take action to support federal COVID relief monies becoming permanent as of 2024.”

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho dealt with a union in his previous position in Miami, but he has never faced anything like this. Will he take a hard line or assuage the union with imaginary money from the federal government?

Meanwhile, in Chicago, a proxy war over the mayor’s office is underway between the city teachers union and progressives on the one hand, and business interests and mainstream Democrats on the other.

Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson took to the debate stage last week in their mayoral runoff. According to the Chicago Tribune, Johnson accused Vallas of “wanting to raise property taxes, enacting policies in the 1990s that caused lasting harm to the city and school district’s financial position, and working with Republicans to damage the pension system. Johnson also said Vallas doesn’t want to teach Black history and claimed he does not support women’s abortion rights.”

Vallas, who is ahead in the polls, opted not to respond in kind, saying he left a surplus during his time leading the district and supported reproductive choice, though he was personally opposed to abortion.

Johnson also downplayed his ties to the teachers union. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to the people of the city of Chicago, and once I’m mayor of the city of Chicago, I will no longer be a member of the Chicago Teachers Union,” he said.

Johnson relies highly on union support, having secured the endorsements of SEIU Healthcare and AFSCME Council 31. But Vallas has labor allies as well, with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police and the plumbers union.

Putting one of its own in the mayor’s chair would be a coup for the Chicago Teachers Union, and perhaps a turning point for its fortunes. A Vallas victory would extend the reign of teachers union adversaries that began with Mayor Richard Daley in 1989.

These three teachers unions are using three different methods to achieve their aims: inside influence in New York City; strikes and rallies in Los Angeles; and electoral politics in Chicago. Which, if any, will succeed remains to be seen, but the results will determine the direction of public education in those cities for the immediate future.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

While districts nationwide have become victims in a rash of devastating ransomware attacks in the last several years, cybersecurity experts said the extortion tactics leveraged against the Minneapolis district are particularly aggressive and an escalation of those typically used against school systems to coerce payments.

In a dark web blog post and an online video uploaded Tuesday, the ransomware gang Medusa claimed responsibility for conducting a February cyberattack — or what Minneapolis school leaders euphemistically called an “encryption event” — that led to widespread digital disruptions. The blog post gives the district until March 17 to hand over $1 million. If the district fails to pay up, criminal actors appear ready to post a trove of sensitive records about students and educators to their dark web leak site. The gang’s leak site gives the district the option to pay $50,000 to add a day to the ransom deadline and allows anyone to purchase the data for $1 million right now.

On the video-sharing platform Vimeo, the group, calling itself the Medusa Media Team, posted a 51-minute video that appeared to show a limited collection of the stolen records, making clear to district leaders the sensitive nature of the files within the gang’s possession. 

“The video is more unusual and I don’t recall that having been done before,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the cybersecurity company Emsisoft. 

A preliminary review of the gang’s dark web leak site by The 74 suggest the compromised files include a significant volume of sensitive documents, including records related to student sexual violence allegations, district finances, student discipline, special education, civil rights investigations, student maltreatment and sex offender notifications. 

The video is no longer available on Vimeo and a company spokesperson confirmed to The 74 that it was removed for violating its terms of service, which prohibits users from uploading content that “infringes any third party’s” privacy rights. 

As targeted organizations decline to pay ransom demands in efforts to recover stolen files, Callow said the threat actors are employing new tactics “to improve conversion rates.”

“This is likely just an experiment, and if they find this works they will do it more frequently,” Callow said. “These groups operate like regular businesses, in that they A/B test and adopt the strategies that work and ditch the ones that don’t.” 

Here’s a snippet of the video’s introduction (with all sensitive records omitted):

The Minneapolis school district hasn’t acknowledged being a ransomware victim, while Callow and other cybersecurity experts have been harshly critical of how it has disclosed the attack to the public. In a March 1 statement, the district attributed “technical difficulties” with its computer systems to the referenced “encryption event,” a characterization that experts blasted as creative public relations that left potential victims in the dark about the incident’s severity. 

The district “has not paid a ransom” and an investigation into the incident “has not found any evidence that any data accessed has been used to commit fraud,” school officials said in the March 1 statement.  

In a statement to The 74 Tuesday, the district said it “is aware that the threat actor who has claimed responsibility for our recent encryption event has posted online some of the data they accessed.” 

“This action has been reported to law enforcement, and we are working with IT specialists to review the data in order to contact impacted individuals,” the statement continued.

Minnesota-based student privacy advocate Marika Pfefferkorn called on the district to be more forthcoming as it confronts the attack. 

“First and foremost, they owe an apology to the community by not being explicit right away about what was happening,” said Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation. “Because they haven’t communicated about it, they haven’t shared a plan about, ‘How will you address this? How will you respond?’ Not knowing how they are going to respond makes me really nervous.”

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange, said that district officials appear to have coined the term “encryption event,” but available information suggests the school system was the victim of “classic double extortion,” an exploitation technique that’s become popular among ransomware gangs in the last several years. 

With its video and dark web blog, Medusa may have spent “a little more time and energy” than other ransomware groups in presenting the stolen data in a compelling package, “but the tactics seem to be the same,” Levin said. “Now that we have a group coming forward with compelling evidence that they have exfiltrated data from the system and it’s actively extorting them, that’s all I would need to know to classify this as ransomware.”

In double extortion ransomware attacks, threat actors gain access to a victim’s computer network, download compromising records and lock the files with an encryption key. Criminals then demand their victim pay a ransom to regain control of their files. Then, if a ransom is not paid, criminals sell the data or publish the records to a leak site. 

Such a situation recently played out in the Los Angeles Unified School district, the nation’s second-largest school system. Last year, the ransomware gang Vice Society broke into the district’s computer network and made off with some 500 gigabytes of district files. When the district refused to pay an undisclosed ransom, Vice Society uploaded the records to its dark web leak site. 

District officials have sought to downplay the attack’s effects on students. But an investigation by The 74 found thousands of students’ comprehensive and highly sensitive mental health records had been exposed. The district then acknowledged Feb. 22 that some 2,000 student psychological assessments — including those of 60 current students — had been leaked.

Districts that become ransomware targets could face significant liability issues. Earlier this month, the education technology company Aeries Software agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle a negligence lawsuit after a data breach exposed records from two California school districts. District families accused the software company of failing to implement reasonable cybersecurity safeguards. 

Federal authorities have made progress in curtailing cybercriminals. In January, authorities seized control of a prolific ransomware gang’s leak site and earlier this month officials announced sanctions against seven men with ties to a Russian-based ransomware group that’s known to target schools. 

At least 11 U.S. school districts have been the victims of ransomware attacks so far in 2023, according to Emsisoft research. Last year, ransomware victims included 45 school districts and 44 colleges. 

In Minneapolis, a lack of transparency from the district could put affected students and staff at heightened risk of exploitation, Emsisoft’s Callow said. 

“There absolutely are times when districts have to be cautious about the information they release because it is the source of an ongoing investigation,” he said. “But calling something a ransomware incident as opposed to an encryption event really isn’t problematic. Nor is telling people their personal information may have been compromised.”

Pfefferkorn, the Minneapolis student privacy advocate, said she’s concerned about the amount of data the school district collects about students and worries it lacks sufficient cybersecurity safeguards to keep the information secure. She pointed to Minneapolis schools’ since-terminated contract with the digital student surveillance company Gaggle, which monitors students online and alerts district officials to references about mental health challenges, sexuality, drug use, violence and bullying. 

The district said it adopted the monitoring tool in a pandemic-era effort to keep kids safe online, but the unauthorized disclosure of Gaggle records maintained by the district could make them more vulnerable, she said. 

There’s little recourse, she said, for students and educators whose sensitive records were already leaked by Medusa. 

“It’s already out there and that cannot be repaired,” she said. “There’s information out there that’s going to impact them for the rest of their lives.”

SEIU Local 99 announced over the weekend that it plans to hold a 3-day unfair labor practice strike to protest what it characterizes as harassment from LAUSD. The union will announce dates for the strike this Wednesday at a joint rally with the teachers union, UTLA. An FAQ on UTLA’s website says its members “are preparing for full solidarity once the [strike] dates are announced.” The rally will take place from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Grand Park in front of L.A. City Hall. In addition, the LAUSD school board will meet Tuesday to discuss the labor negotiations in a special closed-session meeting. 

The union representing LAUSD’s 30,000 school bus drivers, custodians, and other service workers took another step closer to a strike yesterday in a move that could lead to a shutdown of the nation’s second largest school district.

“We are canceling the extension of our current union contract,” said SEIU Local 99 executive director Max Arias at yesterday’s school board meeting. “This includes the no-strike provision.” 

The announcement follows a string of threats issued by Local 99 leaders in recent months, each one bringing the union closer, at least rhetorically, to a work stoppage. 

A representative for a coalition of 47 organizations also addressed the negotiations, presenting the board with a letter urging its members “to address the historic underinvestment in a group of workers — namely women of color — who have consistently demonstrated their commitment to the students and families of Los Angeles.”

In December, service workers rallied in front of LAUSD headquarters. In January and February, the union held a strike authorization vote, which passed with 96% support. Now, by canceling the contract extension and its no-strike provision, the union opens the possibility a strike could occur even sooner than anticipated.

“We do not take this decision lightly,” said Arias. 

Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, spoke on behalf of the 47 organizations.

“We want to encourage an equitable resolution and believe in the Superintendent’s leadership to make that happen” said Dahan, quoting from the letter. 

The letter praises Local 99’s in-person work early in the pandemic and its advocacy to end “willful defiance” suspensions and increase K-12 arts funding. Other signatories include Educators for Excellence Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health, and the Los Angeles Urban League. 

The union’s presence at the board meeting was part of a district-wide action on Tuesday — informational picketing at nearly 300 schools — calling attention to alleged unfair labor practices. In documents filed with the state labor board, the union alleges a variety of obstruction and intimidation tactics from district administrators during last month’s voting period to authorize a strike.

One charge describes a principal who, by continually popping into the staff lounge, would not allow union members to confer in private. Another describes an official who placed boxes in front of a bulletin board holding voting information.

In a statement Wednesday, LAUSD said it was “disappointed” in SEIU’s decision to cancel its contract extension, acknowledging a strike would “cause a significant disruption to instruction, and would adversely impact our entire system.”

A strike protesting these tactics — an unfair labor practice strike — could be called at any time. 

The union’s other weapon, an economic strike, can only be called once the state’s negotiating procedure has been exhausted. The union has moved closer in that direction as well. 

Arias said state-facilitated mediation has failed, leading to the step of fact-finding, during which a three-member panel reviews each side’s arguments and produces a non-binding recommendation. 

The district has “made some movements I want to commend them on,” Arias said in an interview, adding that during recent negotiations, LAUSD agreed to expand health benefits for teaching assistants and after school workers. 

But, he added, they haven’t come close to meeting the union’s core demand of a 30% wage increase as well as an hourly bump of $2, the latter proposed with the union’s lowest-paid members in mind. 

The average annual salary for union members is $25,000, and many are living paycheck to paycheck.

Three board members on Tuesday — Nick Melvoin,Tanya Ortiz Franklin, and board president Jackie Goldberg — wore purple, the color of SEIU. LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho showed up late, missing Local 99 president Conrado Guerrero’s two minutes of comment, which highlighted members’ work to prepare sack lunches and maintain facilities during the early pandemic. 

“How soon LAUSD forgets,” Guerrero said. 

When Arias made his announcement, some board members looked surprised, but Carvalho appeared unfazed, moving only to lift a small glass coffee mug to his lips.

Local 99 has the backing of United Teachers Los Angeles, whose board voted in January to support the service workers if they struck by not crossing the picket line.

On March 15, Local 99 and UTLA will hold a joint rally at LA City Hall. 

Its admission on Wednesday, which included the news that 60 current students’ records had been compromised, comes five months after the nation’s second-largest school district was the victim of a ransomware attack and four months after schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho categorically denied that students’ psychological records were part of that breach.

“As the District and its partners delve deeper into the reality of the data breach, the scope of the attack further actualizes and new discoveries have been revealed,” Jack Kelanic, the district’s senior administrator of IT infrastructure, said in a statement. “Approximately 2,000 student assessment records have been confirmed as part of the attack, 60 of whom are currently enrolled, as well as Driver’s License numbers and Social Security numbers.”

The 74 published an extensive investigation by reporter Mark Keierleber Wednesday revealing that the records — among the most sensitive information school districts maintain on students — could be uploaded from a dark web leak site of the Russian-speaking ransomware gang Vice Society. The cyber criminal gang infiltrated LAUSD’s computer system last year and then released the records when the school district refused to pay an undisclosed ransom demand.

When presented with the results of The 74’s investigation Tuesday, district officials did not retract or correct Carvalho’s earlier statements, which a district spokesperson said “were based on the information that had been developed at that time.” The comments were made in early October, about a month after the cyber attack was first reported, and at a point where school district and law enforcement analysts had already reviewed about two-thirds of the data leaked on the dark web, according to the schools chief.

The district is now saying that notification to individuals whose information was posted has been slowed by the painstaking nature of the process and the fact that some of the records date back nearly 30 years. To comply with state privacy rules, the district posted a data breach notice to the California state attorney general’s office website in January disclosing that district contractors’ certified payroll records and their names, addresses and Social Security numbers were leaked.

School officials have not said anything publicly about notifying current or former students or district employees that their information has been compromised, but said Wednesday their investigation is ongoing and they “will continue notifying individuals as they are determined.” A day earlier, a district spokesperson told The 74 that no current or former students had been informed that their psychological records were posted online.

The records identified by The 74 were at least a decade old and involve special education students. They include a comprehensive background on the student’s medical history, observations on their home and family life, and assessments of their cognitive, academic and emotional functioning. 

“It could ruin careers, it could damage families, people could get fired, it could potentially increase the likelihood of self harm if they suffer some kind of mental trauma from it,” a cyber security expert told the Los Angeles Daily News for a story it published on the district’s response to The 74’s investigation. 

Hundreds — and likely thousands — of sensitive files were leaked online

People are likely unaware their health records were stolen

Because the district hasn’t disclosed the trove of records exists

And federal privacy laws don’t require schools to go public

Update: After this story published, the Los Angeles school district acknowledged in a statement that “approximately 2,000” student psychological evaluations — including those of 60 current students — had been uploaded to the dark web.

Detailed and highly sensitive mental health records of hundreds — and likely thousands — of former Los Angeles students were published online after the city’s school district fell victim to a massive ransomware attack last year, an investigation by The 74 has revealed. 

The student psychological evaluations, published to a “dark web” leak site by the Russian-speaking ransomware gang Vice Society, offer a startling degree of personally identifiable information about students who received special education services, including their detailed medical histories, academic performance and disciplinary records. 

But people are likely unaware their sensitive information is readily available online because the Los Angeles Unified School District hasn’t alerted them, a district spokesperson confirmed, and leaders haven’t acknowledged the trove of records even exists. In contrast, the district publicly acknowledged last month that the sensitive information of district contractors had been leaked. 

Cybersecurity experts said the revelation that student psychological records were exposed en masse and a lack of transparency by the district highlight a gap in existing federal privacy laws. Rules that pertain to sensitive health records maintained by hospitals and health insurers, which are protected by stringent data breach notification policies, differ from those that apply to education records kept by schools — even when the files themselves are virtually identical. Under existing federal privacy rules, school districts are not required to notify the public when students’ personal information, including medical records, is exposed. 

But keeping the extent of data breaches under wraps runs counter to schools’ mission of improving children’s lives and instead places them at heightened risk of harm, said school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. 

“It’s deeply disturbing that an organization that you’ve entrusted with such sensitive information is either significantly delaying — or even hiding — the fact that individuals had very sensitive information exposed,” Levin told The 74. “For a school system to wait six months, a year or longer before notifying someone that their information is out on the dark web and being potentially abused is a year that those individuals can’t take steps to protect themselves.” 

In a January report, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that school districts were being targeted by cyber gangs “with potentially catastrophic impacts on students, their families, teachers and administrators.” Threats became particularly acute during the pandemic as schools grew more reliant on technology.  The number of publicly disclosed cybersecurity incidents affecting schools has grown from 400 in 2018 to more than 1,300 in 2021, according to the federal agency. 

When L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho acknowledged in early October that the cyber gang published some 500 gigabytes of stolen records to the dark web after the district declined to pay an unspecified ransom demand, he sought to downplay its effects on students. An early news report said the leaked files contained some students’ psychological assessments, citing “a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.” Carvalho called that revelation “absolutely incorrect.” 

“We have seen no evidence that psychiatric evaluation information or health records, based on what we’ve seen thus far, has been made available publicly,” said Carvalho, who acknowledged the hackers had “touched” the district’s massive student information system and had exposed a limited collection of students’ records, including their names and addresses. 

The 500 gigabytes of stolen records include tens of thousands of individual files, including scanned copies of adults’ Social Security cards, passports, financial records and other personnel files. 

The systemic release of students’ psychological assessments stolen from the Los Angeles district and published to the dark web hasn’t been previously reported. Leaked psychological evaluations use a consistent file-naming structure, allowing The 74 to isolate them from other types of district records that appear on the ransomware gang’s leak site, including those related to district contractors and files that are benign and do not contain confidential information. The 74 has independently verified that 500 students’ sensitive psychological assessments are available for download as PDF files on the Vice Society leak site, reaching a federal threshold that would require health care providers to publicly disclose such a data breach if it involved patient health records. 

More than 2,200 PDFs — and a large swath of other document types — follow the consistent file-naming structure, suggesting the total number of leaked student psychological files is in the thousands. The records are at least a decade old and while they don’t appear to contain information about current students, they do contain highly personal information about former LAUSD students who are now in their 20s and 30s. 

In early October, Carvalho said that people would be contacted if their information got exposed in the data breach, assuring them, “No news is good news.” By that point, Carvalho said, school district and law enforcement analysts had already reviewed about two-thirds of the data leaked on the dark web. 

Now, more than four months after the schools chief denied that psychological evaluations were exposed, the nation’s second-largest school district has not changed its position publicly. A district spokesperson said that Carvalho’s statements in October “were based on the information that had been developed at that time” and that the review was still ongoing.

“Los Angeles Unified is in the process of completing its review and analysis of the data posted by the criminals responsible for the cyberattack to the dark web, to identify individuals impacted and to provide any required notifications,” the district told The 74 in a statement. “Once Los Angeles Unified has completed its review and analysis of that data, Los Angeles Unified will provide an update,” to affected individuals and the public.  

‘Huge emotional strain for the family’

The particular files posted online — students’ psycho-educational case studies — are among the most sensitive records that schools keep about children with disabilities, said Steven Catron, senior staff attorney of the Learning Rights Law Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income families in special education disputes with their children’s school district.

The evaluations are designed to help schools assess how a student’s disabilities and other factors affect their learning. They include a comprehensive background on the child’s medical history, observations on their home and family life, and assessments of their cognitive, academic and emotional functioning. 

One of the reports notes that a student was placed in foster care “due to domestic violence in the home.” The student struggled with “a limited attention span” and often refused to complete his work, the report notes, and “is easily angered when he does not get his way.” Another states a student’s desire to “become a police officer so that he can ‘arrest people because they do drugs.’” A student’s father “works in a plant that makes airplane parts and speaks no English,” one report notes. “His mother is a librarian assistant and speaks a ‘little English.’” 

In general, Catron said, such reports can include details about a family’s immigration status, sexual misconduct allegations, unfounded child abuse reports or that a student has “been hitting other children or adults in a school environment.” Yet it’s often difficult for families to get sensitive information removed from the files, he said, even if it isn’t accurate. Now, with breached student records of this nature in the public domain, “who knows what is going to happen.”

“The sheer scope of information, like you’ve seen, it’s darn broad and pretty hurtful for people,” Catron said. “If those records include those types of notes, whether correct or not, it can just cause a huge emotional strain for the family.” 

The files themselves note that the assessment reports “may contain sensitive information subject to misinterpretation by untrained individuals” and that the “nonconsensual re-disclosure by unauthorized individuals is prohibited” by state law. 

Available files appear to be limited to former Los Angeles students born primarily in the late 1980s and 1990s. The age of the records highlight how potential data breach victims extend far beyond current students when districts suffer hacks, Levin, the cybersecurity expert, said. Students’ sensitive information can be exposed years or even decades after they graduate if districts lack sufficient data security safeguards.  

The timeline could also complicate any potential efforts by the district to find and notify affected individuals who could unknowingly face heightened risks including embarrassment, identity theft and extortion.

“Sometimes school districts will delay notifying until they can identify every last person that they possibly can, but that can be an expensive to impossible endeavor,” Levin said. “For a school district like LAUSD to try to track people who were associated with the district say 10 years ago, that’s a daunting task and clearly is very likely to be imperfect.”

The disclosure gap

Health care providers are held to strict data privacy rules and could face steep fines in the event of a data breach involving sensitive patient records. Agencies and businesses covered by the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act are required to publicly acknowledge health data breaches affecting 500 or more people and notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 days following a breach.” 

The Broward County, Florida, school district recently got caught in a data breach disclosure debacle after the country’s sixth-largest school system suffered a ransomware attack in 2021 and refused to pay an extortion demand initially set at $40 million. In response, threat actors published to a dark web leak site the personal information of nearly 50,000 district personnel enrolled in its health plan. The Broward district is currently one of four K-12 school systems listed on a data breach portal maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. The breach portal  — often referred to as the “Wall of Shame” — includes all data breaches affecting 500 or more people that were reported to the federal agency in the last 24 months. 

District officials in Florida ultimately waited 154 days — three months longer than federal rules allow — to disclose the breach’s full extent on its website, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In a statement, a district spokesperson told The 74 the school system “worked diligently to investigate the incident.” Once officials realized that records related to the district’s self-insured health plan were breached, notifications to affected personnel and the federal health administration “required the gathering and sorting of significant amounts of data in order to determine the individuals to be notified.” 

“That process was complex and took substantial hours,” the spokesperson said. “Under the circumstances, notification was made in an expeditious manner.” 

The Broward district is a HIPAA-covered entity because it operates a self-insured health plan. But public schools aren’t generally considered “covered entities” under the health privacy law. And even when they are, students’ education records — including their health information — are exempt. They’re instead covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal student privacy law known as FERPA. The law prohibits student records from being released publicly but, unlike HIPAA, does not require schools to disclose when such breaches occur.

“The same type of information is treated differently from a compliance standpoint depending on who is holding and maintaining that information,” said student privacy expert Jim Siegl, a senior technologist with the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum. The federal privacy rules that apply to hospitals and schools “live in separate universes. If it’s maintained by the school, it’s FERPA. If it’s maintained by your doctor, the same information is HIPAA protected.” 

A small subset of Los Angeles students’ health records are covered by HIPAA, the LAUSD district spokesperson said, but the psychological assessments are not. A data breach involving student’s records — like the one in Los Angeles — could be considered a FERPA violation, according to the U.S. Department of Education. 

“FERPA requires the school to maintain direct control over the records,” Siegl said. “There is a lot that goes into a FERPA violation, but I would say that within the spirit of FERPA, they did not maintain direct control over the records.” 

Yet, consequences for violating FERPA are next to nonexistent. Districts can lose federal funds if they have “a policy or practice” of releasing students’ records without parental permission, a high bar that excludes occasional violations. Since the law was enacted in 1974, it’s never been used to strip funding from a district that broke the rules. 

‘A psychological torment’

To comply with state privacy rules, the Los Angeles district has been more transparent about the systemic breach of sensitive records about distinct construction contractors. In a data breach notice posted to the California state attorney general’s office website in January, the district said its investigation into the breach had uncovered certified payroll records and other labor compliance documents that included the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of district contractors. 

The data breach notice also made clear that cyber criminals had infiltrated the district’s computer network more than a month earlier than initially disclosed. Carvalho said in October that district cybersecurity officials were quick to detect the unauthorized access and, “in a very, very unique way, we stopped the attack midstream.” 

The district spokesperson said LAUSD is working to determine whether any of the breached files are considered “medical information” under state law and whether a notification is required. Any data breach alert to the state attorney general’s office would coincide with notifications to affected individuals, the spokesperson said. 

Asked about the school district’s notification obligations for the trove of leaked student psychological records and whether it’s investigating the matter, an AG’s office spokesperson said in an email “we can’t comment on, even to confirm or deny, a potential or ongoing investigation,” and didn’t offer any other information. Reached for comment about the data breaches in Los Angeles and Broward County, a federal Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said its civil rights division “does not typically comment on open or potential investigations,” and declined to say anything further. 

The Los Angeles district has for decades struggled with its obligations to provide special education services to children with disabilities. Last year, it reached an agreement to provide compensatory services to children with disabilities after an investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights office found it had failed to provide them during the pandemic. Parents and advocates said last month many children are still waiting for those services.

Los Angeles parent Ariel Harman-Holmes, whose three children are in special education, said she’s worried the data breach could further divert funds from those much-needed special education services. 

“I would rather have those funds go back into the schools and special education rather than spending a ton on litigation or settlements about privacy issues,” said Harman-Holmes, who serves as vice chair of the district’s Community Advisory Committee for Special Education. But she acknowledged it “would be very disturbing” if her own child’s psychological evaluations were leaked online. 

“Our middle son is a very private person and this could be a psychological torment to him knowing that personal observations about him were out there,” she said. “That would be very devastating to him.”

All 80 districts within the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s jurisdiction will have the authority to opt-in to services with Hazel Health, a telehealth provider that has partnered with districts nationwide to connect families with licensed care quickly and at no cost.

Their virtual therapy model removes some key barriers to accessing care from the equation, including insurance coverage, provider shortages or waitlists and transportation. Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second largest district, and Compton Unified have already opted in.

In California, nearly 70% of youth who’ve experienced a major depressive episode did not receive any treatment — 10% above national averages. 

However, the new partnership is not designed to support students long-term.

“Each student can typically expect an intake visit plus six weeks to two months of weekly sessions before being discharged from the Hazel program,” a spokesperson for Hazel Health told The 74 by email. “The program is short-term—if your child needs long-term mental health support, we will help identify and connect you with options in your community.”

The $24 million dollar partnership with L.A. Care Health Plan, Health Net, and the L.A. County Department of Mental Health is part of the state’s urgent push to address the youth mental health crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and social media. In addition, racial unrest and discrimination is particularly taxing students of color, who make up 86% of Los Angeles county schools. 

Los Angeles Unified has not yet finalized their implementation plan. It may take up to twelve weeks before sessions begin, according to a spokesperson from the county’s education office.

In December, some Compton Unified students began to access at-home services, and as of last week, two district schools began offering telehealth visits onsite. By March, the district plans to offer space for students to use at every campus.

Half of mental illnesses start by age 14, and suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for children. Other school districts already partnered with Hazel include Clark County, Nevada’s largest, and Duval County Public Schools in Florida. 

While a similar teletherapy offering in Colorado enables youth 12 and up to confidentially sign up and meet with therapists on their own, Los Angeles’s partnership with Hazel will require students to be referred by a parent, guardian or school staff member. 

Over half of Hazel Health’s mental health providers are people of color and over 40% are bilingual. When necessary, clinicians use Language Line to facilitate sessions in students’ preferred language.  

“Hazel Health aligns the hiring of therapists to the demographics of its partner districts,” said Van Nguyen, Public Information Officer for the LA County Office of Education. 

The company launched its first mental health visits in the fall of 2021, which range coping mechanisms and tools for general anxiety disorder, depression, academic stress and bullying. Presently, about 22 clinical mental health positions are vacant.

“Hazel’s hiring practices involve looking for trauma-trained clinicians with deep expertise in children and teens, as well as specific passion areas and specialties (such as LGBTQ). Getting the match right is critical,” Drew Mathias, vice president of marketing, told The 74. 

Their clinicians most often use cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing and dialectical behavior therapy approaches. 

Founded in 2015 by a pediatric emergency room doctor, K-12 educator, and former Apple software engineer, Hazel Health offers physical and mental health care visits to children at over 3,000 public schools.

Last month, by unanimous vote, the 78-year-old representative of Board District 5 was elected president of the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education. She last held the position in 1990, before moving on to stints in city and state politics and academia. 

In an interview with The 74, Goldberg discussed both long-term and immediate difficulties facing the district, saying that negotiations with the unions representing LAUSD’s teachers and service workers would be resolved “in the next four to six weeks.” Her statements echo superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s recent promises of “a multi-year contract” that will “offset the pressure of inflation for all our workforce.”  

Goldberg must also lead the board in deciding how to spend the district’s $14.3 billion operating budget in a way that addresses the emotional and academic impacts of the pandemic and prepares for a future of declining enrollment and swelling costs. 

Goldberg spoke with The 74 about these challenges, her goals for her one-year term as president, and her thoughts about superintendent Carvalho as he approaches one year on the job. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Are you confident that the budget you’re going to craft can accommodate demands from the labor unions? Let’s start with the service workers. 

…I am absolutely confident that we will conclude successful negotiations with all our bargaining units [including UTLA and SEIU Local 99], in probably the next four to six weeks — without any strikes or work stoppages… 

This board is very supportive of very good compensation packages because we know that the folks that have worked in our schools and in our offices have been through a lot of distress, and we want them to know that they are valuable to us and that they are the critical features of the district…There aren’t going to be any cuts to their benefits. That’s not where we’re looking. We need those people. The people at the schools are the only people who interact with children… 

All of those folks make schools a place of learning and safety for children and young people, and we’re not going to do anything, if we can possibly avoid it, that would lead to anybody thinking of, first, not working for us any longer, second, not helping us recruit for our vacancies, and third, for feeling the need for a work stoppage.

One thing the teachers are asking for is smaller class sizes. In order to achieve that, you would need to hire more teachers.

We’ve held class sizes down this whole year, with schools [that] lost enrollment not losing teachers unless they lost significant enrollment. So class sizes are actually smaller than they’ve been in recent years…I don’t think we will need to hire people to continue that because, unfortunately, in the entire state of California and in Los Angeles Unified, enrollment is declining. 

People are leaving because they can’t afford to live in the state. People are leaving because of immigration policies that have slowed immigration, which was a big part of our increase in population through the eighties and nineties and the beginning of 2000.

And also the birth rate in Los Angeles County is down considerably from what it has traditionally been. So all of those factors mean that we will have fewer students next year than we have this year…

Are you saying that natural demographic shifts will resolve that one point of tension between the district and the teacher’s union?

I doubt that it will ever resolve that point of contention. But I do think it will mean that the actual teaching experience for teachers in our system will be with significantly smaller class sizes than they have had when we were growing enrollment. 

I want to ask about enrollment decline. What is the board doing to make attending LA schools more attractive? 

It’s really done school by school, but we do a lot of things to make school more attractive. We have a very large sports program. We have a very large music program, and a growing music program. We have a very large arts program that is now beginning to grow again…We have festivals of cultural types all over the district. We have dual-language programs. We have programs with robotics. We have programs with STEM, we have programs with STEAM…

Are those making a dent in the enrollment decline?

I think so. We have a fairly significant number of schools in my board district with an increased enrollment this year. A lot of them in Southeast and South Gate. Huntington Park and Bell. Those schools are full and filling up. MACES Academy has a waitlist. Southeast Middle has a waitlist. 

There are different efforts being done regionally. There are different efforts being done at individual schools. And there are different efforts that the board is paying for, like extended transportation after school so that more students can participate in after school fun activities.

We’re coming up on a year since superintendent Carvalho came to the district. How would you say he’s doing?

Well, I think he’s doing pretty well. He will get a formal evaluation sometime in early February. We have a process we’ve developed and board members have been asked to review some materials and to rate him on certain issues, and all of that will be gathered at a closed session sometime in February…But I would say he has done some very important things very quickly. Certainly getting us a strategic plan, which the district has not had for many years…And very quickly when he came in, he set up ways to get feedback and information from the public…as well as staff…

He certainly has taken up the issues that are most important to this board, which are the social-emotional crisis in many of our schools, with many of our students, and some of our teachers. 

He also is pointing to real goals — specific, measurable goals in student achievement, and also how to support our personnel so they feel like this is the best place they ever wanted to work and to be able to help us recruit for still vacant positions… 

What are some areas for improvement for the superintendent?

I’m really not able to say that I have any at this moment…what he is doing is taking a look at not just the present, but the history and the future of this district…I have never seen a superintendent take a backward look at everything that has been going on as a way to understand how to move forward. 

It came out that [the cyberattack in September] started more than a month earlier than was disclosed by Carvalho…Is Carvalho trustworthy?

He’s trustworthy. He did what was necessary to protect this district. Making things public at a time earlier than he did would have endangered all of the efforts of the federal government, the state government, FBI, local police in trying to stop this. 

We are one of the very few districts that has been hit hard by this stuff that paid no ransom and managed very carefully to also protect all our payroll, for example. We lost nobody. They got no payroll information with all the Social Security numbers, for example. They got none of it. In fact, the only Social Security numbers they got were from the original place they broke in, which was Facilities. And that was with a few contractors.

There was some student information. Not Social Security numbers, but things like birth dates that were accessed. Right?

Yes. There were other smaller things — none of which, however, could prevent us from opening the schools, running the schools, paying people on time and appropriately. So I would say, considering what a terrible mess — and we’re not done with it, by the way. We still, every day, every week, every month have a series of checks that are being done…

I know a lot of one-time funding is going towards academic recovery efforts and there were these two acceleration days over winter break. Only about 9% of students in the district showed up. Do you see that as a success?

But about 65% of the ones that showed up were exactly the kids we were looking for. And we learned a lot. We learned that elementary kids are less likely to go to get help at a school they don’t regularly attend.

We learned that we should count on about half the students showing up — we figured that it would be 75% [of students who signed up]. We predicted wrong. In other words, we learn. So how we do the next two [acceleration days] in spring will be better.

How else should the district be tackling academic recovery in order to attract the students who didn’t show up for acceleration days?

We’re going to probably accelerate the amount of after school on your own campus with your own teacher support. That’s something we’re looking into for the following year. Saying…let’s see if we can do it two or three days a week all year long.

So, extended after school programs.

Extended after school, Saturday programs, additional teacher assistants we hope to hire to put into the classroom, so there’s a lower adult-to-student ratio. That makes for a lot of extra help for kids who are struggling. I spent 17 years teaching in Compton. I’m well aware of what it takes to make movement with kids who are struggling in school.

What about recovery for students with disabilities?…I’ve heard from a lot of parents and advocates that during [individualized education plan] meetings, the team is not bringing up compensatory education…Is that acceptable?

I have no idea if what you’re saying is accurate or not. So, without knowing that I can’t answer that question.

What specifically can the district be doing for students with disabilities, who are going to need way more than just some extra after school time?

Well, the [individualized education plan] will determine their individual needs and the district will meet them. That’s our goal. We don’t have any subordinate goal to that. We don’t say we’re going to try or anything else. We’re going to meet them. 

We had trouble meeting them [early in the pandemic] because, for example, all the kids that needed speech — most of the speech teachers went online. The parents didn’t want to do speech online. They wanted it in person, and we weren’t willing to require speech therapists to meet in students’ homes. So yes, they didn’t get it. You’re right. That was terrible. But it was a decision the parent made not to do that…

What we’re trying to do now is to overdose. So if [the students] were going to get [the services] once a week, we’re going to try to see if we can get it for them twice a week and things like that…

We’re going to try to figure out ways to deal with that loss, which has been extreme. No doubt.

How would you describe the district’s financial health?

Well, on the macro level, not good. On the micro level, fine. 

On the macro level, we, every year, spend more than we receive. And the two areas which bust our budget, is special education — which is about a billion dollars from the general fund that should not have to come from the general fund — and are benefits paid to retirees. Both the healthcare benefits that we pay to retirees and pension benefits that we pay part of and that the employee pays part of. Both of those put us in a long-term situation of having to ultimately…not be able to do what we have done for many, many decades, which is to pay the existing bills and to keep putting off some of the things that we haven’t yet figured out how to rectify.

SEIU Local 99 announced on Feb. 11 that the strike authorization had passed with 96% support from members who voted. The authorization does not guarantee a strike but allows the union’s bargaining team to call one if necessary. The union’s first state-run mediation session with LAUSD is scheduled for Feb. 21. 

If LAUSD workers, parents, and administrators agree on one thing it’s that nobody wants a strike.   

Earlier this month, the union representing Los Angeles Unified’s service workers — including 30,000 custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and special education assistants  —  issued its clearest threat to date in its years-long contract negotiations with LAUSD, announcing that it would hold a strike authorization vote this month. 

SEIU Local 99’s members regard the prospect grimly. Earning an average annual salary of $25,000, many said they could not afford to forgo a paycheck.

Yet, between now and Feb. 10, they plan to vote in favor of the work stoppage. 

“We’re having a hard time making it,” said Hugh Alston, a special education assistant at 93rd St. Elementary. “I would reluctantly have to vote yes. All of us. We’d stick together.” 

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a press conference earlier this month that concluding contract negotiations with Local 99 was his “highest priority,” and promised to “offset the pressure of inflation for all our workforce” with “a multi-year contract that will, at all levels, outpace what has been provided to other workforce groups across the country.” 

“If we are to retain, incentivize, and recruit the highly skilled workforce we need as far as teachers and support staff, we need to provide adequate compensation that addresses the critical challenges facing anyone in this community,” he said.

LAUSD offered the union 5% wage increases for multiple school years, but union leaders called that insufficient, accusing the district of ignoring proposals regarding increased work hours and expanded health coverage. 

Though financially padded for the current school year, LAUSD officials expect budget cuts over the years to come, with persistent absenteeism and declining enrollment, the latter due in part to exasperated parents fleeing the district. Families still recovering from remote schooling and other pandemic disruptions worry that a strike could be the “nail in the coffin” for LAUSD. 

“I can absolutely tell you that one more major disruption like that, that’ll be it,” said Christie Pesicka, a parent advocate in the district. “Enrollment will plummet again.”

An LAUSD spokesman declined to comment on how the system would respond to a strike, refusing to lay out a backup plan for services like bussing, food prep, cleaning, and after-school programs. He also would not say if the district was considering remote schooling. 

What is clear is that workers are angry. In an interview with The 74, Local 99 executive director Max Arias described the union’s rally in front of the district’s administrative headquarters in December as “militant.” 

“I fully expect that it’s gonna go through,” he said of the strike authorization vote. 

The union’s members have been working without a contract since June 2020. 

Initially, that was because of the pandemic. While teachers and administrators carried out their duties remotely, many service workers kept at their on-site tasks, cleaning facilities and preparing sack lunches. Little time, said Arias, was left for collective bargaining. 

Negotiations resumed with the easing of COVID restrictions, but the two parties have been at  loggerheads. The district’s latest move came in December, when it offered the workers a 5% wage increase for each of the 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 school years and a couple of one-time bonuses. 

Local 99 characterized the offer as insufficient and divisive, and in late December declared impasse before California’s labor relations board and requested a mediator to shepherd the parties towards an agreement. 

“To date, LAUSD is not engaging in good faith negotiations regarding proposed contract

language changes,” reads the request for mediation. “Ever since we started this process, LAUSD has not seriously considered most of our proposals.”

Workers say poor conditions, a lack of respect, and resulting staffing shortages harm morale and threaten the smooth operation of school facilities, making some of them unusable 

“We have urinals, toilets — we have sinks — that haven’t been serviced in two years,” said Edna Logan, a building and grounds worker at Manual Arts High School in South Central LA. “It’s across the board where we are low-staffed.”

Logan said she plans to vote yes on authorization even though she doesn’t “want it to come to that.”  

“We have to send a strong message,” she said.  

Alston, whose role as a special education assistant guarantees him only six hours a day, works a second job nights and weekends in order to afford the rising cost of living in Los Angeles.

He’s considered leaving the district — and he’s not alone. 

“Oh yes, I’m looking now,” said Elizabeth Thomas-Parker, a special education assistant and vice president of Local 99. “I’m looking at other districts.” 

Thomas-Parker, whose husband supports the family with a second income, said her main demand is more respect for her work.

“It’s so rude and so toxic to where I don’t want to have nothing to do with them,” she said. “It used to be fun to work for LAUSD. It’s not fun anymore.” 

Until Feb. 10, Local 99 representatives will collect ballots from the union’s 30,000 members at designated sites. Meanwhile, California’s labor relations board has assigned a mediator to the case.

Logan, also a member of the union’s bargaining team, wants one thing to come across clearly during mediation: “Without me, without my counterparts, the school would not be able to function.”

Parents, many of them service workers themselves, understand that keenly. According to Pesicka, they fear a reprise of the chaotic remote-learning months. 

“Everybody’s exhausted,” said Pesicka. “It’s so much easier just to go to a neighboring school district, or to go to a charter school, or to go to a private school if you can afford it.”

Every week or so, Los Angeles parent Glenisha Cargin makes a round of phone calls to LAUSD school officials trying to get help for her young son. 

Cargin, the mother of a first-grader on the autism spectrum who attends a district school in Westmont, calls the principal. Next she moves on to the school’s special education coordinator, then the local district superintendent. 

Cargin also said she “legit (talks) to his teacher every day.” 

The boy’s individualized education plan, or IEP — a legal document binding under state and federal federal disability law — entitles him to specific services from LAUSD. (To protect his privacy, Cargin requested her son’s name not be used.) He needs speech therapy. Prone to outbursts and wandering from his desk, he also needs a dedicated classroom aide. 

But midway through the 2022-23 school year, the child hasn’t gotten any of these services. During LAUSD’s remote schooling in 2020 and 2021, he wasn’t getting them either. 

“There’s regression,” both behavioral and academic, said Cargin. “I don’t feel like he is where he should be.”

Under an April 2022 agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, LAUSD must assess whether Cargin’s son and each of the roughly 66,000 district students with disabilities are eligible for “compensatory education” to make up for services many were illegally denied during remote schooling. 

Eight months later, parents and advocates say rollout of the plan has been uneven at best, and often confusing with minimal parent outreach. The process can be so opaque that securing even the most basic services requires a lawyer, they said.

“Because parents don’t know what their rights are, no one is holding the district accountable,” said Lisa Mosko Barros, a parent in the district and founder of the advocacy group SpEducational. 

“What we have in this district…is a crisis of awareness and information available to parents,” she said. “There should also be an awareness-raising campaign on the part of LAUSD to explain to families what compensatory ed is and why their child might be entitled.”

Advocates across the U.S. hailed the agreement with LAUSD, the country’s second largest district, as a potentially pivotal moment in public schools’ pandemic recovery. A November resolution in Fairfax County, Virginia, the outcome of a similar investigation, brought renewed attention to the issue of regression suffered during the pandemic, especially for students with disabilities. 

But LA parents of children with special needs say the agreement simply highlights problems that long precede March 2020.

In a statement, an LAUSD spokesperson said more than 38,000 IEP meetings “with individualized compensatory education determinations” had been completed as of December 1. “The District has also provided information to parents of students with disabilities about the Plan, provided multiple parent and stakeholder outreach meetings and trained thousands of staff members on implementing the Plan.”

But it’s unclear what “determinations” were made — that is, of the 38,000 students whose IEPs were reviewed, how many actually qualified for makeup services. 

The decision about who qualifies comes down to an analysis. IEP teams — besides the parent, these include the student’s teacher, a special education coordinator and an assistant principal — must go through records to determine whether a student received the services spelled out in the IEP during the months disrupted by COVID. If not, the district has to offer them.

Under the federal agreement, IEP teams must discuss this analysis thoroughly during their annual meetings with parents, but advocates say they’re skipping over it entirely. 

“As a general theme, the district is not bringing up compensatory services,” said Jill Rowland, the education program director at the Alliance for Children’s Rights, which advocates for foster youth. 

Rowland and other lawyers on her team representing low-income LA families have observed silence around compensatory education in about 30 IEP meetings this year. When they bring it up, the IEP team members appear at a loss. So parents have to enter informal dispute resolution, a process that takes up to 20 work days, to secure the extra services the child needs. 

“Now, that’s all good and great if you have an attorney,” Rowland said. “That is not going to help the majority of kids.”

Cargin got the silent treatment too. At her son’s IEP meeting in August, no one from his school mentioned compensatory education, said Cargin. Four months later, despite Cargin’s constant pressure, her son was still without speech therapy and classroom support. 

“The district really is lousy at notifying parents about anything,” she said.

Ariel Harman-Holmes, a parent, attorney and vice chair of the district’s Community Advisory Committee for Special Education, said she suspects parent experience varies “wildly” from school to school. 

She considers herself among the lucky ones. 

Her son Elijah, a fourth-grader at an LAUSD school in Sherman Oaks, has an IEP for his autism. Handwriting for him is cumbersome, so he avoids it. Although he’s on a track for gifted learners, his ability to form letters on the page is at a kindergarten level. 

Harman-Holmes says leadership from the school’s assistant principal in charge of special education is “excellent.”

She and Elijah’s IEP team met multiple times this fall. They reviewed what sort of help he got during remote schooling and discussed whether his difficulties were behavioral, academic or physical. 

They ultimately agreed that Elijah did need compensatory occupational therapy. 

But the process wasn’t trouble-free. Harman-Holmes had to enter informal dispute resolution because the IEP team members couldn’t grant the services on their own. 

“They were like, ‘You have to go to [informal dispute resolution],’” she said. “But at least they were very clear and open about it, and told me how to move forward.”

During a presentation to the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education this fall — one of five the district gave for parent groups — member Kelley Coleman worried that other parents had no idea the plan existed. 

“If I wasn’t on the [committee], I would not have any of this information. How is the division of special ed making certain that all families are aware of and understand all of this?”

Other advocates say the outreach sessions don’t come close to cutting it given the district’s size and demographics. Nearly 22% of district families fall below the poverty level, and nearly 12% of families speak English “less than well,” according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by the Department of Education.

”The case manager for every child with an IEP should reach out to the family by phone and by email and by a notice in the backpack and say your child might be entitled to compensatory education,” said Mosko Barros. “To my knowledge, that’s not happening.”

Cargin, the mother in Westmont, said she’s been trying to get the district to pay for private services since well before the resolution was announced last April. But she doesn’t blame her son’s teachers or his school’s administrators. “I just think that they get the same answers and the same runaround as I do,” she said. 

And then there’s the case of Isaiah Gardner. 

Isaiah, who’s 14 and medically fragile, requires near-constant attention during the school day. He needs nursing support, speech therapy, and adaptive physical education. He uses a communication device to speak. When the pandemic started, he lost all of these services. 

Through a series of administrative proceedings, Isaiah’s mom, Tiffaniy Gardner, secured promises of hundreds of hours of services and the equivalent of thousands of dollars of compensation from the district. But by the time she reached the last settlement agreement in December 2021, she was fed up. The district’s denial of services — including barring Isaiah from entering the classroom once in-person schooling resumed in April 2021 — had humiliated her son. 

“To me, it felt like you guys don’t want him here. You don’t value him as a student, you don’t value him as a community member,” said Gardner.

LAUSD would not discuss Gardner’s case or others with The 74. 

On April 15, the single mother flew with her three boys to Dallas so Isaiah could attend a public school in the suburb of Mansfield known for its disability services. The transition has been tough for Isaiah, she said. He still talks on the phone regularly with his nurse and teacher from LA Unified. 

But Gardner feels she made the right decision. And she wants to remind parents that they have agency during IEP meetings. 

“A lot of times people don’t understand that their voice is just as important as everybody else in that room,” she said. “It’s your call to make about your child.”

Correction: Story was changed to correct the spelling of Glenisha Cargin’s name.

More information about LAUSD’s compensatory education plan can be found here: https://achieve.lausd.net/compedplan

Parents can also email Covid-Comp-Ed-Plan@lausd.net or call (213) 241-7696