The Los Angeles Unified School District recently adopted a $18.8 billion budget bursting with good news, including big pay bumps for staff, smaller class sizes for students, $124 million for Black student success programs and more mental health workers.
But underneath these positive investments looms a threatening fiscal reality. In September 2024, pandemic-era federal funding allocated to the district–which totaled $5.6 billion and currently supports the salaries of more than 2,100 employees–will expire.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and members of the Board of Education are not oblivious to this reality.
The upcoming expiration of federal funds dominated this year’s budget discussion and influenced several funding decisions.
“We need to transition responsibly, from an era of COVID emergency funds to an era around the corner where the five and a half billion that we have been living off will all disappear,” said Carvalho. “If we did not begin the process now, a year from now it will be impossible to do so without incredible pain.”
A key change is Carvalho’s controversial decision to replace a much-loved program for young students who are struggling to read, called Primary Promise, with a new reading and math intervention program.
Primary Promise pairs high-need elementary students with a reading specialist who works with small groups in class. It would cost $100 million to continue next year and $200 million to be expanded to all elementary schools, which was the original plan of former Superintendent Austin Beutner.
Carvalho’s new program, dubbed the Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model, will be supported with $40 million in Title 1 funds, a federal grant intended to support students living in poverty.
The new program would train classroom teachers in intervention methods used by the Primary Promise specialists. It would offer small group math and reading interventions to high-need students in kindergarten through Grade 12, but…
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