![]("https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_KfL4jJfNItdJNWaCVjwfmZ4JfTUDJ-aD4Nzcc8SkwIX9rYv4Jc27oXV2bsdnvzIN7MN6nTmz576DN8vnbAu_NU07hZ55wwH-OUEk2v5LLwISZd2thRhyfr1u7rG8bjW4uVEBDgWNEI9TIhe3x0Hd-QtKNHZvT943ncmpbw0f77hZ5K83fmwE7ykBtw/s640/LAUSD%20Declining%20Enrollment.png")
Why is the LA City Council taking these drastic measures to curb homeless encampments around LAUSD schools and daycare centers?
It's not all hearts and flowers, good will and generosity. It's a cold necessity to keep LAUSD from imploding due to the plummeting student enrollment.
Check out LA City Council President Nury Martinez' comments on this issue:
"Who's left at LAUSD?" asks LA's council president just before voting to criminalize homelessness outside the schools of the second-largest district in the country — yet somehow she fails to acknowledge that "who's left" includes 17,000 LAUSD students who are themselves homeless https://t.co/M492a54gaJ pic.twitter.com/tTYUjXMQDl
— Alissa Walker (@awalkerinLA) August 3, 2022
Reality bites, and it is biting Los Angeles hard.
On many fronts,
it will take years before the full toll of the coronavirus pandemic and the
responses to it is understood.
The impact on
education and the children who experienced learning loss due will certainly be
something to keep an eye on.
Thomas Peele
recently reported for Edsource on the findings of Los Angeles Unified School
District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho about the extent of public school
enrollment declines over the last two years.
“California’s
K-12 enrollment decline of more than 270,000 students since the pandemic began
is largely attributable to people leaving the state, not enrolling children in
transitional kindergarten or kindergarten, or deciding to home-school their children
but failing to file the paperwork to account for them,” Peele reported.
For LAUSD, the
biggest school district in the state and one of the biggest in the country,
this decline merely hastened an ongoing decline in enrollment.
“The district
has 58% of the student population it had at its peak in the early 2000s, now at
430,000 students,” Peele notes.
The disruption
to the education of students across the state cannot be understated, despite
United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz’s absurd claim that
learning loss doesn’t exist.
LAUSD cannot lie about it. Everyone knows that LAUSD is in full free-fall.
Students missed
out on the wide range of learning opportunities school allow, including
socialization, and had to endure often subpar remote learning arrangements.
And the teachers unions didn't care.
California’s
prolonged closure of in-person education didn’t help things. Nor did it help
that California’s K-12 system is already among the worst performing in the
nation. Since even before the pandemic, most students in California’s K-12
system couldn’t read and do math at grade level.
K-12 Education is a crock in California. It's base indoctrination, nothing more.
Meanwhile,
increasing portions of education budgets will be going not to educating
students but to cover pension debt for public school employees. The ongoing trend of increased payments for
pension debt and other obligations versus declining enrollment makes for a
challenging fiscal situation and a challenging situation to ensure the K-12
system properly serves the needs of students.
The extra money was never about the kids. Ever.
No wonder
people are leaving the system.
And now there are studies sounding the alarm on rising school violence. (Click here)