Los Angeles — Los Angeles Unified School District students and Proposition 28 author Austin Beutner have filed a lawsuit against the school district and Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho over their misuse of $76.7 million in Prop 28 funds, which deprived hundreds of thousands of students from receiving expanded arts and music instruction as mandated by law.

The lawsuit details LAUSD’s repeated violations of Prop 28’s requirements to hire teachers to increase art and music education at schools, how LAUSD provided false and misleading information to the California Department of Education and the public to cover up its misuse of its Prop 28 spending, and how LAUSD’s misuse of Prop 28 funds has violated the civil rights of Black and Latino students.

“Art and music education is essential for our kids to develop the skills they need in the classroom, in their careers and throughout their lives. LAUSD is denying our children and their classmates the expanded arts and music education in every school that Prop 28 provided. We are disappointed that we must go to court to compel Superintendent Carvalho and LAUSD to follow the law,” said parents of the student plaintiffs in a joint statement.

Download the complaint here: https://tinyurl.com/Prop28lawsuitexhibits

The lawsuit is supported by unions representing nearly all of LAUSD’s workforce, including United Teachers Los Angeles or UTLA, Service Employees International Union or SEIU Local 99 and Teamsters Local 572, in addition to Beutner. Attorneys Jeffrey M. Chemerinsky, Emma M. Tehrani and Kyle J. Skinner with the Los Angeles-based law firm Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP represent the plaintiffs in the litigation, filed on Feb. 10, in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Passed by California voters in 2022 to address longstanding underfunding of arts and music education, Prop 28 provides dedicated funding to school districts to hire arts and music teachers and aides at every school so that every student benefits from increased arts and music instruction. The official ballot pamphlet, prepared by the state legislative analyst’s office, explicitly states that Prop 28 “requires schools to certify that these funds were spent in addition to existing funding for arts education programs.” Prop 28 also provides greater funding for schools attended by students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, in recognition that students from low-income families and particularly Black and Latino students have historically been hit hardest by the lack of art and music education.

In accepting Prop 28 funds, school districts are required to 1) use this money to “supplement,” and not “supplant” or replace, funding for existing art and music instruction, and 2) use at least 80% of the funds to hire arts teachers and aides to provide music and art instruction.

LAUSD failed both requirements.

In 2023-24, LAUSD cut baseline funding for art and music teachers and forced schools to use Prop 28 funds to replace these funds that were eliminated, in violation of the law. Additionally, LAUSD did not spend at least 80% of the Prop 28 funds to hire new teachers or aides, with most schools seeing no increase in arts and music staff at all.

In comparison, Long Beach Unified School District hired more than 150 new arts and music teachers and instructional aides with its $10.7 million annual allotment of Prop 28 funds to serve its 64,000 students. Had LAUSD exercised the same fidelity in implementing Prop 28 as Long Beach Unified, the school district should have hired more than 1,000 additional art and music teachers and aides with its $76.7 million annual allotment of Prop 28 funds. However, Superintendent Carvalho claimed in writing to LAUSD’s board that the school district hired only 100 new arts and music teachers to serve the needs of almost half a million students.

“Students across California have been deprived of an arts education for far too long, and a diverse, statewide coalition worked to fix this problem by putting Proposition 28 on the ballot and fighting for its passage,” said Prop 28 author Austin Beutner. “7 million Californians voted to approve the initiative, and LAUSD is knowingly and willingly disregarding the will of the voters and violating the law. Now the court must compel LAUSD to finally start providing the arts education that the voters passed and hundreds of thousands of LA’s students deserve.”

The lawsuit seeks a court order to compel LAUSD’s compliance with Prop 28, alleges race and wealth discrimination, and that the district misled the state and taxpayers by falsely certifying its compliance with the law.

The lawsuit comes after more than one year of parents and teachers urging the district to reverse course and stop violating Prop 28, and instead, to properly fund arts and music education as required by law. Despite all of this advocacy, LAUSD officials never contacted Prop 28’s author, Beutner, for any guidance on the law or to discuss concerns raised by the coalition about the district’s compliance with the ballot measure’s funding requirements.

Timeline of events

Nov. 8, 2022 – Proposition 28, authored by Austin Beutner and championed by education and arts advocates, is approved by voters, with 64% of voters statewide, and 70% of voters in Los Angeles County, voting yes.

January 2023 – California school districts such as Long Beach Unified School District begin to provide information and budget guidance to schools regarding Prop 28 to encourage hiring of art and music teachers. However, LAUSD provided no such information, budget guidance or encouragement to its schools.

August 2023 – California school districts begin the school year with many additional art and music teachers. Long Beach Unified hired over 150 arts teachers and instructional aides for the 2023-2024 school year using $10.7 million in Proposition 28 funds. Meanwhile, LAUSD did not ramp up hiring using Prop 28 funds. Had LAUSD acted similarly to Long Beach Unified and other school districts, the district would have hired more than 1,000 additional art and music teachers.

March 25, 2024 – California Teachers Association President David Goldberg, California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas, SEIU Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias, UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz, Teamsters Local 572 Secretary Treasurer Lourdes Garcia, Oakland Education Association President Ismael Armendariz and Beutner sent a letter to the Governor, State Superintendent of Public Instruction and legislative leaders about school districts that were not following Prop 28’s funding requirements.

April 29, 2024 – State Superintendent Tony Thurmond sent a letter to school districts, reminding them of their obligation to use Prop 28 funds to “supplement funding for arts education programs.”

June 18, 2024 – Local education union leaders and Beutner sent a letter to LAUSD providing detail of the district’s refusal to comply with Prop 28.

August 15, 2024 – Superintendent Carvalho sent the Board of Education a memo that acknowledged that “the District prioritized the use of Prop 28 funds to cover existing staff as well as hire new staff,” admitting Prop 28 funds were improperly used to pay for existing staff. A chart in the memo shows how the district used Prop 28 funds to backfill its cuts to its existing arts budget, labeled “other funding,” a clear violation of the law.

After continued outcry by arts advocates, labor partners and school families, LAUSD added $30 million of arts funding to elementary schools for the 2024-25 school year.

LAUSD did not put back any of the $76.7 million of funds that were taken from schools in 2023-24 and unlawfully replaced with Prop 28 funds. LAUSD did not address the unlawful use of the remainder of the Prop 28 funds ($46.7 million) in preschools, middle schools and high schools, for either of 2023-24 or 2024-25.

By providing these funds in August 2024, almost eight months after the normal budget and hiring cycle, the practical effect of this delay meant few, if any, schools were able to use the funds to hire teachers to provide students with arts education for either the 2023-24 or 2024-25 school years.

LAUSD also implemented a “clawback” system to take 20% of unspent Prop 28 funds from schools and use it elsewhere, in effect reducing the Prop 28 funds any school would receive by 20%. Prop 28 limits the amount of funds a district can take from any school’s Prop 28 funds to 1%.

Analysis of LAUSD’s failure to implement Prop 28

LAUSD’s unlawful implementation of Prop 28 is seen in a review of arts funding at seven elementary schools, one in each board district. The chart below shows how LAUSD used Prop 28 funds to replace and reduce existing funds, in violation of the law.

The cuts of the baseline arts budget (academic year 22-23) at these schools are typical of LAUSD’s districtwide failed implementation of Prop 28. The result is that there was no increase in the number of arts and music teachers or aides at many schools.

As an example, at Gardner Street Elementary School in Hollywood, the number of arts and music teachers did not increase. That’s because baseline art and music funding was cut from $37,338 in 2022-23 to $0 in 2023-24, and LAUSD told the school to use Prop 28 funds to replace the lost arts funding. The school should have received both $37,338 in baseline funds and the additional $57,882 in Prop 28 funding, for a total of $95,220, which would have allowed the school to have a fulltime arts teacher, instead of arts teacher for less than two days per week.

LAUSD’s use of Prop 28 funds to “supplant” existing arts funds was improper, and the district’s administrative failure to implement the program ensured that there would not be a significant increase in art and music staffing. Because LAUSD is responsible for hiring at the district level, individual schools effectively could not have used the Prop 28 funds to pay new arts teachers’ salaries, even if they had received the correct amount of funding. This failure has been repeated in the 2024-25 academic year and is also why LAUSD’s secretive infusion of approximately $30 million of Prop 28 funding to elementary schools in the summer of 2024 for the 2024-25 academic year failed to remediate LAUSD’s violation of Prop 28: principals and program directors had already submitted their budgets and teacher hiring had long since been completed. Attempting to find arts teachers to pay with the additional funding just one month before the start of the 2024-25 academic year — when teachers and principals are often on vacation — would have been impossible, exposing LAUSD’s “restoration” of funds for what it was: an attempt to cover up its massive violation of Prop 28.

While LAUSD has refused to provide school by school information about the increase or decrease in arts and music staffing, plaintiffs have data that show most schools had no increase in art and music teachers or classes in the 2023-24 academic year.

The lawsuit also details many instances of LAUSD providing false and misleading information to the California Department of Education and the public, for example, the school district’s claim that a field trip to the zoo is arts education.

And the lawsuit includes several other significant violations of the law by LAUSD.

In its 2021 report “Art for Life’s Sake: The Case for Arts Education,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences President David W. Oxtoby calls on “governments at the national, state, and local level to recognize the vital role arts education plays in developing empathetic, well-rounded, and civically engaged individuals who are prepared to be active members of their communities and participants in our democracy.”

Yet, LAUSD’s failure to properly implement Prop 28 leaves its students without expanded arts and music instruction as mandated by Prop 28, which is now codified at Education Code Sections 8820-8822.

Prior to Prop 28’s passage in 2022, barely one in five public schools in California had a fulltime arts or music program. The Prop 28 ballot measure was authored by Beutner, championed by education and arts advocates, and provides that 1% of total K-12 education spending is devoted to additional arts and music instruction and staffing. In the 2023-24 academic year, the program’s first year, approximately $934 million in Prop 28 funding was appropriated for California’s schools.