Art for art’s sake, absolutely. So what is it in the Los Angeles Unified School District that, after much chiding, still doesn’t understand its need to use taxpayer funding specifically set aside for arts education — the cultural learning that allows our young people to know art, and to make it forever part of their lives — and instead plunder the funds for other projects?
The LAUSD has long been told by parents, arts advocates and this editorial board that it needs to start spending the state funding it gets through Proposition 28, California’s arts education mandate, for the arts and only for the arts. And not as a substitute for the (paltry) existing arts programs in the district. Prop. 28 specifically tells districts accepting its $1 billion in annual funding — about $77 million to the LAUSD every year — that it can’t use the money to pay for current arts teachers and classes. The money is to go entirely to new programming.
But it doesn’t. The Los Angeles district is wantonly going against the taxpayer mandate and using the proposition’s funding for already existing arts classes.
“LAUSD has willfully and knowingly violated the law,” former LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner, who authored the proposition, said to EdSource, the nonprofit news site. “And as a consequence, is harming hundreds of thousands of students by depriving them of the arts education that they are entitled to under law.”
That’s why the families of eight district students and Beutner have filed a lawsuit against the LAUSD and its superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, demanding that the monies be spent on new arts education.
It’s sad that it has to come to this. But the families are right to sue.
The lawsuit, filed Monday afternoon in Los Angeles County Superior Court, says the district is misusing the funds and misleading the public in taking the money from Proposition 28.
The district last year even acknowledged its malfeasance. It says the proposition only mandates any small increase in arts programming, and that it doesn’t have to spend all the $77 million on new arts classes. The district is plainly wrong, and we will look forward to the court’s ruling that will force the LAUSD to do what voters approved.