Союз учителей Лос-Анджелеса разоблачил ложные обвинения в банкротстве школы после успешной забастовки

During the 2025-2026 school year, United Teachers of Los Angeles successfully fought the Los Angeles Unified School District for a good contract. Then came the anti-union backlash. The Los Angeles County Office of Education sent LAUSD School Board President Scott Schmerelson a letter claiming our contract would spell fiscal Armageddon, and is threatening to intervene. Conservative media claimed UTLA and other striking California teachers’ unions were “ punishing children” and “hold[ing] everyone hostage ”. The Washington Post editorial board even called teacher unions’ actions “immoral”, “extortion” and “abuse”. How did we get here? Like your hypochondriac relative who’s always “dying” but never seems to die, LAUSD has long claimed to be broke. During our 2019 strike, for example, Schmerelson denounced what he called LAUSD’s “‘doom, gloom and heading for bankruptcy’ predictions that we have heard for decades.”  LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner had claimed LAUSD’s reserve was down to only $700 million. Yet as the parties went through mediation and fact-finding, more information trickled out, and the reserve “grew”, first to $1.2 billion, then to $1.86 billion. After UTLA won numerous contract gains, LAUSD saw its reserves almost double from 2019 to 2022, growing to $3.4 billion. We heard more tales of financial doom before our strike in 2023, when we won a 21% raise over three years, but began the 2025-2026 school year with a $5.03 billion reserve. During both strikes, as today, anti-union voices condemned us for forcing LAUSD to spend money it allegedly didn’t have. San Diego Unified School District school board member Richard Barrera, who is running for California Superintendent of Public Instruction, explained at the July UTLA Leadership Conference that in proclaiming this crisis, LACOE and other critics “conveniently ignore” some of the sizable block grant money California gives LAUSD every year.  Barrera also noted that LAUSD will get another $300 million from the $3.9 billion in Proposition 98 money that Sacramento is temporarily withholding. It’s not hard to claim an entity doesn’t have enough money if you don’t count some of its revenue. California requires LAUSD to hold only 1% of its budget in reserve. But LAUSD’s budget estimated that the district began the 2026-27 school year with a 27% unrestricted reserve–far more than other school districts, and far above LAUSD board policy, which only calls for holding 5%.  LAUSD also vastly overprojects its spending on certain budget items, creating budget projections that have repeatedly understated the district’s eventual year-end balance. For example, in 2024, LAUSD budgeted $1.2 billion for textbooks, but actually spent only $460 million. In 2025, it budgeted $1.5 billion, but spent only $495 million.   Longtime UTLA critic Marc Joffe of the California Policy Center, to his credit, acknowledges that “LAUSD’s actual year-end reserves have come in above projections for the last 12 fiscal years.” In fact, the differences between LAUSD’s projected and actual reserves have been enormous. Not once have the losses LAUSD projects come anywhere close to materializing.  Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo criticizes LAUSD over allegedly serious deficit spending, but UTLA instead considers such spending to be a course correction. LAUSD’s reserve at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year was a staggering $6.4 billion—we demanded that they spend some of it on our schools, our students, and yes, on us. Schmerelson and LAUSD School Board Vice-President Dr. Rocio Rivas contest LACOE’s alarmism. In an August 6 letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, they explain: “These negotiated settlements came about through compromises by both the labor unions and the district and were entered into with extreme care for the future of LAUSD…LAUSD and labor partners…went together to Sacramento to lobby the legislature and Governor for increased funding for our schools. The result was a budget with…a super COLA and increased SPED funding that will provide our district with $740 million in additional 2026-27 funding over the original budget…we are proud of the stability these labor agreements bring to the district.”  They also note that despite the “devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our communities, test scores in the district have continued to show improvement year over year.” Schmerelson and Rivas detailed what they describe as a series of “inaccurate public statements in [LACOE’s] letter.”   For example, Duardo refers to LACOE’s objection to the Collective Bargaining Agreements on the grounds that they offer employee compensation increases that are more than the California Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) cost-of-living adjustment. Yet Schmerelson and Rivas explain that “There is no legal basis that binds a district to offer compensation in such a manner.” A closer look reveals just how out of touch some critics are. Duardo’s letter explains that California’s COLA was only 2.3 percent for the 2025-26 fiscal year–the first year of our newly-negotiated contract. In FY 2024-2025 it was only 1.07 percent. Does anybody in their right mind think that UTLA should, or would, agree to such a small “raise”? (I’d add that I’ve been involved in conducting the contract approval vote at a large LAUSD high school each of the past three contracts, and I can tell you that even if UTLA signed such an agreement, our membership probably would not have voted to approve it.) Schmerelson and Rivas also criticize Duardo’s “threaten[ded] escalation over labor costs”, explaining that LACOE’s only regulatory responsibility is to “determine whether a school district may be unable to meet its financial obligation in the current fiscal year or either of the two subsequent years.” They criticize LACOE for “losing sight of its specific and limited statutory duty in favor of chastising the board for its reasoned and good faith approach to labor relations…” LAUSD does face real challenges–declining enrollment, aggravated by federal immigration raids, as well as the fact that, as Barrera explains, California “ranks near rock bottom” of what we give to schools in relation to our state’s wealth. In condemning us, opponents are saying, in effect, that the financial pressures facing educators living in one of the most expensive cities in the world should be educators’ problem. But LAUSD had been refusing to pay us what it should, and Sacramento was refusing to provide the funding that it should. Our 2026 contract success helps make these pressures their problem.