LAUSD Budget Town Hall: A Report
Guest post by Kim Kaufman, Los Angeles community member and public schools supporter. If you also attended these meetings or other LAUSD School Board meetings and would like to have your first person responses posted on K12NN, email here. This is how the story was reported on KPCC.
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I attended the fourth (of five) “budget forums” that the LAUSD is holding in each of the districts around the city. This was at Burroughs Middle School in the Hancock Park area. From the school’s website, the full description:
John Burroughs Middle School hosts the LAUSD Budgets Priority Town Hall Meeting – October 15, 2013 at 6-7:30PM
As requested by the LAUSD Board of Education, this meeting will be held to increase transparency and understanding of the State of California and LAUSD budgets, and to gather community input and feedback on the priorities LAUSD should invest in.
The presentation tonight was made by LAUSD’s CFO, Megan Reilly. She explained some of the complicated formulas for their revenue and then went into the presentation of the choices the attendees could make for where they would like to see an increase in funding. Everyone was given a clicker to rate their five highest priorities as they were shown in the power point presentation. Among the twenty-two choices were reducing class sizes, more teachers, assistant principals, increases for maintenance workers and custodians, nurses, physical education, funding for arts, librarians, security personnel, etc. To