What Parents Should Know About School Bonds And Our LAUSD Citizens’ Oversight Committee:
Written by redqueeninla in Education, LAUSD
There is a political brouhaha going on right now that really deserves your attention. Your attention as a parent, as a taxpayer, as a citizen.
It involves a pretty obscure committee known as the “Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee” (BOC: www.laschools.org/bond) – I know, I’d never heard of it until recently either. [NB: The BOC website has been offline for several days; an archived version is available in the first hyperlink].
Turns out all that money we as tax payers empower agencies to borrow as “bonds” for a specific purpose or project – a whole endeavor with terms I don’t understand well – that money needs “watchdogging” because just mandating it happen doesn’t say how it will happen, or by whom, etc. Such appropriations become a situation ripe for abuse, to which alert minds have been thinking about and attending the danger for a good long while.
For example there is a whole League of Bond Oversight Committees. This tactic of funding specific projects is common enough and involves large enough sums of money, overseen by rank enough novices that all across the state Oversight Committees have been formed to watch the process and these themselves end up needing instruction. Check it out: http://www.calboc.org/ .
And right now we have a Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee in LA that is under attack. It is supposed to be an independent task force with appointees from various interest groups charged with scrutinizing the distribution of funds mandated by the taxpayers specifically for the purpose of funding school construction and infrastructure. Our Board of Education ensures that the appointees to this committee made by various special interest groups are fit to serve (as in not, say, felons or pedophiles), but they are not to influence the What Parents Should Know About School Bonds And Our LAUSD Citizens’ Oversight Committee: – redqueeninla: