Some species of jellyfish can grow to be very big. They are also said to be brainless and, to the unwary, can be hazardous. To taxpayers, this is also a fair description of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The massive district, geographically the nation’s largest and second in enrollment, covers all or part of 31 communities in addition to the city of Los Angeles. Its budget is larger than a least 18 states and, unfortunately, possesses a well-earned reputation for horrible management. One has to look back only a few years for prominent examples.
In the late 1990s, the district set about building the nation’s most expensive high school on real estate that turned out to be contaminated with hazardous chemicals. Mitigating this problem added years to the completion of the project and millions to the taxpayers’ bill. Although the evidence suggested that this boondoggle was the result of incompetence, ignorance and outright corruption, LAUSD officials uniformly asserted the Bart Simpson defense: “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me and you can’t prove a thing.” Incredibly, no one was ever held accountable for this fiscal fiasco.
Since then, with the support of campaign funds from contractors who profit when schools spend money, the district has been able to convince voters to approve 5 separate bonds totaling $20 billion, with a repayment cost of close to $40 billion, to fund a massive school building program. While the district was placing bonds on the ballot at a rate of almost one every two years, enrollment has actually declined by 10 percent, raising the question of what will be done with the vacant classrooms if this trend continues. But as usual, no one in authority seems to want to address the possibility that the district may be building, and taxpayers are being charged for, classrooms that aren’t needed.
The latest prominent example of LAUSD’s brain dead management style is the $1 billion program to supply all students with iPads. Before evaluating the wisdom of this move, it should be noted that even though the district would need hundreds of thousands of units, officials failed to negotiate a better than retail price.
Now that the program has begun, officials are actually surprised that some of the $700 iPads have gone missing and students have shown the ability to “jailbreak” – a term describing the process of removing limitations on the use of these Apple units. These students are now able to play games and surf the net freely, instead focusing on assigned studies.
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