The seven members of the L.A. Unified’s board oversee the nation’s second-largest school district, with more than 538,000 students enrolled. The district is also the county’s second-largest employer with more than 74,000 educators, administrators, and support staff on its payroll.

Three seats are up for election on Nov. 5, including Board District 5.

Unlike in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., where the mayor appoints education system leaders, Los Angeles schools are run by the school board, which voters elect directly. That means the board members have a lot of power.

What do LAUSD board members do?

• Hire and fire the superintendent — their single most important responsibility
• Pass the budget ($18.4 billion) and decide how it will be distributed
• Work with parents and resolve disputes in their district over facilities, budgets, etc.
• Vote on every charter school that hopes to open in L.A

What’s on the agenda for next term?

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing challenges in the district, including declining enrollment, disparities in student learning, truancy, inadequate mental health support, and lackluster standardized test scores.

Go deeper: Read more about what board members do, and the challenges facing the school board

About the Board District 5 race

This is an unusually shaped board district that cuts through a wide variety of neighborhoods: Eastside communities of Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, parts of Silver Lake, Hollywood, and Koreatown. The district skirts downtown and covers Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and South Gate.

The candidates:

• Karla Griego, teacher, parent
• Graciela "Grace" Ortiz, teacher, city councilmember

Quick take:

• Both Griego and Ortiz have extensive experience working with vulnerable and under-resourced student populations; Griego is a longtime special education teacher and Ortiz oversees a team trying to get absent students back in the classroom.
• They both believe schools still lack the funding needed to help students thrive. Both were critical of the district’s decision to eliminate a literacy program, Primary Promise, focused on students in kindergarten through third grade.
• Their campaigns split the endorsement of major school labor groups. Griego’s agenda closely matches that of the teachers union and is focused on systemic changes like increasing investments in alternatives to school police. Ortiz talked about finding compromises on some of the most contentious issues including charter schools and school policing.

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Hoops Shoots Photography

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Karla Griego

Teacher, parent

Griego has been an educator in the Los Angeles Unified School District for almost two decades and most recently taught special education. Griego has also held leadership positions in United Teacher Los Angeles, the union representing more than 37,000 LAUSD educators. She is the parent of an LAUSD high school student.

Ahead of the primary, Griego said her top three priorities are:

• Providing mental health and social-emotional support
• Fiscal transparency and accountability of the superintendent and charter schools
• Expansion of innovative programs like community schools and the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP)

LAist interviewed Griego in August. Here’s what she said:

• The district’s academic improvement hides other problems. “I think it's great that the data shows that our students are improving. I don't think that's the only data that matters. I think our students are over-tested … I also think that the district needs to invest more in enriching curriculum. For example, project-based learning research shows that students learn better and are more motivated to learn when they do things like projects that are relevant to them.”
• The district’s budget transparency is woeful. “Sometimes people can't speak to the budget, because of the way that it's presented. Even school board members have a hard time understanding it, because they give them these stripped down PowerPoint presentations that don't have everything in there. They just give you what they want to show you, and it does not leave much for people to analyze it, to research it, to question it.”
• The district’s investment in AI was a mistake. “There's so much money spent on marketing. There's so much money spent on AI. That's something that nobody asked for. Seeing numbers on an app doesn't tell me the story of how my daughter is doing. And you cannot provide social-emotional learning and support via an app. We need humans.”
• School safety issues arise because the district hasn’t followed through on community-based safety. “Of course parents are like, ‘We need police back.’ Because we hear about fights, we hear about bullying, we hear about vaping in the bathrooms. They're very real concerns. I'm concerned about it as well as a parent. But again, accountability. The district has not done its part in using the money as it was supposed to be used. So how can we say that community based safety programs don't work when we haven't even tried?”
• Schools with wrap-around resources like legal aid and health care are the future. “There are values that are embedded in this community school model that guide the work that we do. And one of them is that we are creating social, socially and racially just schools. So we are looking at the way that we do schooling through that lens of being just and inclusive and affirming.”

We also asked Griego whether she would have voted with the board majority to:

• Restrict where some charter schools can be located? Yes. “[The resolution] gives us clarity. It gives us a pathway on how to assess when there is vacant space for a charter to come in because before what was done was, nobody visited a school site… There was a lot of confusion as to what to do, what determined an empty space or an empty classroom.”
• Cut funding to school police? Yes, because I believe in community-based safety. What I would have done was continue to push them to use it. The money is there, but the work wasn't done to implement it, and some people are frustrated by that. The district hasn't done its due diligence for this.”

More voter resources:

• Website: KarlaGriegoForSchoolBoard.com
• Endorsements: See full list here

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Courtesy Graciela Ortiz

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Graciela ‘Grace’ Ortiz

Teacher, city councilmember

Ortiz is a Huntington Park city councilmember and former mayor. Ortiz has worked in education for almost two decades and helps lead a team of LAUSD educators that track attendance and student engagement. She ran unsuccessfully in a special election for Board District 5 in 2019. The local chapter of a union representing some school support staff retracted its endorsement of Ortiz after a civil lawsuit filed in January alleged Ortiz is liable for the sexual assault of a minor by another campaign worker in 2020 and 2021; Ortiz said that lawsuit was a political stunt, and that it was later dismissed.

Ahead of the primary, Ortiz said her top three priorities are:

• Having fully funded schools.
• Reducing class sizes in all grade levels and adding afterschool programs that provide quality enrichment.
• Safety in all schools.

LAist interviewed Ortiz in July. Here’s what she said:

• The district should refocus its literacy efforts on the early years. “I know that the Primary Promise program was eliminated. However, a new program was brought in so that they can focus on students from all grade levels. But I still believe that it doesn't have to be one or the other. We still need to have that focus and emphasis on K-3. When our students are not reading at grade level, we need to focus on K-3.”
• More funding for schools will improve attendance and academics. “It's never just about attendance. It's always about other issues that are impeding students from being in school. And so all of that affects academic progress. The other piece is that we need fully funded schools. We need to make sure that all our classrooms have full-time teachers. We need to make sure that we have co-teaching. That we have teachers supporting one another.”
• The district’s budgeting practices need to be reviewed. “We need to have a full assessment of where the money is being spent.” Citing recent controversy over where arts money was allocated, Ortiz says, “When you have community members and parents questioning where the money is going and what schools it's going to, it's a big problem.”
• School safety requires the district to have its own police. “I just don't want outside agencies in our schools dealing with an emergency situation. I want to have our own officers who understand our students, who understand our families, who understand our teachers and counselors to be able to patrol the outskirts of our schools and keep us all safe.”
• But a comprehensive school safety approach also requires funding school-level staff. “Having our counselors, our psychiatric social workers, teachers in every classroom, campus aides, cafeteria workers, our buildings and grounds crew — we had the hurricane, right? It was our building and grounds crew who went in to work when everybody else didn't and they assessed the buildings.”

We also asked Ortiz whether she would have voted with the board majority on key decisions and she declined to give clear yes or no answers, but here’s what she did say on the decision to:

• Restrict where some charter schools can be located: Ortiz says that while challenging, she’s seen co-locations benefit students from both charter and public schools. “I would hope that they would have come up with a resolution that would have been great for both sides.” Ortiz says the debate over charter schools is overly politicized. “Every time there's an election that comes up, it's charter schools, co-location, it's the same conversation. When it's not election time, no one's talking about it.”
• Cut funding to school police? “Unfortunately, society does this to us all the time, where they pin individuals one against the other. It's take away from here to give here. It shouldn't be one or the other. Our Black Student Achievement Program was able to grow from that decision. It didn't mean that it needed to cut school police….  I believe that we need school safety, but we also need extra supports for students that need it the most. 

More voter resources:

• Website: GracielaOrtiz.com
• Endorsements: See full list here

Follow the money

Senior editor Ross Brenneman contributed to this story.

This voter guide originally published Sept. 4.

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