Endorsement: No on Measure US in LAUSD, the district’s rushed $9 billion bond

The time to seek new investments in any organization is when you’re thinking big, and so is your customer base.

You’re expanding operations and your horizons. For a business, you need an infusion of current money to make more future money. For a nonprofit or a government sector, you need the cash to expand your services, for which there is a clear surge in demand.

When it’s a school district that seeks more investment, we’re talking public monies. Sometimes the bond measures that are the way districts finance big infrastructure improvements and building new campuses are an absolutely appropriate way to spend tax dollars. When a wave of new students comes along, our society makes a commitment to educating them and keeping them warm, cool and safe.

But the situation in the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District is hardly one of excessive demand for insufficient supply. Yes, the district is large — but its 400,000 students of this academic year pales compared with the over 700,000 students it educated two decades ago.

The drop in student body numbers is not entirely the district’s fault. Demographics plays a big part. But the popularity of private and charter schools did not come from nowhere. While the LAUSD offers some innovative programs and excellent individual schools, it needs to up its game.

And that’s a matter of great teaching and good administrations. Those have nothing to do with the $9 billion construction bond the school board last month voted unanimously to put on the November ballot. It’s the largest bond ask in L.A. history. It shares the ballot with a $10 billion statewide school bond. It was tossed on the ballot in haste to meet a filing deadline, with little actual specifics about where the money would go. Voters should say no to it.

The simplest reason is that it is clear campuses are going to have to be closed, including school sites that could get bond money. Now is the time to choose the best campuses and prepare to mothball the others. There are still unspent billions from a previous bond measure, including $1.8 billion not even allocated by the board. The head of the district’s Bond Oversight Committee says his group was not even consulted. Meanwhile, the superintendent tells us the district was conducting polling on a bond measure many months ago.

The rushed nature of this measure, Measure US, is an insult to the taxpayers of LAUSD. If LAUSD knew a bond would be forthcoming, they should have had the decency to conduct thoughtful hearings vetting out how such a measure should look like. This, apparently, was too much to expect from LAUSD.

Vote no on the LAUSD bond in November and demand better from the superintendent and the uncritical rubber stampers on the school board.