$ 7 Billion Los Angeles Unified School Bond Heads to Ballot

The LA Times posted an in depth article about the largest school bond ever proposed. Such a comprehensive solution is going to be very controversial. The Chair of the Oversight Committee was critical of the timing of the size of bond. District Officials however see this as a an opportunity to go to the voters for a large set of increases instead of every two or three years.

The Los Angeles Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to place a $7-billion bond on the November ballot. It would be the largest local school bond ever -- by far -- and would allow officials to tax property owners for building and repairing schools for the next 10 years.

From four previous bonds, the Los Angeles Unified School District already has enough money to allow every student to attend a neighborhood school on a traditional, two-semester schedule -- the main goal for those earlier measures.

This bond, by contrast, contains a wide-ranging wish list of possible expenditures that backers say would create state-of-the-art "small" schools with the potential to improve graduation rates and test scores.

The requested amount ballooned from $3.2 billion in recent days, allowing district officials to assuage some critics and constituencies with additional dollars and letting board members pad funds earmarked for their favored priorities, such as early childhood education centers.

It will be hard to know if LA voters will support this local bond as well as all of the other measures that will be on November's Ballot.