2014: Launch of the Equity Alliance for LA’s Kids

After the achievements of Godinez v. Davis and its successors, public interest lawyers wanted to see how school funding decisions beyond buildings affect California’s students. Did students of color, or those from low-income families, get the same resources, programs and learning aids to succeed in school as those from comfortable backgrounds?

For years, parents, students, policymakers and researchers answered that question with a resounding “No.” Despite a constitutional amendment in 1988 that required the state to set aside minimum general funding and property tax guarantees for education, they complained that the existing framework—which included  more than 50 separate programs with their unique funding formulas—was too complex, outdated, inefficient, centralized, and inequitable.

By June 2013, they had done enough groundwork to convince lawmakers to pass AB 97, setting up a new public school financing system. This marked the debut of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which weighted funding based on student needs. Implementation began that fall, and communities reacted almost immediately.

“Los Angeles families saw in the LCFF a chance to ensure their schools would finally have the resources their children need after decades of an inequitable public education system,” said Vickie Ramos Harris, Vice-President of Policy and Programs at Catalyst California. “Then after the policy was in place, they realized the Los Angeles Unified School District was using a different interpretation of equity than they had in mind.”

Indeed, the LCFF equity lens brought new attention to high-needs schools, said Jessenia Reyes, who at the time worked on educational equity at Advancement Project California (APCA, now Catalyst California). But parents weren’t seeing the substantive changes they had envisioned, and they weren’t going to stay silent.

They pressed for a closer look at youth in foster care, English learners and low-income students, aiming for a local refinement that also dug deeper into factors outside the classroom that deeply affected them.

Community Coalition, InnerCity Struggle, and APCA organized community discussions and rallies to address what was still missing in the equity picture. To keep attention focused on the issue, they banded together to form the Equity Alliance for LA’s Kids. APCA gathered, analyzed and mapped data on district budgeting and student performance—what eventually became the Student Equity Need Index (SENI). Ongoing conversations now also included district officials and board members.

Publicly, they expressed support for equity funding, even passing the Equity is Justice resolution in June 2014, which adopted the SENI as a budget tool beginning the 2015-16 school year, allowing some schools to add arts and early childhood programs. But behind the scenes, the commitment was more ambivalent. Reyes said students, parents and advocates worried that no specific funding was assigned to it.

“There was no transparency or accountability,” she said. “It was a watered-down version of what we wanted.”

Moreover, South and East LA residents argued the SENI should consider community factors that can deeply affect students’ health, and therefore their academic performance, such as gun violence or access to parks. LAUSD officials claimed those issues made no difference in school need rankings.

Meanwhile, the ACLU SoCal and Public Advocates had argued since April 2014 with LAUSD over its LCFF obligations. The district misclassified some $450 million in special education money in the general fund as LCFF spending, effectively shrinking actual LCFF totals and costing high-need students more than $2 billion over time.

The district adopted a plan with the misclassification, and the L.A. County Office of Education endorsed it despite initial misgivings. In July 2015, the attorneys sued. After a two-year battle, the district settled, promising to add more than $150 million to the 50 highest-need schools, in East and South Los Angeles, over three years.

"I am overjoyed," plaintiff and parent Reyna Frias said at the time. "It has been a long effort, but well worth the time our students and parents dedicated to it."

The settlement did not end the debate over funding resources for high-need students. The longstanding argument regarding community factors, which began in the SENI’s first year, remained. The district eventually agreed to a redesign that added chronic absenteeism, incidence of asthma and incidence of non-fatal gunshot wounds, among other indicators. It first used SENI 2.0 in the 2018–19 school year.

“This was really groundbreaking,” Reyes said. “It was a pivotal moment for the district because they were being pinned down on what they believed equity actually was.”

The SENI today still faces budget challenges. Traditionally, unspent SENI funds from one year have carried over for each school’s use in the next, allowing districts to marshal resources over time when they cannot use them in a single school year. This practice enabled better long-term planning. But in 2024, administrators proposed returning most of that money to the general fund, leaving schools with only 30 percent.

The Equity Alliance moved quickly to claw back those losses, and the district agreed to a phased schedule: the superintendent’s selected priority schools, a classification layered over SENI that did not always align with it, would keep 70 percent of SENI carryover funds. SENI-designated highest- and high-need schools would keep 60 percent, and all other schools would keep 50 percent.

The district also promised to protect SENI funding through 2026-27. Now there are no guarantees beyond 2026, and carryover funds are still a question mark. At a recent Equity Alliance convening, Miguel Dominguez of Community Coalition mentioned possible cuts of up to $200 million to the SENI, though the board has not made any official statements. This possibility illustrates the persistence of the struggle.

“The fight for equity for our students of color and underserved communities doesn’t have an endpoint,” Ramos Harris said. “Each time we have new school board members or district leaders, we need to make them aware of this history and the priorities of our students and families. This is not a zero-sum game: equity is critical, especially during lean times.”