Los Angeles Unified is $3.6 billion in the red, and its plan to close the gap includes shutting down or merging neighborhood schools alongside thousands of layoffs.

State fiscal watchdogs say this was avoidable — the district could have simply stopped replacing staff who left, instead of building years of overstaffing with one-time pandemic relief money that has since run out.

Now students and families are the ones at risk of paying for it. Small elementary schools with fewer than 200 students, like Avalon Gardens and Leapwood, could be shut down or folded into larger campuses. Large high school complexes could be consolidated under a single administration. For the district's 370,000 remaining students, already down by nearly half since 2018, that means bigger classes and less support, right as the staff who serve them are being cut.

"We ballooned our staffing when we had the resources to do so and we didn't take the parallel process to close all of those positions," said LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, describing how the district's own decisions created this crisis.

Students didn't create this budget crisis, and they shouldn't be an afterthought in solving it. The LAUSD Board of Education and Superintendent must commit to real community input before any school closes or merges, and make sure the cuts that follow protect classroom quality — not just the budget.

Sign the petition to demand LAUSD put students first, before another neighborhood school disappears.