LAUSD’s Budget Crisis Deepens: Attendance Plummets 40% While Spending Soars on Lavish Projects and Bureaucracy 

As the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) grapples with a looming budget shortfall and plans for potential, but insignificant, layoffs, critics are rightfully pointing to a glaring mismatch: student attendance has dropped dramatically over the past decade, yet district spending continues to climb unchecked, fueled by excessive administrative bloat, questionable capital projects, and misplaced priorities.

According to recent reports, LAUSD’s enrollment has declined sharply, with the district now serving around 389,000 students in the 2025-26 school year — a more than three percent drop from the prior year alone, and part of a longer-term trend that has seen overall California public school attendance fall from about 5.4 million to 4.7 million students statewide since 2015. 

In LAUSD specifically, cumulative attendance declines have approached or exceeded 40 percent in some analyses when factoring chronic absenteeism and post-pandemic exodus, yet the district’s overall budget remains bloated at roughly $18.8 billion for 2025-26, with 90 percent allocated to personnel and little restraint on non-essential expenditures. (emphasis added)

The California Department of Education data shows statewide K-12 funding has ballooned from $61 billion in 2015 to $114 billion in 2024, with per-student funding soaring from $11,181 to $24,222 (adjusted for average daily attendance), a growth rate of nearly 9 percent annually — far outpacing inflation. LAUSD mirrors this pattern, facing a projected $191 million deficit by 2027-28 if current spending trajectories hold, prompting the board to consider reduction-in-force measures and central office cuts of $150 million.

Yet amid these warnings of fiscal doom, examples of extravagant spending persist, underscoring what critics call systemic waste. 

A notorious case is the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools (formerly the Belmont Learning Center site), which opened in 2010 as the most expensive public school in U.S. history at a staggering $578 million. The complex features luxurious amenities, including a 995-seat theater with high-end finishes — though not explicitly gold leaf in all reports, the project’s opulence has long symbolized LAUSD’s penchant for over-the-top construction. Critics argue such mega-projects divert funds from core education needs while enrollment shrinks.

Other components of LAUSD’s excessive spending include:

• Administrative bloat: Layers of high-salaried central office staff and consultants, even as classrooms face potential cuts.
• Capital projects and modernization: Ongoing multimillion-dollar upgrades, including performing arts centers and facilities that exceed practical needs.
• Personnel costs: Despite declining enrollment, staffing levels and union-driven contracts keep payroll elevated.
• Questionable allocations: Past accusations of misusing arts program funds and other categorical dollars.

As previously reported by the Globe:

Unlike academic performance, there is one area of education spending also growing by leaps and bounds – what our education industry pays itself.

In 2015, the median total compensation (including contributions by the district to retirement and healthcare) of an administrative/management employee was $133,628.Median total for a full-time certificated employee (teachers) was $100,600.

By 2023 (the last year full records are available), admin compensation had reached $193,206 and certificated $141,115. Roughly a 4.5% annual growth rate for both, a rate well in excess of inflation.

These compensation numbers may be hard to comprehend for those fed the continual “myth of the underpaid education employee”, but they are verifiable facts derived from actual pay records obtained through Public Record Act requests and posted to Transparent California.If you’d like to see what your district is actually paying people, not what those being paid would like you to think, go there and do the search.

The Globe queried the LAUSD budget to determine how much the district is spending on staff, consultants and vendor services. Simply stated, the numbers are obscene.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho earns a base salary of $440,000 per year, unchanged in his new four-year contract approved in September/October 2025 (running through February 13, 2030). He receives no raise but enjoys substantial additional perks, including a $50,000 annual retirement annuity contribution, a $1.5 million district-paid life insurance policy, a car and driver, private security, and other fringe benefits. This makes his total compensation package significantly higher than the base figure. No public records identify any LAUSD employee earning more than the Superintendent in 2025-26; Carvalho remains the district’s highest-paid official.

Consultant and Professional Services Spending (Past Two Years)

LAUSD does not publish a single consolidated “consultants” total in its budget documents, but spending on professional and consulting services, outside vendor contracts, and related “Services & Other Operating Expenditures” has grown dramatically amid the district’s budget crisis.

Key figures from official reports and analyses (as of February 2026):

• Growth Trend (2020-21 through 2024-25 estimates): Total spending on professional and consulting services grew 112% since 2020-21. Service contracts grew nearly four times faster than certificated employee compensation and three times faster than classified compensation.
• Active Contracts: As of February 2025, LAUSD had over 2,000 active service contracts with outside vendors and consultants.
• 2025-26 First Interim Financial Report: 
  • “Professional/Consulting Services” category projected to increase by $143.7 million compared to prior projections.
  • Related subcategories (e.g., “Subagreements for Services”) up $55.4 million; “Operations and Housekeeping Services” up $55.8 million.
  • Overall “Services & Other Operating Expenditures” rose by tens of millions in both unrestricted and restricted funds.

Exact combined totals for “consultants” across FY 2024-25 and 2025-26 are not broken out in one line item, but the categories that include consulting, professional services, and vendor contracts represent a substantial and rapidly expanding portion of the district’s ~$18.8 billion budget (roughly 20% non-personnel costs post-pandemic). Critics, including the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), note that these expenditures have outpaced classroom salary growth while the district underspent on teacher compensation by an estimated $3 billion (including 2024-25) under California’s 55 percent rule.

This pattern — explosive consultant/contract growth alongside enrollment declines and looming layoffs — has drawn sharp criticism as the district eyes central-office cuts and reduction-in-force measures.

These patterns echo broader critiques in California education funding, where districts cry poverty while per-pupil dollars rise dramatically, but the pupils are still illiterate.

In 2024 only 47 percent of California students kids met standards for English, and a miserable 36 percent in Math. By all objective measures, academic performance in California has gone from bad to worse.  According to the National Assessment of Academic Performance (NAEP) results, California ranks 38th in reading, while spending per pupil has skyrocketed.

The LAUSD board is set to vote soon on reduction-in-force plans amid these challenges. Yet, in total, the reduction “represents less than 1% of the total Los Angeles Unified workforce,” as reported by LAist.

As enrollment continues to erode — driven by families fleeing high-cost areas, charter school competition, remigration, self deportation, and dissatisfaction with education outcomes — taxpayers demand answers: Why does spending keep rising when the student body shrinks? Until LAUSD reins in the waste, from gold-plated theaters to bureaucratic excess, the district’s cries of underfunding ring hollow.