Reporter Robin Estrin:  

As the nation's second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified is also the biggest landowner in LA County and its second-biggest employer. 

Those are just a few reasons Alberto Carvalho, LAUSD’s superintendent, is one of the most influential people in our community. A few weeks ago, I invited him to join me for an interview about the most important issues defining the new school year. 

Ever wonder what it’s like to prepare for a conversation like that? Here’s a little behind-the-scenes.

I scoured hundreds of pages of budget documents, strategic plans, and resolutions; reviewed dozens of hours of school board meetings; and perhaps most importantly, I reached out to teachers, parents, community organizers, and union leaders, and asked them what questions they had for Superintendent Carvalho.

On the day of the interview, we met over Zoom to discuss academic achievement, declining enrollment, the role of school police, and the district’s imminent cellphone ban. After 20 minutes, I did what I often do. I thanked my guest for his time and asked if there was anything we didn’t get to or anything he’d like to add. 

His reply didn’t make it into the interview, but I’ll share it with you here. “We didn’t tackle the Middle East or Ukraine or the presidential election,” he said, laughing. “I think you covered everything — and then some.”
 
You can find the rest of our exclusive conversation below.

LAUSD chief talks cellphone ban, police, test scores

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho spoke to reporter Robin Estrin ahead of the 2024-2025 school year. 

Alberto Carvalho explained the rationale(s) for banning cellphones in early 2025: “A lot of the behavioral issues that students are demonstrating in school, but also outside of school, emanate from this over-dependency on social media platforms that they access through their cellphones, robbing them of important social interaction with their peers. The truth of the matter is that students accessing their cellphones during the regular school day also impacts their ability to concentrate on their studies, keeps them distracted. And research also indicates a strong tie between mental health conditions — stress, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and bullying — to the overuse of cellphones and the media apps that reside on their cellphones.” 

As for the LAUSD board’s police deployment model, that won’t change anytime soon: “Gun violence, the occurrence of bullying actions, fights in schools where you have a permanently deployed police officer — in the state of California or across the country — compared to schools where you don't have that type of deployment, the difference in a number of incidents does not necessarily vary. … Where we have seen the most egregious examples of mass shootings, those have taken place disproportionately in schools that actually had school resource officers assigned to them.”

Carvalho also emphasized an aggressive plan to boost students’ reading and math scores on exams: “It will take massive amounts of strategic before- and after-school tutoring programs; during-school intervention activity, meaning the best of the best of our teachers providing small group instruction, particularly to the neediest of all students; it will require digital content available 24/7 to our students; and then what our teachers do so beautifully, which is differentiated instruction during the school day, targeting the students based on their achievement level, providing the acceleration, the remediation, the intervention, and the before- and after-school resources.”

LA Mayor Karen Bass on ‘no-car’ 2028 Olympics, homelessness

Mayor Karen Bass returned to LA on Monday after accepting the Olympic flag at the Paris Games over the weekend. The Southern Californian city will host the next Summer Olympics in 2028. 

LA28, the organizing committee behind the Games, estimates it will need a $7 billion budget. Bass says so far, LA28 has raised $2 billion, and the committee is confident they will get the rest. 

For people traveling to and from the Games, Bass’ goal is for them to use public transit. That includes bringing thousands of extra buses into town — borrowed from surrounding areas and states. 

As for homelessness — more than 75,000 people are living on county streets — the mayor says LA will continue to deal with the issue “very aggressively.” She adds that her target is 2026 when LA will host FIFA World Cup matches. 

‘Making it’ is not worrying about work: A laid-off father’s story

Barret Kruse, 55, lives in Valencia with his two children. He tells KCRW:

“I normally work in IT asset management. It's a fancy way of saying: counting computers and software for companies and being able to maintain those. And as [of] December, I believe it was the 24th — just in time for the holidays — I was laid off, and I have been since.

Right now I’m doing gig work — Uber Eats, DoorDash — delivering food. And I have two kids with me, too, and one's older. They're 18. The other is a 14. I’m the primary guardian for my kids.

Those unemployment checks, they total about $840 every two weeks. Rent alone is about $3,000 here, and that's before utilities and everything else. 

What little money I had saved is gone.

… I would define ‘making it’ as being able to feel safe for five minutes without having to worry about work. I'm not asking for big grandiose things. I'm not getting some house over the hills there, [I want] just a little place to be able to feel at home. To be able to … enjoy a feeling of community. … Maybe a couple of bucks put aside, a car that works, [and] four tires that matched — that'd be making it.”

Beyond San Andreas: Monday’s 4.4 quake was from Puente Hills fault

A 4.4 magnitude earthquake rattled Los Angeles on Monday. Its epicenter was in the East LA neighborhood of El Sereno on the Puente Hills fault system. While it's not as famous as its sibling, the San Andreas fault, it could be more dangerous for Angelenos.  

The Puente Hills fault system spans across some of the oldest and most densely inhabited parts of the area, including Downtown LA and Hollywood, explains seismologist Lucy Jones. The buildings there are often older, weaker, and therefore can’t withstand earthquakes. It is also less active than the San Andreas fault, moving every few thousand years compared to 100-150 years.  

“When that one earthquake happens in Puente Hills, because it's right under Downtown Los Angeles, the estimates are about an order of magnitude more damage than what we get from the San Andreas earthquake,” Jones says. 

She adds, “We've got this really bad, active fault right underneath us. Don't forget. We need to take the risk seriously. But it really doesn't allow us to say with any certainty what's coming.”

$1000/mo: UBI pilot allowed Angelenos to improve health, be better parents

In 2021, 3200 Angelenos received $1000 per month for a year to spend however they wanted. It was through the program BIG: LEAP (Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot). The participants saved their money and used it to secure better jobs and housing, and some reported that the cash allowed them to leave abusive relationships. All that’s according to a new study from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Ashley Davis applied to BIG: LEAP on a whim. While working in corporate marketing for a decade, she got pregnant. She later learned her son had special needs and partial hearing loss.

Davis received her first $1000 around her son’s sixth birthday. She immediately paid off her car registration and took him to Legoland. The extra cash helped with other expenses like clothes and shoes for her son and even a new juicer.

Davis says the money brought ease: “I made sure to get him [necessities] without thinking about it or saying, ‘Hey, well, if I spend this, I might not have enough money for food or for this bill.’ … It was so many times where I had incidents, where I needed to take care of my car’s maintenance. And things like that would have normally stressed me out, and I just took care of it. I didn't think twice about it.”

In retrospect, Davis shares that she didn’t realize how depressed and stressed she was prior to the program. The cash, she says, enabled her to take care of her mental health, and thus have the energy to return to school.