The 79-page “Family Insights” report found LAUSD families saw improvements in their schools in the past year, with support for leadership of the nation’s second-largest district increasing significantly.

The 2025 version of the annual poll, published by the L.A.-based nonprofit education advocacy group , found nearly three-quarters of families approve of both Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and the LAUSD school board, ratings that exceeded those of last year. 

Its findings were based on surveys of more than 500 LAUSD families conducted in the fall and again in February.

Most families gave their schools a “B” grade overall, GPSN Executive Vice President Ana Teresa Dahan said in an interview, acknowledging the positive direction of their kids’ education, while also seeing the need for more growth in certain areas.

“We have had some big crises happening, and I think families are generally happy with how the district has responded to those crises,” said Dahan of the poll’s results. 

“Families think that their kids are doing well in school,” she added. 

A published earlier this year by GPSN found LAUSD at a critical turning point, with fresh obstacles from the , changes in federal aid and new policies under the Trump administration, including immigration crackdowns, causing stiff headwinds for the district.

The GPSN poll found 63% of families thought LAUSD students and their own children were performing at the right level or above in reading and math, up from 54% last year.  

Almost 90% of parents rated instruction at their child’s school positively on this year’s report. 

Just over half of families surveyed in the poll said kids’ emotional and mental health needs have become the top priority in public education. Parents said they want schools to provide mental health services, such as counseling, both during and outside the instructional day.

More than half of families surveyed — 55% — said they did not feel adequately represented in district policy decisions, although that figure improved from last year when just 34% felt well-represented.

The poll found a majority of LAUSD families value high-quality teaching and instruction, and nearly half of parents also identify free home internet and high-quality tutoring as their top three priorities.

LAUSD students made gains in their scores on the district’s most recent state reading and math exams, but most kids in the district still . LAUSD made progress on federal assessments released this year but .  

In a written response to the GPSN report, a LAUSD spokesperson said the district is receiving good feedback from parents, and school officials are committed to better listening to families.

“Los Angeles Unified is proud that a majority of parents in a recent GPSN survey expressed satisfaction with their schools,” a district spokesperson said in a statement. “This continued growth in parent confidence affirms the hard work of our educators and staff.” 

Speaking at a press conference at LAUSD headquarters, Carvalho also said the district would offer transportation to graduation events, shorten lines outside venues, and provide temporary shelter for attendees in case of immigration action by ICE at or near graduation venues.

The district was examining steps it could take to ensure immigrant students can participate in summer school classes that start next week without threat of arrest, including expanded busing and more virtual classes, Carvalho said.

“Our schools are places of education and inspiration, not fear and intimidation,” Carvalho said. “Many of us here are immigrants or children of immigrants.”   

The actions come as the Trump administration has ramped up actions against immigrant students across the country. 

More than 100 graduation-related events are scheduled across L.A. schools on Monday and Tuesday, which is the last day of class before LAUSD lets out for summer break.

Carvalho, who is a Portuguese immigrant and outspoken critic of the immigration policies of President Donald Trump, said some L.A. families were afraid to attend graduation ceremonies, fearful they could be targeted by federal immigration agents. 

He said schools and families remain on high alert after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in L.A. last week arrested in raids across the city.

The federal immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles last week included arrests at local businesses, but not at schools, and prompted widespread and sometimes violent protests that began on Friday and continued through Monday, with dozens of arrests.

LAUSD does not track students’ immigration status. According to the city’s teachers’ union the district immigrant students, and a quarter of those students are undocumented. 

LA Immigrant families have grown more concerned as the Trump administration has stepped up immigration crackdowns in L.A. and beyond.  

In April, federal immigration agents were denied access to two LAUSD elementary schools after the agents sought to contact five students at those schools, who were identified by federal authorities as minors who arrived unaccompanied at the border.

Carvalho said he has instructed LAUSD school police to “intervene” against any ICE agents who may be attempting immigration enforcement at school graduation events, but he declined to provide additional details.

“Every single graduation site is a protected site,” Carvalho said. “I have directed our own police force to redouble their efforts and establish perimeters of safety around graduation sites, [and] to interfere, intervene and interfere with any federal agency who may want to take action.”

He said he had spoken with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom about the actions he was taking. Reps for Bass and Newsom didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.   

The LAUSD school board, Newsom and Bass have all backed Carvalho in standing against federal immigration enforcement. The LAUSD school board has issued a series of resolutions stating that for immigrant students.

Carvalho said on Monday that last week two ICE vehicles were spotted near two LAUSD elementary schools. The ICE agents didn’t visit the schools, Carcalho said, but they did frighten the children inside. 

“No action has been taken, but we interpret those actions as actions of intimidation, instilling fear that may lead to self deportation,” said Carvalho. “That is not the community we want to be. That is not the state or the nation that we ought to be.”

Since the pandemic, the Los Angeles Unified School District has lost more than 70,000 students. Enrollment has fallen to 408,083, from a peak of 746,831 in 2002. Losses , too, with the district shedding more than 11,000 kids. 

Nearly half of the district’s 456 zoned elementary schools — 225 campuses — are half-full or worse, and 56 have seen rosters fall by 70% or more, according to a new analysis of more than 30 years of local attendance data. 

Decades of shrinking classes recently prompted L.A. school board president Scott Schmerelson to say district leadership needs to start talking about closing or combining schools, something that some other big U.S. cities are already doing.

But LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said in an interview with ����Ӱ�� he’s pumping the brakes on closing or consolidating schools, a tactic that often sparks protests in impacted neighborhoods.

Instead, Carvalho said, he’s starting with a fresh idea for how to solve some of the problems associated with dwindling admissions in LAUSD, one that he said may also stave off a financial crisis for the district caused by falling per-pupil funding. 

He believes the L.A. Unified can fight the financial losses that could force it to close or consolidate schools by shutting down underutilized buildings on multi-building campuses or unused portions of individual school buildings, while keeping other parts operational. 

“When you close a school, it may very well extinguish the only protective area in a community for kids,” Carvalho said of his motivations for avoiding — at almost any cost — school closures, even amid demographic changes and . 

If L.A. Unified can consolidate its shrinking schools into a fraction of the classrooms or buildings, Carvalho explained, it could save on staffing and facilities costs that could otherwise force the district into closing schools.

“You close buildings that are either not up to par or are underutilized within those schools, prior to a conversation regarding the closure of the school itself,” he said.

That’s because, Carvalho said, when a school is closed, students still have to go somewhere; and staffing levels set by union contracts will prevent the district from shedding too many teachers.

“So what do you save on? You save, basically, on the maintenance of that school,” he said, plus the salaries of principals and a few other staffers.

“The savings,” he concluded, “are not what people think.”

L.A. Unified is starting with a plan to survey its schools to see where unused space exists, Carvalho said. After that, a process will be created to close or employ unused classrooms in other ways. He didn’t offer examples, but other districts have embedded child care centers or afterschool programs in empty classrooms. 

But Carvalho faces pressure to act from a school board that’s concerned with the district’s increasingly dire loss of students.

Schmerelson, the board’s term-limited president, pushed the issue closer to the forefront earlier this year when he said that the district needs to consider consolidating or closing schools.

Since LAUSD is funded on a per-pupil basis from local, state and federal sources, Schmerelson said, the loss of students directly threatens the fiscal health of the district at a time when pandemic-era federal relief funding has dried up.

“We’re going to have to fasten our seat belts and endure this ride,” Schmerelson said in an interview this winter. 

Just as important as the financial pressures, Schmerelson explained, are the social and academic ones.

Under-enrolled schools can’t provide a robust education, he said, since there aren’t enough kids to fill up classrooms and float basic programs such as sports teams or a science club.

And with fewer kids to go around, more Los Angeles schools are failing to attract enough students to hit such a threshold, a number that is often pegged at about 200 kids for traditional public schools in an urban district like L.A.

What to do when schools shrink beyond the point of viability is a thorny problem for LAUSD. But now, a study published this month by a watchdog group has offered a fresh look at the challenge.

“,” a 36-page report published by a nonpartisan nonprofit led by Tim DeRoche, an author and parent who lives in Los Angeles, draws on official attendance data for LAUSD’s zoned elementary schools for the years 1995 to 2024. 

DeRoche’s investigation of LAUSD produced some startling conclusions.

“The district is shrinking dramatically,” said DeRoche, who, among other things, on the history of U.S. school attendance zones.

Most zoned L.A. elementary schools are almost half empty, and many are operating at less than 25% capacity, DeRoche said. 

Enrollment has dropped by more than 46%, he added, leaving more than 160,000 empty seats. Thirty-four schools have fewer than 200 students enrolled; a dozen of those schools once had enrollment over 400.

DeRoche said the steepest drops tended to be in poorer neighborhoods and lower performing schools, while higher performing schools retained more students.

He said tactics, such as the one proposed by Carvalho to limit campus usage, could make a difference to preserve programs, but ultimately LAUSD will have to reckon with the financial problems posed by surplus seats.

“Districts around the country are going to be facing these financial crises, and the potential closure of schools,” DeRoche warned. “In L.A. that is a dramatic problem that cuts across every neighborhood of the city.”

Drops in per-pupil funding combined with persistent overhead will put the squeeze on LAUSD, he said, just as falling admissions have forced other school systems to make tough decisions.

More districts in other cities and states are starting a process of closing or combining schools after enrollments that cratered in the pandemic failed to bounce back. 

Results with school closures have been mixed.

New York City, faced with excess capacity and enrollment declines like L.A., has some of its tiny schools, and so far managed to avoid huge public outcry. School closures in Denver and have been a painful business.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, who represents neighborhoods in L.A. including Watts and San Pedro, is another member of the LAUSD board who is calling for a plan to combine or close the city’s underused schools.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep the same number of campuses when costs of everything are increasing,” she explained.

“And yet,” Franklin added, “that is a very hard conversation to have with community members who are afraid of losing their neighborhood school.”

Still, she said the district ought to start having those tough talks about closing schools soon, to maximize chances of successfully managing properties while continuing to serve the needs of families.

The possibilities the board member sees are myriad. Some school buildings might even be best put to use, she said, by serving as housing for teachers. But first the district has to talk to families and analyze the data to find out what neighborhoods really need. 

“We could be using our properties in different ways,” Franklin said, “that still contribute to the vibrancy and the needs of the community.”

News of agents showing up at Lillian Street Elementary School and Russell Elementary School in South Los Angeles’ Florence-Graham neighborhood was . A spokesperson said the agents were turned away by school administrators at both schools. 

The federal agents’ appearances — with as many as four showing up at one time looking for information on children in grades one through six — were believed to be the first reported cases of Homeland Security authorities attempting to enter a U.S. school. 

Carvalho said in both cases the federal agents falsely told school officials they were given authorization by the caretakers of the children to visit their schools and get ”access” to the students. 

“The agents represented in both instances to the principals that they wanted access to the students to determine their well being,” said Carvalho at a press conference Thursday morning “It is disturbing that during that conversation, they conveyed to both principals that the parents or the legal guardians… provided them authorization for access to these kids in school. That is absolutely, blatantly untrue.”

Carvalho said he believes the visits were related to federal immigration enforcement actions. Representatives for DHS did not immediately respond to a request for information. 

“The children are okay, but the communities are feeling fear, and that is a shame,” said Carvalho, a Portuguese immigrant and critic of President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. 

“I am still mystified as to how a first, second, third, fourth or sixth grader, would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation, that would require Homeland Security to deploy its agents to two elementary schools,” he said. 

The news comes as families and educators in the nation’s second-largest school district prepare for federal crackdowns amid among the many immigrant families in Los Angeles. 

On Monday, four officers who identified themselves as Homeland Security agents turned up at Russell Elementary’s front office asking questions about four students enrolled in grades 1-4 at the school, Carvalho said.

The school’s administration turned the agents away after determining they did not have a warrant, Carvalho said.

Hours later, he said, another group of agents visited Lillian Street Elementary in search of information regarding a student enrolled in the sixth grade. Those agents, too, were turned away by school officials after it was determined they didn’t have a warrant.

The groups of officers from the federal agency showed up at the two schools in plain clothes, Carvalho said.

Immigration agents may not be given access to schools unless they.

President Trump has vowed to deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants in his second term, but enforcement actions around public schools have so far been limited.

LAUSD appears to be the only school district that has seen federal agents turn up at the schoolhouse door. A visit by federal agents to a Chicago school earlier this year  members of the Secret Service pursuing an investigation. More recently, what were believed to be federal agents parked outside a school in Seattle turned out to actually .

Carvalho said it didn’t matter that the agents were affiliated with DHS, as opposed to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, because the agencies collaborate on enforcement.

Carvalho said the district’s legal department has been informed of the federal visits.

In standing against federal immigration enforcement, Carvalho has the backing of his board, which has passed a series of resolutions stating that for immigrant students.

But even with the actions by the school board, immigrant families fear they could be swept up and arrested or deported in a federal immigration roundup, said Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice, a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families.

“Our families are in distress over being separated and deported,” said Aleman.

“Community reform by nature does not have to be protracted or slow, it can be quick,” said Carvalho in his at the event titled “Imagine the Possibilities” where he committed to “swift and unapologetic” change to how LAUSD operates. 

 “It is with great pride that I welcome all of you to a new school year,” he said. “More importantly, welcome to a new day.” 

Carvalho promised everything from $7 billion in facilities and classroom upgrades to telehealth in schools (via a robot named Pepper) and new magnet programs in a speech that was both encouraging and rooted in real challenges the district faces.

Carvalho acknowledged LAUSD’s declining enrollment, widespread student mental health struggles and concerns about the district’s long-term financial outlook.

“There are very few urban superintendents who know how to do it as well as he — that is he lays out what are the challenges facing the district and ‘what are we going to do about it?’ ” said Dr. Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. “He struck a good balance between a sobering message of where we are and some inspiration.”

At the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles, there was certainly an air of inspiration and flair.

Before Carvalho spoke, performances from students and student groups, including a marching band and mariachi band, filled the room with proud notes. 

When Carvalho took to the stage, he did not initially speak. Instead, the spotlight shone on him while he took slow steps across the stage, arms crossed over his chest. His walk was accompanied by swelling violins, crescendoing from a video intended to galvanize the audience about the importance of education. 

Throughout his speech — crammed with pop culture references (top contenders: Kylie Jenner’s three minute plane ride and Bridgerton season two) — the @LAUSDSup Twitter account pushed out tweets with main points from the address. 

Some Twitter users expressed qualms in replies, heavily juxtaposing the celebratory tone of the event. 

“Teachers feel discourage[d] because they are used and taken advantage of by parents and the district,” Twitter user @JeanettePanthen said in response to this Tweet.

Others felt more promise from Carvalho’s words, especially when he walked through the five “pillars” — “academic excellence, joy and wellness, engagement and collaboration, operational effectiveness and investing in staff — in the . 

Advocates offered generally positive reactions to the speech, but also wanted more details about how Carvalho’s lofty goals would be achieved. 

“The speech clearly conveyed vision and goals,” said Ana Ponce, executive director of GPSN in a statement. “ How this becomes actualized will be important. We are looking forward to the details of implementation, especially implementation at full scale across the whole district.” 

Here are seven key takeaways Carvalho communicated in his speech and at a press conference: 

1. Education will start early …

Carvalho asserted his prioritization of early education, saying LAUSD will transition from a district with a “K-12 possibility” to a “B-14 promise,” birth through at least two years of post-secondary school.

Starting in October the “Born to Learn” campaign will match more than 100,000 newborns with welcome packages and an LAUSD graduation date, so parents will know when to enroll their child. 

This fall, there’s also a plan for 360 new Universal Transitional Kindergarten classrooms to open up, with spots for up to 19,000 4-year-olds. 

2. … and continue past high school

In-person courses for college credit will be available for 225 recently-graduated students. Adult education vocational and apprenticeship preparation programs will soon be launched as well, including a nursing program producing 15 graduates annually. 

3. Closing the Digital Divide

Through a $50 million investment, LAUSD will bring high speed internet to every student and family that needs it, Carvalho told reporters — a plan rolled out in May that advocates have expressed apprehension about. The investment targets more than 60,000 students who don’t have access to high speed internet at home. 

On the commute to school, children will stay connected, too. Over the summer, Wi-Fi was installed on all buses, a move intended to help over 30,000 students maximize the time they can spend studying and completing homework. 

4. What will the district do about the “lost children?”

LAUSD is grappling with high rates of chronic absenteeism, dipping enrollment and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 students on LAUSD enrollment rosters. 

Carvalho said in the week before school starts on Aug. 15, he, his staff and thousands of other individuals will call and knock on doors to get unenrolled and chronically absent children signed up for the school year. The district is also launching a campaign called iAttend, which will focus on promoting high attendance by eliminating barriers to attending school.

Fifteen schools will now offer transportation for students living less than five miles from school, a distance that has not been included in past bus routes. Mobile laundry services, so families can have clean clothes, will be available in each district one to four times a month.

5. Boosting parent engagement and ties to LAUSD

A new Parent Academy will serve 100,000 parents with webinars and resources to equip them with skills and information to support their children. The Adult Education Virtual Academy will also serve about 1,000 students, including working parents, who may not be able to attend in-person classes.  

6. LAUSD staff will get additional support 

Carvalho said there will be a focus on recruitment, development and retention of staff. Through a partnership with the LA County Office of Education, staff will be provided with free counseling services via telehealth, a 24/7 hotline, referrals, and one-on-one therapy. 

The contract with United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, expired at the end of June. Carvalho said he hopes to soon reach a new contract agreement — although he declined to give an estimate for when. 

Twitter users responded to Carvalho’s tweets from the event with more pressure on contract negotiations:  

In a response to one Carvalho tweet, user @writersgrind wrote: “Thanks for the pep talk. I would love a contract that includes a competitive salary, smaller class sizes … Quality teachers will continue to leave the classroom because we have nothing left to give in these conditions.”

7. Upgrades to facilities and classrooms – including eco-friendly changes

Carvalho announced more than $7 billion to upgrade over 2,000 classrooms and nearly 1,000 schools. Projects are either in design or already under construction, providing earthquake safety, accessibility, and “21st century upgrades.”

A $50 million investment will go toward environmental and sustainability upgrades at approximately 20 schools identified, through a “greening index,” with upgrades such new playgrounds and shading. 

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Cari Spencer is a senior at the University of Southern Califo