Wielding chainsaws, they helped the 97-year-old former Colorado governor clear out fallen timber this year to make a path for some four wheelers. 

“They just enjoyed the working relationship back then, and they enjoy the friendship now,” Romer said in a recent interview. 

But when they finish the day’s projects, it’s not unusual for the group to relax over wine and cheese and trade war stories about Romer’s tenure. Under his leadership, the district saw several years of steady gains in reading on both and . Fighting bureaucracy and a powerful teachers union, he required elementary schools to use Open Court, a phonics-based program that embraced what is known today as the science of reading. The district trained teachers to use it and hired reading specialists to make sure they stuck to the curriculum. 

“For six years, we concentrated on that. It was the most important thing we did,” Romer said. But the teacher’s union chafed against the program’s rigid design and eventually demanded over the curriculum. “They didn’t want us to be screwing around in classrooms. They wanted the door shut. We forced those doors open.”

Nearly 20 years later, those stories have a new relevance as reading scores are once again on the rise. The current superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, has taken a similar, top-down approach to literacy with a program from curriculum provider Amplify. District leaders say they’ve learned from the past about the dangers of a lockstep approach to teaching reading, but some wonder whether teachers are getting the support they need. 

Tackling a new curriculum is “not an easy shift, and the ongoing support is needed,” said Francisco Villegas, chief academic officer at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that manages 20 high-need schools in the district. “There are fewer dollars, and that likely will have implications for what the district is able to provide.” 

The Partnership schools adopted the Amplify program in 2018-19 and began to see in English language arts on the state test. Since 2022, seven of the Partnership’s 11 elementary schools have seen double-digit increases in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards. At a in September, Carvalho called the Partnership a “terrific incubator” that influenced the district’s curriculum choices. 

But systemwide, leaders are to balance the budget and layoffs are expected. Compared to the Open Court years, training on the reading curriculum districtwide is more “hit or miss,” said Maria Nichols, president of the district’s principals union. LAUSD offers opportunities, both online and in-person, for professional development. School leaders, however, often don’t know which courses teachers have taken or whether they’re using what they’ve learned, she said. “We are PD rich and implementation poor.”

‘On the same page’

Romer’s team implemented Open Court at a time when was pouring millions into training to teach reading. A $133 million from the U.S. Department of Education provided even more. Nearly all of the district’s 12,000 elementary school teachers participated in and many completed follow-up sessions throughout the year.

“It was phenomenal,” Nichols said. “We were treated as professionals. There was a lot of money back then.”

Former board members, among Romer’s annual visitors, said Open Court was a way to ensure all students, in an urban district where kids often change schools, would receive strong instruction. Marlene Canter, who served on the board from 2002 through 2008, said that regardless of teachers’ level of experience or the college they attended, “everybody would be on the same page.”

For some teachers, that played out literally. Many found Open Court . There was a specific set of cards with letter sounds to post on the wall and a recommended U-shaped classroom layout that, according to a teacher guide, left “a large open space on the floor for whole-group and individual activities” and provided “an easy ‘walk-around’ for the teacher.” Critics viewed the , deployed to ensure teachers followed the curriculum, as “Open Court police” ready to catch them veering off script. 

“They took my fun and creativity away,” former teacher Stuart Goldurs complained in a . “I became an instructional robot.” 

Ronni Ephraim, who served as Romer’s chief instructional officer, said the change upset some teachers. The district asked them to replace storybooks that had been favorites in their classrooms for years with Open Court phonics-based “readers,” workbooks and classroom libraries. Despite the objections, the district saw struggling schools improve and outpace the state. 

“I don’t think top-down is bad,” Ephraim, now a consultant, said about curriculum choices. “I think the board and the superintendent have to believe in it, and then they have to make sure that everybody is prepared to teach it as designed.”

‘Big disconnect’

Critics said the program was ineffective with English learners. Over time, performance flatlined, and the district replaced Open Court with a program. 

Rob Rucker is among the LAUSD teachers who worked for the district during the Open Court years and is now adjusting to Core Knowledge Language Arts. A third grade teacher at 135th Elementary School in Gardena, one of several small cities within the district’s boundaries, he said some novice teachers valued Open Court’s structure. They didn’t yet have enough experience to write lesson plans of their own.

“I actually liked Open Court,” he said. “It was very straightforward and easy for teachers to understand.”

The Amplify program still covers the basic skills students need to decode words and recognize parts of speech. It’s also what reading experts describe as a knowledge-building curriculum. The units introduce students to early civilizations, like the Vikings in Scandinavia, and science content, such as the solar system and animal habitats.

That’s where Open Court fell short, said Nichols, with the principals’ union.

“When we tested kids, they could read beautifully,” she said, “but they couldn’t understand what they were reading.”

For a student population like LAUSD’s, with 86% living in poverty and one in five still learning English, strengthening kids’ knowledge of the world is “going to be the real game changer,” said Barbara Davidson, president of StandardsWork, a think tank, and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Since 2015, the campaign has been a leading voice for integrating history, science and the arts into reading curriculum. 

Rucker said his students were already familiar with stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Aladdin,” so it wasn’t hard to keep them interested in a lesson on classic fairy tales. Getting them to relate to lessons on ancient Rome has been more challenging.

According to a district spokesperson, “the goal is to ensure that every school has access to the literacy expertise and coaching capacity it needs.” But other than a two-day training from Amplify, Rucker said he hasn’t had any additional support on how to implement the program, he said. He thinks his school would benefit from an English language arts coordinator teachers could lean on when they need someone with more experience, but because of enrollment loss, many schools have lost administrative positions. 

Some teachers feel Amplify is out of reach for struggling students, leading them to patch in other materials to make the material more relevant. 

During a recent lesson on early American irrigation systems, Kareli Rodriguez, who teaches at Stoner Ave. Elementary School on the west side of town, used pictures and videos to help her fifth graders grasp the idea. Excitement over the Dodgers’ successful World Series run helped her pique kids’ interest in a passage on Yankees’ relief pitcher Mariano Rivera.

But it’s “not realistic,” she said, for teachers to get through a lesson in the recommended 90-minute time slot with so many students working below grade level. A district coach modeled a lesson for the teachers last school year, Rodriguez said, but she couldn’t finish it in time either.

“I think that’s a big disconnect that the district needs to understand,” she said. “It’s definitely rigorous, but most of the students are always playing catch up.”

Still, like most other schools in the district, Stoner Avenue saw improvements in reading. Fifty-two percent of fifth graders met or exceeded expectations, compared to 41% last year. 

Literacy advocates hope those gains will convince leaders — as Romer did with Open Court — to stick with Amplify. “Our push is going to be to say, ‘You got to stay the course,’ ” said Yolie Flores, president and CEO of Families in Schools, a nonprofit that for research-backed teaching materials. Her group breaks down the science of reading for parents so they’ll know how to talk to teachers about the curriculum and help their kids at home.

District leaders gathered in October to celebrate the district’s recent improvement. Outside the auditorium at Maywood Elementary School, as students rushed back to class after lunch, Deputy Superintendent Karla Estrada took a moment to talk about lessons learned since the Open Court years, like taking feedback from teachers.

The district, she said, wants them to follow the Amplify curriculum “with integrity” while recognizing they often have to make decisions in the moment, depending on their students. 

“They let me know where something is not quite what they want,” she said. “But no curriculum is going to do everything for you.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District saw an increase in the number of patients, including students and their families, receiving medical, dental and behavioral health services at expanded wellness centers, according to a new  by the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health. 

The district’s 17 wellness centers and three school-based health centers served nearly 55,000 patients during the 2023-24 school year — an increase of 9% from the previous year — with more than half of student-age patients between 14 and 19 years old. Nearly 7,500 patients visited a wellness center or school-based health center for behavioral health services, a nearly 25% increase compared to the prior year. 

“When students have access to quality healthcare, they have greater opportunities to succeed,” said Maryjane Puffer, executive director of the L.A. Trust, in the report. “The Wellness Centers and SBHCs (school-based health centers) continue to be lifelines for students and families.” 

The centers provide comprehensive behavioral health services such as mental health assessments, substance use evaluations, developmental screenings and psychotherapy. Of the patients who were between the ages of 6 and 19, 27% were receiving psychotherapy at an L.A. Unified wellness center. 

About a tenth of the children age 6 to 19 also received a mental health diagnosis, including for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and attention deficit disorders. More than a third of those diagnoses were of “other disorders,” including autism, disorders related to severe stress, and developmental disorders, which increased from the 2021-22 school year. 

“These numbers reflect growing trust in the services and a deepening understanding of the connection between health and academic success,” Puffer said. 

Students also received primary care services, preventative services such as medical screenings, flu and measles vaccinations, testing for sexually transmitted infections, contraceptive management, referrals to substance use treatment and dental exams. 

The report also indicated that 37% of patients 6 to 19 years old were diagnosed as overweight or obese, an increase of 7% from the previous year. Nearly half of all patients who were seen were also diagnosed as overweight or obese.

“The data also underscores ongoing challenges, including rising obesity rates and persistent behavioral health needs,” Puffer said. “These findings fuel our commitment to expanding innovative solutions such as dental-medical integration, mental health interventions, and partnerships that promote healthier lifestyles for students.” 

This was originally published on .

An education technology company that built an app for Los Angeles students to receive telehealth services during the school day has fallen victim to a data breach that puts students’ sensitive information in jeopardy, a disclosure to state regulators reveals. 

The company, Kokomo Solutions, also hosts an anonymous tip line where Los Angeles community members can , safety threats and mental health crises to the school district’s police department. In filed with the California attorney general’s office, the company disclosed that an unspecified number of individuals’ personal information was compromised after an “unauthorized third party” accessed its computer network and the exposed files pertained to the Los Angeles Unified School District. 

The company, also known as Kokomo24/7, says it discovered the unauthorized access on Dec. 11, 2024, nearly eight months before it disclosed what happened to victims. The district has not issued any public statements alerting students and families that their sensitive information may have been compromised. 

Kokomo24/7, which has apparently scrubbed its website over the last few days of references to its work with the nation’s second-largest district, did not respond to requests for comment.

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said the company notified the school system on Dec. 12, 2024, “that an unauthorized user gained access to certain files containing personal information, stored on behalf of the District.” The spokesperson said the breach was not connected to LAUSD’s telehealth program or its student patients, but did not say whose information was exposed. They said it was Kokomo’s responsibility to handle disclosure to all affected parties and that, as far as L.A. school officials know, “there has been no evidence of personal information being shared as a result of the breach.”

While many details about the breach remain unknown, including the specific types of information that were compromised and whether it was the result of a cyberattack, the incident raises red flags because “there’s no question that [Kokomo is] managing exceptionally sensitive information” about campus safety issues and students’ medical information, school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin said. 

“This is another example of schools outsourcing the collection and management of exceptionally sensitive data on school communities which, if abused, could affect the health and safety of the school community,” said Levin, the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. “We definitely would benefit from knowing more about how they were compromised and how they’re going to fix it.”

District officials have touted the telehealth service to parents since the data breach was disclosed. In an Aug. 8 live video session over Facebook, a district student and community engagement specialist gave that laid out L.A.’s back-to-school offerings.

Parent advocate Evelyn Aleman, who facilitated the event, said she was pleased to learn about the telehealth service during the presentation. Parents grew accustomed to telehealth during the pandemic and the virtual service could benefit families who have been advocating for better health services in schools, she said. But she hadn’t heard about the data breach before being contacted by ����Ӱ��.

“I have a lot of questions: Was the person who was presenting to the group aware that [the breach] had happened?” asked Aleman, who founded the group Our Voice to advocate for low-income and Spanish-speaking L.A. families. “And how deep was the breach? Obviously that would be of concern to the parents.”

, the Los Angeles Schools Anonymous Reporting app allows students, parents and others in the community to report “suspicious activity, mental health incidents, drug consumption, drug trafficking, vandalism and safety issues” to the district’s . 

That same year, L.A. schools  — along with the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Hazel Health — to launch new . The $800,000 program, funded by , is designed to provide app-based mental and physical health care to students, including at school. Hazel Health provides virtual mental health services, according to the district’s website, while Kokomo24/7’s services focus on physical health issues, including minor injuries, allergies and headaches. 

In , the district describes its Kokomo24/7-managed telehealth program as an option for students “to access healthcare when not feeling well during school hours” with the supervision of a school nurse “while remaining in school and focusing on learning.” 

Kokomo founder and CEO Daniel Lee lauding the company’s ability to “transform” L.A. Unified’s COVID-tracking and health data system in a year after the school system’s previous tool became “clunky, difficult to customize and expensive to maintain.” The post notes the company’s role in creating the anonymous reporting application and the district’s Incident System Tracking Accountability Report, an internal tool to document injuries, medical emergencies and campus threats.

The Kokomo24/7 breach is the latest in a series of data privacy incidents affecting L.A. schools, including a high-profile ransomware attack in 2022 that led to the exposure of thousands of students’ mental health records. Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at first categorically denied that students’ psychological evaluations had been exposed but then had to acknowledge that they were after ����Ӱ��’s investigation revealed the records’ existence on the dark web.

Meanwhile, the district’s rollout last year of a highly touted AI chatbot named “Ed” was derailed after AllHere, the ed tech company hired to develop the $6 million project, shuttered abruptly and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company’s founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was then indicted on charges she defrauded investors of some $10 million. A company whistleblower told ����Ӱ�� AllHere’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

The L.A. district for the chatbot bid — including Kokomo24/7 — before awarding the contract to AllHere. Both the bankruptcy and criminal cases are pending. In July, a school district spokesperson told ����Ӱ�� that Ed “remains on hold.” 

The Kokomo24/7 website lists a wide suite of products, primarily in physical security including building access control systems, emergency alarms and visitor management tools. It also names large companies among its customers, including The Oscars — the company was the “health and safety software provider” — United Airlines’ subsidiary United Express and Fifth Third Bank. 

But the Illinois-based company has a relatively small footprint in the education sector, according to records in the GovSpend government procurement database. Among the handful of its school district clients is the Hartford, Connecticut, school system where educators spent more than $60,000 between 2020 and 2023 for licenses to to screen students’ temperatures, track infections and conduct contact tracing. Glendale Unified, a neighboring district to Los Angeles, is also listed as a client on the company’s website.

Kokomo24/7’s connections to the L.A. district were widely featured on the company’s website until this week. In fact, listed four foundational events, including the 2023 launch of the “anonymous reporting app for students and an emergency alert system for staff” for the L.A. district.

The reference to the school district was removed from the company timeline this week, as was a banner attributing a quote to Carvalho, a picture of district police officers and the district police department’s logo. Press releases announcing Kokomo’s work with the L.A. district appear to have also been scrubbed from the internet. 

The since-removed Carvalho quote called “critically important.” Though slightly misstated, the remark comes from a March 2023 school board meeting where Carvalho boasted of people’s ability to “relay in an anonymous way — or not — potential threats” to a student or a school. 

The Los Angeles Schools Anonymous Reporting app hasn’t been universally praised, and last year filed by anti-surveillance activists who alleged the tool created “a culture of mass suspicion” and bolstered police interactions between students of color and those with disabilities. 

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which filed the lawsuit seeking records about the app, students, parents and community members “to surveil each other” on behalf of school police and to file reports that don’t require evidence. It also questioned why the community was being encouraged to file reports on people in mental health crises as part of a broader effort to investigate “suspicious activity.” 

“The app criminalizes mental health, perpetuating the idea that if someone has a mental illness they are inherently a threat to others,” the activist .

“The Cost of Equity: Exploring Recent K-12 Federal and State Funding Shifts and Their Impact on Black Students,” examines how changes in legislative and policy could impact California’s school systems, which enroll more than 287,000 Black students.  

Now, important programs covering a gamut of services used by Black students, ranging from tutoring to transportation to counseling, could be cut, the report says.

The , which was edited by USC Rossier School of Education Professor Kendrick Davis and published by Rossier’s , lands at a critical time for budgeting decisions in California and elsewhere.

Shifts in federal, state and local funding and policy are prompting changes in districts across the state, Davis said in a recent interview.  

Those developments could exacerbate long-standing inequities — in low income, he said.

“It feels like so many reasons why education should be, and currently is, front and center in a lot of the local, statewide and national conversation,” said Davis. “But when there’s drastic changes happening … information and perspective can get lost.” 

Here are some key takeaways from Davis’s study, which was written with graduate researchers from Rossier’s Black Student Collective and is the first in a to be published by the Critical Policy Institute. 

1. School Funding In California Stands at a Crossroads��

Federal funding cuts, including the expiration of pandemic relief, have combined with dropping enrollments and shrinking tax bases to cut budgets for local school districts across California, with districts in other states across the country .

School systems such as Los Angeles Unified have already about what to prioritize in the face of looming cuts, and how those choices play out could have an outsize impact on Black kids, said Davis.     

2. How the State Counts Students Will Impact Local Funding��

California currently allocates state funding for local districts based on average daily attendance, giving school districts their share of per-pupil funding based on how many students on average showed up at class.  

That money typically accounts for more than a third of a local district’s budget. The state is now to the way that funding is shared, so that money will be allocated based on how many kids are enrolled in each district, instead of how many attended class. 

It’ll cost the state more to fund schools this way, Davis said, but more of the money will go to districts with schools serving vulnerable populations, like Black kids, who have higher rates of chronic absenteeism and lower graduation rates.     

3. Programs For Black Students Are Threatened by Federal Changes�� ��

Even before President Donald Trump Took office, ushering in a slew of new changes, programs for Black students were already under scrutiny in districts across California after LAUSD overhauled its signature effort for those students in response to new federal guidance. 

Now, new policies at the federal level, including threats to cut funding to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, present fresh legal and regulatory challenges for efforts to reach Black kids with effective services, said Davis. 

“It makes an already precarious situation worse,” he said. 

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.” 

The district made progress this year with , Carvalho said during the home visit last month, but officials could not say how much progress was made exactly in reducing chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than ten percent of the school year.  

“Our approach is we support, we’re not about penalizing,” said Carvalho of the strategy being employed in getting chronically absent kids to class. “Two years ago, we were in a different position … [but] conditions have improved dramatically.” 

Carvalho said the number of chronically absent students is slowly dropping closer to pre-pandemic levels, in part because of the district’s push to personalize its efforts to bring individual students to class, with well-known tactics like his house visits. 

Los Angeles isn’t the only place struggling with persistent attendance issues. A  found that chronic absenteeism nationwide rose over 10% from 2019 to 2024, peaking in 2022 at 28% of students. 

The same report said the national percentage of students with good attendance fell sharply between 2019 and 2023, compounding the problem. 

More and more research, in fact, is suggesting that higher levels of chronically absent students could become the new normal. 

In L.A., chronic absenteeism remains a problem. At the beginning of the school year,  of all students in the nation’s second-largest district were missing class enough to be deemed chronically absent. 

That’s an improvement from the years following the COVID-19 shutdowns in the district, when nearly half of all students were chronically absent, the worst the problem ever got in LA Unified’s history. 

Carvalho said it’s gotten better because he and the district’s attendance team got personal in their approach, tailoring efforts to individual families, and knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school. 

Attendance counselors, school principals, and sometimes Carvalho himself have visited with thousands of families personally each school year since then, and talked to parents about why their kids are missing class. 

They offer solutions, like free busing or new school uniforms, or whatever could help. The tactic is a standard tool for LAUSD, one that Carvalho and district attendance workers and officials trumpet as a reason for their success. 

But chronic absenteeism has been a serious problem for years in L.A. More than 32% of L.A. Unified students were considered chronically absent for the 2023-2024 school year, the latest year for which the data exists.  

That’s well above the historic norms, but still an improvement from the abysmal previous years. Los Angeles Unified had 36% of students consistently missing class in 2022-2023, and just over 45% of students in 2021-22. 

Fallout from COVID-19 remains the main thing parents and educators blame for the historically high numbers. 

During Carvalho’s last at-home visit of the year, the mother of a chronically absent student said that since the pandemic she’s been confused over when to keep her sick home from class. 

At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, Carvalho said annual incremental gains will be how the district digs itself out. 

That plan appears to be working, he said in May, with last year seeing a dip and district officials expecting 2024 to have even lower numbers. 

LAUSD officials told the LA School Report that chronic absenteeism data for the 2024-2025 school year has not been finalized, so they could not quantify the gains. 

Still, Rudy Gomez, the director of iAttend,  program, said in an interview that the district has made progress fighting chronic absenteeism. 

“We have had some significant gains in chronic absenteeism, although we still have a lot of work to do,” said Gomez. “But we’ve seen some major gains, all across the board.”

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education  for any schools with race-based programming. In  sent to districts nationwide, the department ordered schools to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid or any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.

Now Los Angeles teens, working with , are trying to preserve diversity, equity and inclusion programs in LAUSD by showing their support for them.  

Last month, students, parents and local education activists with the  gathered at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks, a church in South Central Los Angeles, to rally for LA Unified’s DEI programming. 

The event, billed as a cross between a protest and a town hall meeting, also aimed to open up conversation about the lack of protections for gay and minority students under the Trump administration, said Maki Draper, a student leader with activist group Students Deserve. 

“I’m here to stand up for my people,” Draper said. “Stand up for those who feel like they might not have a voice. Stand up for those who are under attack right now.”

In addition to the actions by the Trump administration, Draper said advocates were speaking out against a civil rights complaint filed by a Virginia-based organization, , against LAUSD’s , which gives certain schools extra resources.

The complaint argued that the BSAP violated federal law by “” and prompted the district to announce that it would stop using race as a factor in choosing which schools participate in the program.   

Draper said the BSAP provides opportunities for Black students after historical oppression. The program places counselors and social workers in about 50 schools with large populations of Black students.

Through the program, students have been able to tour Historically Black Colleges and Universities, participate in unique clubs and receive more mental health services.

“With BSAP, I kind of feel more supported,” said Devon Beard, a senior at George Washington Preparatory Senior High School, who also attended the coalition event at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks. 

“It gives students a reason to go to school, like they actually want to get up in the morning,” Beard added. 

In 2020, the coalition successfully advocated for the defunding of $25 million from school police which was then put into BSAP. 

This year, the coalition’s organizers want LAUSD to expand the BSAP budget by $100 million annually and reinstate race as a criterion for the program, despite the complaint filed and that administration’s recent actions. 

The coalition has launched a sticker campaign to push those goals. Students passed out stickers at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks that said “LAUSD must protect Black, undocumented, and LGBTQ students,” and put them on their laptops and water bottles. 

Threats by the Trump administration for an immigration crackdown  LAUSD, said Alexa Delgado, a junior at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center who attended last month’s event at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks.  

Delgado said a  across LAUSD schools earlier this month showed a desire to stand up against immigration enforcement and ensure immigrant students know their rights and are protected by their schools. 

“No child should walk out of their home and be scared that they’re going to be taken away,” Delgado said. “And no parent should be scared that the child isn’t going to get home at the end of the day.” 

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

Less than a year into her role as president of the , the former community schools administrator in December with the . 

Nichols said the move was aimed at strengthening the AALA’s bargaining power ahead of its contract negotiations with LAUSD this spring. 

AALA is the official bargaining unit for middle-level administrators in LAUSD, including the district’s elementary and secondary principals. 

Nichols said each day her members face rising workloads, budget cuts, and threats to their safety. As a four-decade veteran of LAUSD, she knows those issues firsthand. 

“For me, it’s about changing a system,” Nichols said of working with the district. “Because the people are not the problem.”

Perhaps it’s respect for the system that’s led Nichols to join the AALA with the Teamsters. She said the district has already made concessions to the AALA since the change. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you tell me more about the issues facing principals and administrators’ workload in LAUSD?

We represent the ability to bargain the effects of district action, whether it is positive or negative for the membership.

We’re now in the third year of superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s strategic plan, and many initiatives have been pushed out, especially at the school site or with directors and operations coordinators who supervise school sites. 

However, now, when a new initiative is introduced, the district has the responsibility to meet and bargain with us. In previous cases, that was not the case.

For example, the district required five classroom observations and formal visits per week with written feedback for every administrator at each school site. 

If you had a principal, an assistant principal, or an assistant principal for special education—and in the bigger high schools, two or three principals—everybody had to participate in five classroom observations and then input their informal observations.

When you add 40 minutes times five, that’s an additional 200 minutes to your workload.

It wasn’t until we affiliated with Teamsters in December and submitted a demand-to-bargain letter that we basically agreed that the intent wasn’t about quotas, and that there was a lack of cohesion in implementation. Therefore, the quotas have been lifted, which is a huge win for us right now.

Why Teamsters, and why now?

When I first took on the role, I proceeded to run on three pillars.

One of them being a transformational leader. I was very aware of the conditions out there because I was in the field. I proceeded to try to build communication systems and collaborative structures with our district. But two months in, I was getting nowhere with the district.

So, in early September,  I shared my concerns and urgency with my staff because this year is a negotiating year for us. We have an urgency to try to get the best contract, and I knew that the language of the contract mattered.

I brought up the possibility of meeting with other unions to see if we could affiliate and become bigger. I knew that unions were about solidarity and power, and power means numbers and strength. Teamsters came, and they brought their whole team. All of a sudden, we had this team that could support our work, especially the legal part. We continue to have the AALA model, which is one vision and one voice together, but since affiliating, we’ve begun to bring immediate relief at the hands of our brothers and sisters.

How has budgeting played out as an issue for members of your union?

Budget development is happening right now. For example, I’m hearing from my members that they are reporting getting less psychiatric social work time, less school psychology time, less allocation for assistant principals–positions that support programs and special education. Last year, the district did away with 400 assistant principal positions. That was another area that really created urgency, that the district was doing this to us. That could have also been an area to bargain because the effects of not having an assistant principal could have been bargained. 

If the positions are being cut in half or more, that’s a great concern. In LAUSD, we rely on human capital to do the human work, and those positions right now are being slashed in addition to having less money.

Campus safety is a crucial responsibility for principals, particularly in collaboration with law enforcement partners. How does that play into the upcoming bargaining period?

Since 2020, school police have almost been completely taken out of the district, leaving very few coming back from COVID. Crimes have increased tremendously, including physical fights, guns at schools, etcetera. Safety is a huge concern.

The district talks a lot about keeping students safe, keeping employees safe, but the resources that we currently have are limited. The district implements a positive behavior support system. The district implements it for students’ progressive discipline, which is good, but for the more difficult cases, the district has these diversion tickets that kids get, and they don’t have any weight or teeth.

We want to be mindful of the students we serve and the populations and demographics they belong to, but the current systems are not enough.

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

The Los Angeles Unified School District was ensnared by three high-profile cyberattacks in the last few years, each of which exposed reams of sensitive information online. 

Three subsequent class-action lawsuits from parents accused the nation’s second-largest district of taking inadequate steps to protect their children’s personal records — and failing to tell them that sensitive information had been leaked. The district has since taken multiple actions to shield details about the incidents from public view. 

The trio of events encompass a September 2022 ransomware attack that exposed students’ highly sensitive psychological evaluations among other records; a January 2022 cyberattack on education technology company Illuminate Education, which compromised sensitive information in Los Angeles and districts nationwide; and a massive June 2024 cyberattack on the cloud computing company Snowflake, a third-party vendor used by the district to store certain records. 

Threat actors with the Vice Society cybergang took credit for the September 2022 ransomware attack on L.A. schools, posting the records to its dark web leak site after education officials did not pay its extortion demand. In the aftermath of the attack, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho sought to downplay its effect on students. An told the local press that students’ psychological evaluations were included in the leak, a revelation Carvalho refuted as “absolutely incorrect.” 

“We have seen no evidence that psychiatric evaluation information or health records, based on what we’ve seen thus far, has been made available publicly,” said Carvalho, who acknowledged the hackers had “touched” the district’s massive student information system but said the “vast majority” of exposed student records involved their names, academic records and home addresses. 

An investigation by ����Ӱ�� into the leak uncovered that the breach had, in fact, exposed student psychological evaluations, which contain a startling degree of personally identifiable information about students receiving special education services, including their detailed medical histories, academic performance and disciplinary records. Just hours after our story published, the district acknowledged in a statement that “approximately 2,000” student psychological evaluations — including those of 60 current students — had been uploaded to the dark web. 

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, a district spokesperson said its cybersecurity response protocol “follows a clear, structured process that prioritizes swift internal assessment and adherence to all applicable state and federal data privacy regulations.” The process, the district said, is “designed with transparency, compliance and community trust in mind.”

Due to the sensitive nature of the information, students may have to “deal with this breach for the rest of their lives,” attorney Ryan Clarkson told ����Ӱ��. Clarkson represents students and parents in a class-action lawsuit alleging LAUSD failed to act on known cybersecurity vulnerabilities and provided families insufficient notice that students’ personal records had been compromised.  

“It’s hard to bury it, it’s hard to get away from it, it’s kind of part of who we are,” Clarkson said in an interview. “Your psychology as a child is always going to be your psychology as a child.”

While the parents of special education students had been left in the dark about the breach, so too were members of the district’s special education committee. Carvalho acknowledged at a September 2022 that L.A. Unified was a “district under siege” and sought to “dispel rumors” about the incident, including one that multiple attacks had occurred. He didn’t make any statements regarding the impact on sensitive special education records. 

Carl Petersen, who served on the committee at the time, told ����Ӱ�� that Carvalho left the committee members without information about the attack’s ramifications on children with disabilities. 

“At that point it was, ‘Oh, this was a very minor thing. We caught them in the system immediately and we shut it down,” said Petersen, who described Carvalho’s comments as part of a larger district effort to obfuscate. 

In January 2023 — four months after the attack — L.A. school officials acknowledged in that sensitive records had been exposed but only listed Social Security numbers included in payroll records and third-party contractor files swept up in the breach. It wasn’t until March 2023 that they disclosed to state regulators the leak had also compromised . 

The letter submitted to the California AG’s office doesn’t make clear the types of student records that were affected but urges individuals to “keep a copy of this notice for your records in case of future issues with your child’s medical records.” 

����Ӱ�� submitted a public records request for information related to the ransomware attack, including complaints submitted to a hotline LAUSD created in its wake, insurance claims, Carvalho’s communications with the FBI and the types of student records that were subject to disclosure. The district denied the requests, stating it could not locate any “non-privileged responsive records,” meaning that they didn’t have to provide any of the records that were responsive because they were legally protected from disclosure. 

A week after it was discovered, the school board to grant Carvalho emergency spending powers to recover from the 2022 Labor Day weekend attack, allowing the schools chief a year to “enter into any and all contracts” to address the incident “without advertising or inviting bids and for any dollar amount necessary.” 

‘Shared with the world’

In August 2023, nearly a year after the attack, Carvalho made a high-profile appearance at the White House, where then-First Lady Jill Biden warned about the growing threat of cyberattacks on students and a need to do more to protect their sensitive data.

“If we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data,” she said at the first-ever K-12 cybersecurity summit. “Every student deserves the opportunity to see a school counselor when they’re struggling and not worry that these conversations will be shared with the world.”

Carvalho said quick reaction time by the Los Angeles district and federal law enforcement officials set into motion a response plan that mitigated the attack, limited the number of files breached and avoided class cancellations. His remarks in the East Room didn’t touch on the leak of students’ mental health records but said the number of stolen files “could have been much worse” had officials not acted quickly to prevent the cybercriminals from encrypting additional district systems. One action they had no intention of doing, he said, was paying the undisclosed ransom demand because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”  

Los Angeles parent Ariel Harman-Holmes, whose three children are in special education, said she’s worried that fallout from the data breach could divert money from the services her children with disabilities need.

“I would rather have those funds go back into the schools and special education rather than spending a ton on litigation or settlements about privacy issues,” said Harman-Holmes, while acknowledging it “would be very disturbing” if her own child’s psychological evaluations were leaked online. 

As L.A. Unified’s response to the attack was being lauded by federal officials at the White House summit, its lawyers were in court with parents who alleged the district’s mitigation efforts weren’t just inadequate — they violated the law. Three separate lawsuits filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court charge the district had insufficient safeguards in place to secure students’ sensitive records and failed to provide enough notice to victims once that information was stolen. 

An inspector general’s office audit highlighted cybersecurity vulnerabilities yet, the complaints allege, LAUSD failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the attack. Parents also charge the district failed to comply with state data breach notice requirements after it learned that students’ psychological records and other files were published online. 

The most recent complaint was filed in September 2024 against the district and the company InfoSys, which built and manages the My Integrated Student Information System — the district’s primary student data portal. The district “has stated under oath in discovery responses” that InfoSys managed the student information system that was compromised, according to court records filed by the plaintiffs.

Insufficient cybersecurity protocols allowed the intrusion to go unnoticed for more than two months, the lawsuit alleges, and, once it was discovered, L.A. school leaders failed to provide “prompt and accurate notice of the data breach.” 

The breached portal “is currently the largest student data system in the United States,” the 162-page complaint notes, yet district officials “prioritized a race to incorporate technology in classrooms, with no regard for the risks of harboring troves of student data in online databases subject to cyberattacks.” 

One district, three breaches

Months before the Vice Society ransomware attack began, Los Angeles student records were exposed in a cyberattack on ed tech vendor Illuminate Education, which affected districts nationwide. LAUSD submitted a breach notice to the California attorney general’s office in May 2022, some unfolded. The report doesn’t disclose the types of information that were exposed or the number of students who had been affected. 

Then, in June 2024, a threat actor who goes by the name “the Satanic Cloud” posted a listing on a notorious dark web marketplace, seeking $1,000 in exchange for what they claimed was a trove of more than 24 million L.A. school district records. A second threat actor, known as “Sp1d3r” similarly posted a listing for records reportedly stolen from the district with a $150,000 price tag. 

The district said school data maintained by a third-party vendor was caught up in a cyberattack on the cloud computing company Snowflake, but officials didn’t disclose the name of the vendor or the types of records that may have been compromised. 

The district denied a public records request by ����Ӱ�� seeking information related to the incident, saying that certain files were protected by attorney-client privilege. 

The incident doesn’t appear in a California attorney general’s office database of data breaches.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

LAUSD officials the nation’s second-largest district will reopen all but seven schools that were destroyed, badly damaged or immediately threatened by flames.��

Questions about the district’s reopening remain, including unresolved challenges about where displaced students will attend school, how they will get there, and whether remote learning will be offered.

Dozens of smaller districts within Los Angeles County also reopened, with the , where the Eaton fire has destroyed at least five campuses and remains mostly uncontained.��

At a , LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the schools slated to reopen are safe to resume instruction after the district last week closed all campuses amid the largest and most destructive fires in LA history.������

LAUSD schools will operate on modified schedules without extracurricular activities, he said, and special allowances will be made for students and staff who miss classes.

“Students and our workforce will come back having witnessed and experienced a level of disruption not paralleled in the history of our community,” said Carvalho. “We will embrace our work with empathy, flexibility and patience.”����

The historic L.A. area fires that began last week have killed at least 25 people and destroyed or damaged more than 12,000 buildings. LAUSD began closing schools last Wednesday as fires in the city intensified, fueled by strong Santa Ana winds. At least 340 district staff have so far lost their homes in the blazes, Carvalho said.

As of Monday, the had burned nearly 24,000 acres, destroying many homes and businesses in iconic Los Angeles neighborhoods, including Pacific Palisades and Malibu. The , located on the city’s east side, had burned more than 14,000 acres in the neighborhoods of Pasadena and Altadena, and is only 33% contained.����

on Monday, bringing the possibility of renewed growth of existing fires and the creation of new ones as local and out-of-town firefighters battle the deadly blazes.

Famed Palisades High School, which was also badly damaged in the fires, will not reopen this week, Carvalho said. Two additional schools in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that have been completely burned, Palisades Charter Elementary and Marquez Charter Elementary, will be relocated to other campuses later this week.��In all, more than 2,000 students enrolled at the three schools have been displaced, he said.��

Carvalho said the district is still working out logistics, such as the possibility of providing transportation for displaced students.����

Marquez Charter Elementary will be relocated to Nora Sterry Elementary, about nine miles away. Palisades Charter Elementary will be relocated to Brentwood Science Magnet, about five miles away.��

Four other LAUSD schools located in areas that were under mandatory evacuation orders Monday remain closed. Those schools include Canyon Charter Elementary, Kenter Canyon Charter Elementary, Topanga Charter Elementary, Lanai Road Elementary and Paul Revere Middle School.��

Carvalho said those schools would reopen as soon as fire conditions allowed. He did not say where or if those students will report to class in the meantime.��������

Two additional LAUSD schools that were also threatened by fires could also be closed if conditions worsen, officials said. 

On Monday morning, blue skies overlooked Nora Sterry Elementary, which is preparing to welcome displaced students from Marquez Charter Elementary later this week, as teachers and staff scrambled to get ready for the first school day there.

As cars pulled up to drop off��students, teachers and staff ran into the building to prepare for a busy week. A school nurse held onto her lunch as two district employees loudly backed up a truck to unload supplies.

One mom, walking with her hand tightly clenched to her son, expressed gratitude that the school was reopening. “We live in the neighborhood. It helps that he has something to do,” she said.

David Tokofsky, a former LAUSD educator and board member turned consultant, said the district’s response to the fires is a work in progress. He said district officials should have notified families sooner of last week’s school closures and of the plan to reopen Monday.��

“Normally, the district is at its absolute best operationally in crisis,” said Tokofsky, who counts fires, earthquakes, floods, the coronavirus and the AIDS epidemic among the disasters he’s experienced while working in the district.  

Still, the district’s performance in the face of the ongoing fires can’t really be assessed so soon, Tokofsky said. Challenges facing LAUSD, including trauma, lost instructional time and logistical matters such as student transportation are still ongoing, he said, and the fires that have already engulfed the city may flare up again and bring even more unprecedented destruction.����������

“Nothing compares to this,” said Tokofsky. “We need teamwork and real, concrete action.”

All Los Angeles Unified School District campuses were closed Thursday after four historic blazes engulfed the city earlier in the week, killing at least five people and injuring many others. 

At least three LA Unified schools, including the famed in the Pacific Palisades, as well as Marquez Charter School and Palisades Charter Elementary School, which are all in the same area, were completely destroyed, said LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. 

Schools in other districts in LA county . 

At a visit to a school food pantry where workers and volunteers were providing meals to displaced children in Glassell Park, ashes blanketed the ground and smoke covered the sky, Carvalho said the nation’s second largest district would remain closed through the end of the week.

He did not say when schools would reopen.

“The entire community is still under red alert,” Carvalho told reporters during the visit to Sonia Sotomayor Art & Sciences Magnet school. “Schools are shut down. There are absolutely no activities.”

More than 600,000 students across Los Angeles were without classes due to the closure of LAUSD and at least two dozen other smaller districts in LA county because of the fires. 

Carvalho said LA Unified officials were working to provide and printed lessons to families but widespread power outages and poor air quality continued to hamper distribution efforts.����

It was unclear if the district planned to offer remote classes such as those during the pandemic.  

LAUSD was for students who depended on school meals at eight campuses across the city on Thursday and officials planned to double the number of sites offering free food on Friday.  

The district was also offering access to mental health services for , families and students in need of support.  

As fires continued to burn across LA, many families were evacuated from their homes. Others faced hardships including dangerous levels of smoke that contributed to toxic air quality. Piles of ash and debris still covered many streets and buildings, while burnt and abandoned cars choked roads in some of the city’s hardest-hit areas.    

Residents who visited the food pantry at Sonia Sotomayor said they were grateful for the meals provided there by LAUSD. Parents there also expressed appreciation for online learning materials provided by the district. 

But Leni Lam, a mother of three from Atwater Village who visited the pantry Thursday, said the emotional fallout from the fires would be more difficult to overcome. 

As power outages continued and Lam worked to clean ash and debris from her home while caring for her children and her disabled husband, she hoped LAUSD would reopen schools as quickly as possible. 

Lam said her children were still recovering from the “nightmare” of online learning during the pandemic and that LAUSD should resume in-person instruction as soon as it’s safe.   

“My kids are pretty resilient, and they’re really strong,” said Lam. “But emotionally and socially, like they’ve been set back.” 

Scott Schmerelson, who has worked in the LA Unified School District for nearly four decades and has served on the board since 2015, was  by his board colleagues on Dec. 10.  

As board president, he succeeded , who is retiring.

A former LAUSD teacher, principal and administrator, Schmerelson assumed leadership of the board just before he begins his third and final term representing District 3, which covers parts of LA’s San Fernando Valley region.

In a phone interview, Schmerelson said he’d focus the board’s attention on fighting falling student enrollment in the remainder of the academic year, as pre-pandemic declines accelerated into long-term losses that may eventually force school closures.

“I’m going to constantly, constantly talk about enrollment,” Schmerelson said. “For the school district to remain viable, we have to have students.”

Schmerelson said he hoped LAUSD’s improving test scores would help attract students who may have left the district for private schools or home instruction.

He said as board president he’ll also focus on issues including LAUSD’s  and rising .  

It’s a tall order. But with nearly 40 years working in the district and close to a decade on the school board, Schmerelson believes he has the backing of his community.

As president, Schmerelson will help set the direction of the board’s policymaking and manage its operations. The LAUSD’s seven-member board sets the district’s policy, controls its budget and hires the superintendent.

This fall Schmerelson overcame an aggressive campaign from opponent Dan Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, who focused much of his election messaging on the need to tame waste and corruption in the school district.

Chang and his backers, including the state charter school association’s political arm, spent more than $5.6 million promoting his campaign. �����󳾱��������Dz�’s backers, including the local teacher union, spent about $2.5 million, .

In the end, Chang landed behind Schmerelson with 48% of the vote, while Schmerelson got 52%.

Schmerelson brought up the cost of the race in remarks he made after he was sworn in as president at LAUSD headquarters last month.  

“Really, it is our whole community that won,” he said. “Because we learned to work together against the power of money. And when I say money, I mean $5 million.”  

The contest between the two men had the potential to tilt the district’s school board away from a majority of union-backed members, and impact its handling of several   facing LAUSD, including restrictions on charter schools’ use of buildings, which Chang said he’d move to reverse if elected. 

 victory is part of a successful election season for many teachers  in Los Angeles – and Schmerelson has aligned himself with local unions on policies limiting space and resources for charter schools.

But in an interview Schmerelson said he supports the continued operation of high-quality charter schools in the district.

“I am going to support those charter schools that are doing an excellent job of educating the kids,” said Schmerelson.

“I want to make sure that the charter schools that we have, are viable and working well,” he added.

This school year Fremont High has seen security-related lockdowns on a nearly a monthly basis, including an incident at the beginning of the year when .

But Marisol Pérez, who’s taught at Fremont for more than a decade, said students at the school can find their way out of the concrete jungle through the STEM fields of science, tech, engineering and math.��

A retired Coast Guard veteran who served eight years as a technician in active duty before becoming a teacher, Perez knows from her own experience the value of education and the power of following your dreams.  

Now Perez has made it her life’s mission to outfit her students with the tools to succeed in an increasingly tech-driven world.

“The United States is struggling to produce enough qualified individuals for STEM jobs, which often results in these roles being outsourced to other countries,” said Perez, “leading to a loss of opportunities here at home.”

In recognition of her dedication, Pérez in November was named the , earning the honor through a nationwide nomination process for excellence in STEM education.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Pérez discussed the challenges her students face pursuing STEM fields in South Central and how investment in new STEM programs can create a significant impact.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

South Central LA can be a tough place to grow up. How does the environment there impact students’ ability to study in school?

Students come to school saying that they can’t walk home late because these are not the types of areas where it’s safe to walk around.

The demographics here present unique challenges. Our students, as much as we would like them to focus on their homework, their education, often have different and more immediate concerns. Unfortunately Many come from broken homes, and their worries are far removed from those of the average student outside this community. They’re thinking about where their next meal will come from, or they’re rushing home because they have to go to work.

In my opinion, it’s hard for them to focus on academics in the same way students in other demographics might. The dynamics within the Black and Latino communities here are very similar—they face significant hardships they need to overcome. At the same time, they’re trying to pursue an education and push themselves to meet standards. They often have to work three or four times as hard just to meet those expectations. It’s incredibly challenging.

What has teaching in South Central for over a decade taught you about public schools in these communities?

I don’t think we have as many resources as we would like, and that’s where the struggle usually lies. This is a  Because of that, our budgets are really low—not where they need to be. In reality, schools like ours should be receiving the most funding since we lack critical resources. We have a student population of about 1,900, most of whom are at impoverished income levels. This is exactly where additional resources are needed.

However, when funding is distributed, it rarely seems to reach schools like ours. We end up coming up short, with insufficient budgets to maintain resources. Even for programs like this one, I’ve had to spend a lot of my own money to cover the things we need. Running an engineering course is expensive—very expensive—and I’m constantly struggling to find additional funding. I’ve been applying for grants to help cover the cost of consumables the students go through daily.

For this program alone, I’ve had to obtain additional certifications to qualify for grants within the state because the school simply doesn’t have the money to support programs like this. On top of my engineering background, I pursued these certifications so I could apply for state grants and potentially secure the funds to expand the program and open up more engineering opportunities for the students.

Why is STEM so hard for your students to engage with?

I have a background in STEM, and I can tell you right now that as a mechanical engineer working in government, most people don’t look like me. There are very few Latinas or women in this field. I happen to have both under my belt—I’m a female Latina—and engineering is predominantly male-dominated. 

Bringing STEM programs into communities that are predominantly Black and Latino creates an opportunity to introduce something many people might not have known about. These communities may not realize that there are excellent jobs in STEM that they, too, can pursue. When they see someone like me—a female Latina from their area—they can say, “She did it, so why can’t I?” That’s the mentality we try to push here, is that we can do it, then there’s no excuse for you not to do it.

What is the school environment like for students?

When we wrap up our work, we need to ensure that we’re calling parents and making sure they come to the parking lot so our kids can get home safely. If that’s not possible, we’ll arrange transportation for them. Something as simple as this might seem unnecessary to someone outside the situation, but for us, it’s essential. 

 I live just a block away from the school, but even that short distance can feel intimidating because our community can be a little dangerous. However, the school itself is a safe and nurturing environment. It feels like a small oasis for the kids—a place where they feel secure and comfortable. But when they head home, they instinctively know that as the sun sets, they need to hurry and get there quickly.

What’s your teaching philosophy?

I always tell my kids, I don’t ever want a company to hire you just because you’re a female or because you’re a brown female. I want them to hire you because you have the skills, because you bring something valuable to the company that they need.

I do my best here not only to teach them the necessary skills but also to help them understand that this is not how they should expect to be hired—and it’s not how they should want to be hired. You should be hired because you are competitive and capable.

What changes do you think LAUSD should make?

LAUSD needs to focus more on STEM programs and allocate additional funding to them. The entire country acknowledges a problem with STEM education, as we’re falling short compared to other nations. 

We’re coming up short with STEM. As a result, these jobs end up being shipped to another country.

In the 21st century, with advancements like artificial intelligence, automation, electric vehicles, and even potential hydrogen technologies, it’s crucial to prioritize STEM education, especially since that’s where our biggest global competitors are headed.

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

Federal prosecutors have of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy.

Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tuesday on allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

The 33-year-old former educator’s arrest is the latest chapter in the downfall of “Ed,” a buzzy, $6 million AI chatbot that Smith-Griffin’s company was tapped to build for the Los Angeles Unified School District before the project was halted and the company shuttered. L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and Smith-Griffin appeared together at several events earlier this year to promote the chatbot, an ed tech innovation Carvalho said was “unprecedented in American public education.”

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed in Manhattan federal court accuses Smith-Griffin of defrauding investors and using company funds for a down payment on her North Carolina house and to pay for . 

Smith-Griffin “orchestrated a deliberate and calculated scheme to deceive investors” in the company she founded through a Harvard University startup incubator in 2016 to provide a tech-driven solution to student absences. She inflated “the company’s financials to secure millions of dollars under false pretenses,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a media release. “The law does not turn a blind eye to those who allegedly distort financial realities for personal gain.” 

Smith-Griffin is being represented by Eric Brignac, an assistant public defender with the Federal Public Defender’s Office. Brignac, who is based out of Raleigh, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, an L.A. schools spokesperson portrayed the district, by far AllHere’s biggest customer, as one of many taken in by Smith-Griffin. Previously, the school district and its inspector general’s office opened separate inquiries into the school system’s work with AllHere.

“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”

Between 2017 and June 2024, prosecutors allege, Smith-Griffin used her control over AllHere’s bank accounts to transfer at least $600,000 in company funds to her personal account, generally using PayPal and Zelle to make repeat wire transfers under $10,000. 

Federal prosecutors said the fraud scheme began as early as November 2020, when Smith-Griffin allegedly began to misrepresent to her investors the company’s revenue, customer base and cash on hand. In the spring of 2021, she told investors AllHere had generated some $3.7 million in revenue in the previous year, including through contracts with the New York City and Atlanta school districts. In reality, federal prosecutors allege, the company had only generated $11,000 — and contracts with the two major urban school systems didn’t exist. 

Key AllHere funders include the venture firms Rethink Education, Spero Ventures and Potencia Ventures. Their representatives  didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

When investors and an outside accountant accidentally discovered the discrepancies between the company’s actual financials and its claim to backers, Smith-Griffin masqueraded as a financial consultant to perpetuate the scheme, prosecutors allege. She was accused of creating a fake email address for the phony outside consultant, which she used to send fraudulent documents to her largest investor. 

Though one of the firm’s biggest investors “recruited high profile” education leaders to the company’s board of directors, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson, the indictment notes that Smith-Griffin “exercised exclusive control” over AllHere’s communications with investors, board members, customers and outside vendors.

The indictment adds further uncertainty around the AI chatbot the company created for and launched with such fanfare earlier this year with Los Angeles schools, the country’s second-largest district.

As K-12 school systems nationwide rush to inject artificial intelligence into their teaching practices, the L.A. chatbot has of what could go wrong. On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department on ways schools can harness AI while ensuring they don’t have a discriminatory impact on vulnerable and underserved students. 

In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the chatbot together at the influential ASU+GSV ed tech conference in San Diego. Carvalho said Ed was the nation’s first AI-enabled “personal assistant” and would drive academic improvement while providing Los Angeles’s roughly 540,00 students and their families with a trove of helpful information upon request.

Signs of turmoil emerged in June, when ����Ӱ�� first reported that Smith-Griffin was out of a job as AllHere furloughed a majority of its staff due to its “current financial position.” A statement from the L.A. district said the company had been put up for sale. 

The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August. At a bankruptcy hearing in September, Toby Jackson, one of AllHere’s only remaining employees and its former chief technology officer, struggled to explain why the company had paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses in the past year alone. 

“That is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” said Jackson, who said that Smith-Griffin “did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.”  

Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

����Ӱ�� first reported the possible criminal charges in early October, when Delaware court documents related to AllHere’s bankruptcy case revealed a grand jury subpoena by federal prosecutors. Even before the company laid off employees and announced its financial woes, a former employee-turned-whistleblower told ����Ӱ�� that AllHere had struggled to produce a “proper product” for the L.A. district and took shortcuts that ran afoul of school district policies and bedrock student data privacy principles. 

By the time AllHere went bankrupt earlier this year, it never had more than 31 customers total — less than a third the number Smith-Griffin told investors she had by early 2021. By the time the company collapsed this year, only three of AllHere’s customers generated more than $100,000 in revenue. 

In total, the felony charges carry a 42-year prison sentence for Smith-Griffin, who began her  career working in a Boston charter school as a teacher and family engagement director.

“Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said in the release. “The FBI will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of education opportunities for our city’s children will be taught a lesson.” 

Los Angeles Unified is seeking voters’ approval for a $9 billion bond measure to repair and upgrade its aging school buildings.  

The bond, which Californians will vote on Tuesday as , would be LAUSD’s largest ever and paid for with property tax increases. It requires a 55% majority in order to pass. 

LAUSD Board members in August issued a resolution calling for the measure, citing reports from the district that described structural shortcomings and deferred maintenance in the district’s school buildings, which number . 

Unlike many other states, California does not set aside funding for school capital projects in its annual state budget. Such projects instead are paid for by bonds issued at the state or local level, which are typically funded by property taxes. 

Los Angeles voters often exhibit support for school construction legislation such as Measure US. Headwinds facing the bond include in LAUSD, an ongoing budget crunch and a statewide school construction bond on the ballot this year.

by members of the LAUSD board, district superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the teachers union and local construction groups. It’s by some taxpayer and has been criticized by members of the local charter school community.  

Carvalho argued that the bond is necessary at to introduce Measure US in August. “I’ve seen firsthand our aging and outdated facilities, in many instances, our subpar learning environments, our lack of green space, our lack of outdoor space,” said Carvalho. 

Here are five things to know about the the $9 billion bond: 

1. LA’s school buildings need help. 

LA Unified, the nation’s second largest district, spread out across 710 square miles. As is often the case in large, urban districts, many of the school buildings in Los Angeles are older, and some are in rough shape.  

According to figures kept by LAUSD, at least 60% of the schools in the district were built before 1975. Many of those older buildings need upgrades and renovations such as new roofs, ventilation systems, seismic updates or tech upgrades. According to LAUSD’s own estimates the district needs to replace roughly 50,000 HVAC units, two million square feet of plumbing and 18 million square feet of roofing. 

LA Unified school buildings also suffer from a lack of green space and accessible facilities for students with disabilities. Beyond that, the for investment in technology for its schools, such as video camera systems and alarm and monitoring systems to improve campus safety. 

2. Not even $9 billion can fix the district’s building problems. 

According to the district’s own estimates, $9 billion won’t entirely cover the cost of needed upgrades and repairs to school buildings. Carvalho says the district actually needs at least $80 billion to fully repair and modernize its schools.

Another problem with LA Unified school buildings is that there are too many of them, and they are too big. District officials have said the school system is built for about 650,000 students, but there are now enrolled in LAUSD schools at district-run TK-12 programs. 

With no end to dropping enrollment in sight, a tricky problem facing LAUSD is what to do with all those classrooms when they’re not being used by students. Carvalho has said , but so far the district has avoided doing that. 

3. The state puts its own, $10 billion school construction bond to voters this year. 

State lawmakers have put a statewide bill forward to voters this year for a separate set of  school buildings bonds. would fund repairs and upgrades at public schools and community colleges around the state. 

Los Angeles Unified stands to gain just a small fraction of that $10 billion included in the statewide bond from the legislation, an amount that district officials say is far too small to address the facilities needs there.

And that’s not all when it comes to school repairs for California this election cycle – besides the statewide measure and the measure on the ballot in LA, also have school building bonds up before voters next week. 

4. Charter schools could be shortchanged by LA’s measure.

Measure US sets aside $300 million for charter schools out of the $9 billion total that it seeks to borrow from voters and pay for with a bond. 

California Charter Schools Association Vice President Keith Dell’Aquila said those allotments shortchange charter schools, which account for roughly 22% of LAUSD’s enrollment, including district-affiliated schools.

“Twenty-two percent of the students should see and benefit from more than three percent of the revenues,” at an August board meeting to discuss the bond. 

“We need to be working in collaboration and partnership,” he added. “We see the same challenges: the leaky roofs, the insufficient special education space, too much concrete and not enough grass, the need to reinvest and modernize our schools.” 

Charter-backed upstart failed in the Nov. 5 elections to unseat , the longtime LAUSD educator and policymaker who won the election and will begin his third and final term on the LA Unified board in January. 

Chang conceded in a message to supporters that he wasn’t going to be able to overcome �����󳾱��������Dz�’s 4 percentage point lead. 

Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, who previously helped found charter schools in LA, trailed behind Schmerelson with 48% of the vote, while Schmerelson garnered  52%.

The contest between the two men had the potential to tip the district’s school board away from a 4-3 majority of union-backed members, and impact the board’s handling of several facing LAUSD, including restrictions on charter schools’ use of buildings, which Chang said he’d move to reverse if elected. 

victory is part of a successful election season for many teachers . 

The outspoken former teacher and principal has sided closely with local unions on issues of space and resources for charter schools. His win could mean more headwinds for the nation’s largest charter school sector here moving forward. 

�����󳾱��������Dz�’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Two other LA Unified school board races being decided by voters this year were not as close.

For District 1 in South LA, board admin defeated with 71% of the vote, versus 29% for Al-Alim, whom the in the primary over anti-semitic social media. 

For LAUSD Board District 5, which covers parts of Northeast and Southeast LA, union-backed led with 61% of the vote, versus 39% held by Ortiz.

Meanwhile, a majority of LA voters voiced their approval of a to repair and upgrade aging school buildings. 

As of Friday, voters cast 68% of ballots in favor of , which was backed by members of the LAUSD board, district superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the teachers union and local construction groups.  

Measure US would be LAUSD’s largest ever school facilities bond, and would be paid for with property tax increases. It requires a 55% majority in order to pass. 

The Los Angeles County Clerk is still counting votes and is providing daily. 

As of Friday the clerk had recorded more than 3.7 million votes in all the elections held November 5, with roughly 35% of eligible voters still uncounted.

The district’s $120 million had a clear goal: lifting the academic performance of Black students, who trail behind other groups in assessments of reading and math, providing students extra tutors, and added training for their teachers.  

The program is now in doubt after Arlington-based filed a civil rights complaint arguing it violates federal law by using race “solely” as a criteria for admission, prompting the district to change its policy.

“At bottom, the Black Student Achievement Plan and its benefits are open to some students but not others — and that exclusion is solely based on an individual’s race,” the group’s said. 

In response, LAUSD said it’s no longer using race as a factor in choosing which schools participate. But the program’s future remains murky even with the changes because it could still be open to future legal challenges. 

Still, it’s a dramatic turn of events for LAUSD’s signature Black initiative, and shows the powerful influence out-of-town interests can have on local policy.  

LASUD officials said the district will still give BSAP the same resources as previous years and its programs are staying the same; and all students — not just Black students — are eligible for the help. 

The five-year-old BSAP had seemed to be headed for success by targeting Black kids. 

With broad support from LA Unified’s board, teachers and families, the program deployed counselors and social workers at roughly 50 schools, which together enrolled more about a third of the district’s Black students. 

And this year, the district’s Black students made gains on that outpaced those of other student groups. The district’s Black students also this year outscored Black students around the state on the annual exams.  

Since PDE filed its complaint, superintendent Alberto Carvalho said LA Unified was “able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”

“Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools,” he said with the Los Angeles Times. 

Representatives for , which has lodged more civil rights complaints against at least ten other school districts around the nation, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A website for the non-profit says it is a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas,” including critical race theory and restorative justice. 

PDE’s board includes , the conservative litigant who previously founded an organization that won a 2023 Supreme Court decision against Harvard University to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. 

In with the federal Office for Civil Rights, PDE argued the BSAP violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by using race to decide which students get extra educational services.

After LA Unified dropped race as an official factor in those decisions, OCR dismissed the group’s complaint, heading off a potential legal battle. But PDE could revive its complaint. 

The district’s strategy has drawn fire from its , and an Oct. 22 board meeting. An online letter-writing urges LA Unified to “reinstate Black student population as a criterion for BSAP school allocation.”

Without race to guide which schools participate in the BSAP, University of Southern California education professor Julie Slayton said LAUSD will have to use other factors in deciding how to distribute extra resources to students. 

“They’ll take away the language of ‘Black,’ ” Slayton said. “But it doesn’t have to change, profoundly, the way that they’re thinking about the distribution of these resources and the schools that will receive them.” 

The latest chapter in AllHere’s dizzying collapse revealed more information about the once-lauded company’s finances and its relationship with the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the hearing failed to answer key questions about why AllHere went under after garnering $12 million in investor capital, a blizzard of positive press and a contract with the nation’s second-largest school district to create “Ed,” the buzzy, AI-powered chatbot.

During the hearing held over Zoom, one of AllHere’s only remaining executives, former chief technology officer Toby Jackson, struggled to explain why the company paid ousted CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses from the past year and owed $630,000 to its largest creditor, education technology salesperson Debra Kerr. 

“I don’t know exactly the nature of all of [Smith-Griffin’s] expenses. She was the CEO and so that is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” Jackson said when quizzed about the six-figure amount by the bankruptcy trustee. “She did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.” 

Similarly, Jackson said he had no invoices to substantiate the $630,000 debt to Kerr, who is a longtime associate and of Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, dating back to his days leading Miami-Dade schools. Kerr’s son, Richard, is a former AllHere account executive who told ����Ӱ�� this week he pitched the AllHere deal to Los Angeles school leaders.

“I’m not really sure what exactly that entails,” Jackson said of Kerr’s claim.

Moments later, Kerr chimed into the Zoom hearing, arguing the company owed her the money after she helped AllHere close the lucrative deal in L.A. Kerr said she was never paid her commission from the first payments that LAUSD made to AllHere under the contract. 

The district has said it paid AllHere roughly $3 million of the $6 million for the chatbot, which was taken offline shortly after AllHere announced in June that it was in financial distress and had furloughed most of its employees. 

“I never did collect any commissions and it’s in the contract based on commission percentages that would have been made on any sales accrued,” Kerr told the trustee.

Smith-Griffin, who now lives in North Carolina, was not present for the Zoom hearing and could not be reached for comment. There were indications in the hearing that her separation from AllHere was not amicable, including that the former CEO has refused to disclose the password to her $500 company-owned laptop, one of its few remaining assets. 

Court records show that Jackson, now the head restructuring officer, earned $305,000 a year in his role with the company before it shuttered, nearly three times the $105,000 paid to Smith-Griffin, a Harvard University graduate who built AllHere in 2016 with financial backing from the prestigious institution. 

Filed in mid-August, AllHere’s Title 7 bankruptcy petition strengthens doubts that it could find a new owner to take over its mission as an AI pioneer in K-12 schools. That scenario was put forth by a Los Angeles school district spokesperson earlier this year with the assertion that “Ed” could still be successfully launched as a personalized, interactive learning acceleration tool for all of the district’s roughly 540,000 students and their families.

Instead, court records show AllHere’s few remaining employees are preparing for “the wind down of the company” and officials acknowledged during Tuesday’s proceeding that AllHere was unable to fulfill the terms of its contract with L.A. Unified. 

A lawyer representing the school district was present at the hearing. In a statement Tuesday evening, a district spokesperson said LAUSD is “evaluating its next steps to pursue and protect its rights in the bankruptcy proceedings.” 

Kerr and Carvalho 

Ties between Kerr and Carvalho go back to at least 2010, when she worked for the behemoth education company Back then, she gave Carvalho and Miami students what she to an original print of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Ever since, Carvalho, who took over leadership in Los Angeles in 2022, has been a regular staple on Kerr’s social media. 

A LinkedIn post promoting L.A.’s chatbot noted that the tool worked in partnership with services from seven companies including , the creators of digital education program ABCmouse and where Kerr previously worked as head of sales. 

Kerr didn’t respond to requests for comment but her son, Richard, who began working at AllHere in 2022, said among the school district deals he worked on for the company was the chatbot project in Los Angeles. 

“We had a big deal in L.A. and the investors, I guess, didn’t have patience to wait to get paid from it,” he said. 

Kerr said he met with education officials in Los Angeles and “did a lot of work” helping the company secure the ageement. When asked about his mother’s role in closing AllHere’s contract in Los Angeles, Kerr said “she had a lot to do with it,” but didn’t elaborate further.��

A statement from the L.A. district spokesperson said that “Los Angeles Unified launched a competitive” request for proposals that received “multiple responses,” which eventually led to AllHere’s selection. This spring, Carvalho went on the road with Smith-Griffin to promote “Ed,” billing the chatbot personified by a yellow sun as being “unprecedented in American public education.”

Before he was furloughed, Richard Kerr said AllHere was a great place to work — in part because of Smith-Griffin’s leadership.

“It’s very unfortunate what happened to Joanna. I thought she was on a great path and she was doing an amazing thing,” he said, adding that she made a mistake when she “brought in the wrong investors that were pretty vindictive” and decided to cut short the company without giving it a proper chance. 

AllHere’s former senior director of software engineering, who became a company whistleblower, told ����Ӱ�� earlier this year that AllHere struggled to meet the terms of its contract in Los Angeles and took shortcuts that violated bedrock student privacy principles and district rules. Both the district’s independent inspector general and top administrators have launched separate investigations into what went wrong with AllHere.

Even though his mother, Debra Kerr, was on the Delaware court’s Zoom call Tuesday, Richard Kerr said he was unaware his former employer had filed for bankruptcy.

What’s left

The company’s few remaining employees and board members, including former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Janice Jackson, have not made themselves available for comment. 

AllHere investor Andrew Parker, who was on vacation Tuesday and didn’t attend the court hearing, now serves as the company’s secretary. In addition to Janice Jackson, other players who signed AllHere’s bankruptcy petition are Andre Bennin, a managing partner with the investment firm , and education consultant Jeff Livingston. 

Even though Smith-Griffin is no longer with the company, court records show she still has a significant stake, holding 81% equity in its common stock. Rethink Education was by far the company’s biggest outside investor. 

Other top creditors, according to court records, are the law firm of at nearly $275,000, the information technology company at $190,000 and $123,000 to well-known education consulting firm  

Earlier in the summer, ����Ӱ�� spoke with Gunderson Dettmer partner Jay Hachigian, who said he had only worked with AllHere early in its formation. He didn’t respond to requests for comment this week about his firm’s large outstanding balance with the company. Whiteboard Advisors spokesperson Thomas Rodgers said in an email that his firm previously worked with AllHere but its role is covered by a nondisclosure agreement. 

Court records show the company earned $2.4 million in gross revenue last year but had generated much less since January, about $587,000.

At the time of bankruptcy, court records show the company had active contracts with just 10 school districts, including those in Cincinnati, Miami and Weehawken, New Jersey. Only Weehawken sought to use the chatbot platform created for LAUSD, while the rest relied on an earlier text messaging tool designed to combat chronic absenteeism. 

Despite landing millions of dollars in backing from a group of social impact investment firms, several of which cited their enthusiasm for investing in AllHere specifically because it was led by a Black woman, court records reveal the company’s coffers are nearly empty. AllHere claimed nearly $2.9 million in property and just shy of that — $1.75 million — in liabilities. The company’s actual assets, Toby Jackson acknowledged in court, are much lower. 

It claimed an “unknown” value on pending patents, which Jackson conceded Tuesday had been denied, and $2.88 million for licenses, franchises and royalties for its LAUSD contract. Other assets, including its website and chatbot source code, were also listed at a value of “unknown.”

Jackson said the Los Angeles contract was valued at $2.88 million for the remaining outstanding balance the district owes to fulfill the agreement — money he admitted AllHere would be unable to collect because it has not “held up our part of the bargain in the contract” and is closing shop.

Financial statements to the court show AllHere had $18,000 in savings and just $500 in physical assets: the value of Smith-Griffin’s work laptop, whose contents remain outside the tech company’s reach. 

“We have not been able to obtain the credentials for Mrs. Smith’s laptop. We did not receive any cooperation with that,” Jackson testified Tuesday. “She has been cooperative with some other matters, but not with this one.”

At the time, principals with Boston Impact Initiative were finalizing the firm’s annual impact assessment of AllHere, a 2016 startup that offered a tech-driven solution to chronic student absences. Officials with the were left with an impression that was, it turns out, far from reality. 

“There were conversations with the company and it was doing really well,” CEO Betty Francisco told ����Ӱ�� in a brief telephone conversation earlier this month.  

AllHere was actually on the verge of collapse and now, Francisco is questioning whether her firm may have been played. 

“We are trying to also understand what happened,” she said of the news that the company, the recipient of some $12 million in investor capital and much praise for being an AI education innovator, was in serious straits. Last month, a majority of its staff were furloughed, AllHere announced ; the ambitious AI chatbot that it built for the Los Angeles Unified School District was unplugged and its founder and chief executive officer, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was out of a job. 

Francisco said her firm was a minor player in AllHere’s venture capital fundraising and that the larger, institutional investors were now working with the company “to figure out the plan.” 

What that plan might be — and what necessitated it in the first place — remains a mystery. In the month since ����Ӱ�� first reported on the company’s downfall, key figures in AllHere’s rise have gone underground. ����Ӱ�� sought comments from more than a dozen company officials, including its founder, investors at prominent venture capital firms and members of its board of directors. None, aside from Francisco, would speak publicly about the company. 

It’s a major shift for AllHere’s backers, many of whom work at impact investment firms that fund startups through a social justice lens. These figures were once outspoken about AllHere and their shared place in the race to inject AI into schools. Among those who have gone silent is Andrew Parker of the firm , whose fundraising efforts landed him a seat on AllHere’s board of directors. In a 2021 blog post, he to chronic absenteeism, one of the pandemic’s most lasting impacts, as a profound innovation in the way schools communicate with parents. The company, he boasted, was a smart bet. 

“Being this primary conduit of communication is a terrific business opportunity, and it’s how AllHere will thrive in the years to come,” wrote Parker, who declined to comment for this story.

AllHere’s latest financial woes aren’t the first time that Smith-Griffin felt the pressure of a company mission gone wrong. Shortly after Boston-based AllHere emerged from a startup incubator at Harvard University, where Smith-Griffin was enrolled, its technological approach to bolster student attendance fell flat. 

“The first iteration of AllHere failed spectacularly,” Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, said in a 2017 interview on . “And it was one of the best things that could have happened to us.” 

In response to those early startup woes, Smith-Griffin changed course. She ditched her initial idea of using data to create lists for teachers of the students most likely to become chronically absent — a service that educators told her wasn’t much help — and pivoted to an automated text messaging service that sent personally tailored “nudges” to parents in the guise of a friendly chatbot. 

The $6 million chatbot that it would eventually build for L.A. schools — an animated sun named “Ed” meant to interact individually with and accelerate the learning of some 540,000 students — was in a different class entirely. AllHere, according to a former employee-turned-whistleblower, put students’ personal information at risk by taking shortcuts to meet the school district’s ambitious demands.

Meanwhile, AllHere’s investors publicly touted that it was the infusion of cash and leadership from altruistically inclined impact firms that transformed the company from one with an under-baked product to an AI innovator in the K-12 space. An examination of these firms’ outsized role suggests that AllHere’s venture-influenced embrace of artificial intelligence may have led it to fail once again — this time on a much grander scale. 

‘Disturbed by the allegations’ 

Reached by phone, four members of the company’s board of directors — including several with extensive and well-known education policy credentials — declined to comment for this story. In fact, much of the information about AllHere’s unraveling has been filtered through an unusual channel: The school district it left in a lurch. 

It was an L.A. Unified district spokesperson who first told news outlets that Smith-Griffin was no longer with AllHere and that the company was up for sale. Smith-Griffin, who records show lives in North Carolina, couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Investigators with the district’s independent inspector general’s office have launched an inquiry into the former AllHere executive’s claims that the company misused L.A. students’ personal data and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho last week proposed a task force to find out what went wrong. The inquiry, Carvalho said, will dig into the district’s procurement process and claims the chatbot handled students’ personal information in ways that violated district policy and basic data privacy principles. 

“I’m disturbed by the allegations,” Carvalho with the Los Angeles Times while speaking simultaneously on AllHere’s behalf. 

“We’ve had — our team has had — conversations with the company about those allegations,” Carvalho said. “The company has denied those allegations.” 

The task force, an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement, will create a framework for the district to “continue leveraging technology responsibly.” AllHere, which has been paid about $3 million so far, won the five-year contract after a competitive bidding process, the spokesperson said, and was selected “because it was most aligned” with the district’s vision for the chatbot and “was an established educational technology company focused on personalized and interactive AI solutions to improve student attendance.” 

‘A truly amazing board’

After the pandemic shuttered in-person learning nationally and student absences surged to unprecedented highs, Rethink Education, an ed tech-focused impact investment firm that provided early capital to AllHere, saw an opening. A by Impact Capital Managers says that Rethink provided the company with more than cash flow; it oversaw a “strategic transition,” specifically “a pivot towards an AI chatbot” that observers would later say was outside the scope of AllHere’s capabilities.

Rethink Education partner Ebony Brown offered AllHere critical connections to influential education players and helped it build “a truly amazing board” of directors, by Matt Greenfield, Rethink’s managing partner. She successfully recruited Jeff Livingston, a at McGraw-Hill Education and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , and Janice Jackson, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. 

“Ebony got introductions to several former superintendents of large districts, secured a meeting with Janice, and delivered an impassioned and ultimately successful pitch,” Greenfield wrote. The addition of Livingston and Jackson to the AllHere board was strategic, according to the case study, noting that they “have been instrumental in securing deals with major school districts and in developing a customer acquisition playbook to expand the company’s nationwide presence.” 

The extent to which board members’ helped AllHere land the LAUSD contract is unclear. Livingston and Jackson both declined to provide comment for this story. Greenfield and Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Brown, who also gained a seat on AllHere’s board, then sought to improve the company’s visibility, helping Smith-Griffin “secure a spot as the featured entrepreneur” on the for education leaders in 2021. A year later, Smith-Griffin served as alongside Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at the investment company GSV Ventures. 

GSV is heavily involved in education technology companies. In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the district’s buzzed-about chatbot in San Diego co-hosted by the venture firm and Arizona State University.

“The Forbes profile,” Greenfield’s post notes, “in turn led to inbound interest from venture capitalists, multiple term sheets [documents outlining the terms under which VCs fund startups] and a round” of investments totaling more than $8 million. 

On June 12, just before AllHere announced that it had furloughed most of its staff, the company got bad news from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Officials for a chatbot that addressed student absenteeism, finding that the tool didn’t present eligible technological advancements. 

The office wrote: “No inventive concept exists sufficient to transform the abstract idea of ‘student monitoring’ into a patent-eligible application of that idea.” 

Luis’s mother said the boy stopped socializing after his fourth grade class at his Los Angeles Unified school in Southeast L.A. shut down. She asked that the family not be identified in order to protect her son. 

He began having behavioral issues. He fell way behind in his academics — all after not receiving his mandated services of behavior, speech, and occupational therapies or his one-on-one aid over Zoom. 

Now back in school, Luis needs two years of missed services to catch up, said his mother.

“He needs these services again as soon as possible,” said Luis’s mother.  “I have no other options.” 

Hopefully, Luis will soon get the services he needs. 

LAUSD agreed to provide these services to Luis and more than 66,000 district students with disabilities in with the federal Office of Civil Rights after an investigation revealed students were not provided federally-mandated services during the pandemic.

The broadly-worded nine page agreement calls for the district to create a plan providing students the compensatory services, staff training and ongoing communication with parents on the plan’s status. 

Concerned about how the district’s Special Education Division will implement the services, disability rights lawyers, advocates and parents offered ideas on what LAUSD needs to provide to the students — including mental health services, more special education teachers, more staff training, better transportation to services and a bigger special education budget.

“I’m concerned [the resolution] is a way for the district to look compliant without fixing root issues,” said Jill Rowland, Education Program Director at the Alliance for Children’s Rights, which advocates for the rights of foster care youth in schools in California.  

“We need transportation support to get kids to the providers at centers outside of their schools,” she said. “We need translation services to help students and families who don’t speak fluent English. There’s also already such a shortage of staff, especially for students with disabilities.”

The agreement also calls for L.A. Unified to provide ‘compensatory services’ to students with disabilities, which means the district has acknowledged claims they denied a free and appropriate public education to some students during the pandemic. 

L.A. special education lawyer Chris Eisenberg said the resolution is another tool for lawyers, advocates, and parents to use in holding LAUSD accountable to provide students’ services. 

“I’m hoping that this admission from LAUSD will push them in a better direction,” said Eisenberg “With people breathing down their necks, now they will have to be held accountable to the students.” 

LAUSD’s severe teacher shortage is . The number of students with disabilities in California has been increasing since 2015 and the special education teacher shortage has gotten worse each year. As of 2021, students with disabilities make up 13% of the district’s population.

Special education services are also one of the biggest costs for the district. In 2016, the cost to educate students with disabilities was than that of a general education student. 

“The district has always been concerned with spending too much on special education,” said Valerie Vanaman, a special education attorney who has been critical of the district’s treatment of these students during the pandemic. 

Advocates and parents say they want more funds allocated to special education services from the influx of money that the district received for pandemic relief.

Luis’ mom, who said she’s been disappointed with the quality of the services provided to her son, wants aids, therapists, teachers, and tutors that understand her son’s particular issues.

“He deserves better services and a better life than what they’re offering,” said the mom. “I’ve lost faith in them.”

Lisa Barros Mosko, a parent who was director of Speak Up, an L.A. special education advocacy group when the nonprofit produced showing said their children weren’t getting services during the pandemic, said there had been an ongoing problem with services for years. 

“The pandemic really shed light on the inequities and lack of services for kids with disabilities in the district.”

Advocates and parents also said they were concerned about which officials from L.A. Unified will supervise the district’s work on the resolution. They are concerned that it will be the same leadership that denied their children services during the pandemic. 

“How can we trust the same people who neglected our children’s needs in the first place?” Mosko said. “I think we need completely new leadership in order to rebuild trust.”

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said in a statement the district has agreed to “critical components” such as staff training and ongoing outreach to special education parents and advocates. 

“L.A. Unified remains dedicated to helping all students, including students with disabilities, recover from the pandemic and achieve their educational goals,” the spokesperson said.

Investigators with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general’s office conducted a video interview with Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, after he told ����Ӱ�� his former employer’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

Whiteley told ����Ӱ�� he had alerted the school district, the IG’s office and state education officials earlier to the data privacy problems with Ed but got no response. His meeting with investigators occurred July 2, one day after ����Ӱ�� published its story outlining Whiteley’s allegations, including that the chatbot put students’ personally identifiable information at risk of getting hacked by including it in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant; sharing it with other third-party companies unnecessarily and processing prompts on offshore servers in violation of district student privacy rules. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ�� this week, Whiteley said the officials from the district’s inspector general’s office “were definitely interested in what I had to say,” as speculation swirls about the future of Ed, its ed tech creator AllHere and broader education investments in artificial intelligence. 

“It felt like they were after the truth,” Whiteley said, adding, “I’m certain that they were surprised about how bad [students’ personal information] was being handled.”

To generate responses to even mundane prompts, Whiteley said, the chatbot processed the personal information for all students in a household. If a mother with 10 children asked the chatbot a question about her youngest son’s class schedule, for example, the tool processed data about all of her children to generate a response. 

“It’s just sad and crazy,” he said.

The inspector general’s office directed ����Ӱ��’s request for comment to a district spokesperson, who declined to comment or respond to questions involving the inquiry.

While the conversation centered primarily on technical aspects related to the company’s data security protocols, Whiteley said investigators probed him on his personal experiences with AllHere, which he described as being abusive, and its finances.

Whiteley was laid off from AllHere in April. Two months later, a notice posted to the said a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position” and the LAUSD spokesperson said company co-founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin had left. The former Boston teacher and Harvard graduate was successful in raising $12 million in venture capital for AllHere and appeared with L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at ed tech conferences and other events throughout the spring touting the heavily publicized AI tool they partnered to create.

Just weeks ago, Carvalho spoke publicly about how the project had put L.A. out in front as school districts and ed tech companies nationally race to follow the lead of generative artificial intelligence pioneers like ChatGPT. But the school chief’s superlative language around what Ed could do on an individualized basis with 540,000 students had some industry observers and AI experts speculating it was destined to fail.

The chatbot was supposed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replied “using simple language a third grader could understand” to help students and parents supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues. What they were given, Whiteley charges, was a student privacy nightmare. 

Smith-Griffin recently deactivated her LinkedIn page and has not surfaced since her company went into apparent free fall. Attempts to reach AllHere for comment were unsuccessful and parts of the company website have gone dark. LAUSD said earlier that AllHere is for sale and that several companies are interested in acquiring it.

The district has already paid AllHere $3 million to build the chatbot and “a fully-integrated portal” that gave students and parents access to information and resources in a single location, the district spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday, and “was surprised by the financial disruption to AllHere.” 

AllHere’s collapse represents a stunning fall from grace for a company that was named among the world’s top education technology companies by Time Magazine just months earlier. Scrutiny of AllHere intensified when Whiteley became a whistleblower. He said he turned to the press because his concerns, which he shared first with AllHere executives and the school district, had been ignored.

Whitely shared source code with ����Ӱ�� which showed that students’ information had been processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, were sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

‘How are smaller districts going to do this?’

What district leaders failed to do as they heralded their new tool, Whiteley said, is conduct sufficient audits. As L.A. — and school systems nationwide — contract with a laundry list of tech vendors, he said it’s imperative that they understand how third-party companies use students’ information. 

“If the second-biggest district can’t audit their [personally identifiable information] on new or interesting products and can’t do security audits on external sources, how are smaller districts going to do this?” he asked.

Over the last several weeks, the district’s official position on Ed has appeared to shift. In late June when the district spokesperson said that several companies were “interested in acquiring Allhere,” they also said its predecessor would “continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.” In its initial response to Whiteley’s allegations published July 1, the spokesperson said that education officials would “take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

In in the Los Angeles Times, a district spokesperson said the chatbot had been unplugged on June 14. ����Ӱ�� asked the spokesperson to provide documentation showing the tool was disabled last month but didn’t get a response. 

Even after June 14, Carvalho continued to boast publicly about LAUSD’s foray into generative AI and what he described with third-party vendors. 

On Tuesday, the district spokesperson told ����Ӱ�� that the online portal — even without a chatty, animated sun — “will continue regardless of the outcome with AllHere.” In fact, the project could become a source of district revenue. Under the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, which was obtained by ����Ӱ��, the chatbot is the property of the school district, which was set to receive 2% in royalty payments from AllHere “should other school districts seek to use the tool to benefit their families and students.” 

In the statement Tuesday, the district spokesperson said that officials chose to “temporarily disable the chatbot” amid AllHere’s uncertainty and that it would “only be restored when the human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.” 

Whiteley agreed that the district could maintain the student information dashboard without the chatbot and, similarly, that another firm could buy what remains of AllHere. He was skeptical, however, that Ed the chatbot would live another day because “it’s broken”

“The name AllHere,” he said, “I think is dead.”

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles. 

Those emails were sent shortly before ����Ӱ�� first reported last week that AllHere, with in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job. 

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April. 

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told ����Ӱ��. 

“When AllHere started doing the work for LAUSD, that’s when, to me, all of the data privacy issues started popping up,” Whiteley said in an interview last week. The problem, he said, came down to a company in over its head and one that “was almost always on fire” in terms of its operations and management. LAUSD’s chatbot was unlike anything it had ever built before and — given the company’s precarious state — could be its last. 

If AllHere was in chaos and its bespoke chatbot beset by porous data practices, Carvalho was portraying the opposite. One day before ����Ӱ�� broke the news of the company turmoil and Smith-Griffin’s departure, spotlighted the schools chief at a Denver conference talking about how adroitly LAUSD managed its ed tech vendor relationships — “We force them to all play in the same sandbox” — while ensuring that “protecting data privacy is a top priority.”

In a statement on Friday, a district spokesperson said the school system “takes these concerns seriously and will continue to take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

“Pursuant to contract and applicable law, AllHere is not authorized to store student data outside the United States without prior written consent from the District,” the statement continued. “Any student data belonging to the District and residing in the Ed platform will continue to be subject to the same privacy and data security protections, regardless of what happens to AllHere as a company.” 

A district spokesperson, in response to earlier questioning from ����Ӱ�� last week, said it was informed that Smith-Griffin was no longer with the company and that several businesses “are interested in acquiring AllHere.” Meanwhile Ed, the spokesperson said, “belongs to Los Angeles Unified and is for Los Angeles Unified.”

Officials in the inspector general’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The state education department “does not directly oversee the use of AI programs in schools or have the authority to decide which programs a district can utilize,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

It’s a radical turn of events for AllHere and the AI tool it markets as a “learning acceleration platform,” which were all the buzz just a few months ago. In April, Time Magazine education technology companies. That same month, Inc. Magazine dubbed Smith-Griffin in artificial intelligence in its Female Founders 250 list. 

Joanna Smith-Griffin, Founder and CEO of AllHere, joins on stage as he delivers the keynote at on Unlocking the Potential of AI. With Ed, students receive personalized support to help them excel in school.

— allherek12 (@allherek12)

Ed has been similarly blessed with celebrity treatment. 

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you,” Carvalho said at ASU+GSV. “Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

Smith-Griffin, who graduated from the Miami school district that Carvalho once led before going onto Harvard, couldn’t be reached for comment. Smith-Griffin’s LinkedIn page was recently deactivated and parts of the company website have gone dark. Attempts to reach AllHere were also unsuccessful.

‘The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating’

Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, founded AllHere in 2016. Since then, the company has primarily provided schools with a text messaging system that facilitates communication between parents and educators. , the tool relies on attendance data and other information to deliver customized, text-based “nudges.” 

The work that AllHere provided the Los Angeles school district, Whiteley said, was on a whole different level — and the company wasn’t prepared to meet the demand and lacked expertise in data security. In L.A., AllHere operated as a consultant rather than a tech firm that was building its own product, according to its contract with LAUSD obtained by ����Ӱ��. Ultimately, the district retained rights to the chatbot, according to the agreement, but AllHere was contractually obligated to “comply with the district information security policies.” 

��The contract notes that the chatbot would be “trained to detect any confidential or sensitive information” and to discourage parents and students from sharing with it any personal details. But the chatbot’s decision to share and process students’ individual information, Whiteley said, was outside of families’ control.��

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including , an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the stored on , a cloud storage company. , the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction. 

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules. 

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with ����Ӱ�� outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information. 

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.” 

“The issue is we’re sending data overseas, we’re sending too much data, and then the data were being logged by third parties,” he said, in violation of the district’s data use agreement. “The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating. It cheated by not doing things right the first time.”

In a 2017 policy bulletin, the district notes that all sensitive information “needs to be handled in a secure way that protects privacy,” and that contractors cannot disclose information to other parties without parental consent. A second policy bulletin, from April, outlines the district’s authorized use guidelines for artificial intelligence, which notes that officials, “Shall not share any confidential, sensitive, privileged or private information when using, prompting or communicating with any tools.” It’s important to refrain from using sensitive information in prompts, the policy notes, because AI tools “take whatever users enter into a prompt and incorporate it into their systems/knowledge base for other users.” 

“Well, that’s what AllHere was doing,” Whiteley said. 

‘Acid is dangerous’

Whiteley’s revelations present LAUSD with its third student data security debacle in the last month. In mid-June, a threat actor known as “Sp1d3r” began to sell for $150,000 a trove of data it claimed to have stolen from the Los Angeles district on Breach Forums, a dark web marketplace. LAUSD Bloomberg that the compromised data had been stored by one of its third-party vendors on the cloud storage company Snowflake, the repository for the district’s Whole Child Integrated Data. The Snowflake data breach may be one of the largest in history. The threat actor claims that the L.A. schools data in its possession include student medical records, disability information, disciplinary details and parent login credentials. 

The chatbot interacted with data stored by Snowflake, according to the district’s contract with AllHere, though any connection between AllHere and the Snowflake data breach is unknown. 

In its statement Friday, the district spokesperson said an ongoing investigation has “revealed no connection between AllHere or the Ed platform and the Snowflake incident.” The spokesperson said there was no “direct integration” between Whole Child and AllHere and that Whole Child data was processed internally before being directed to AllHere.

The contract between AllHere and the district, however, notes that the tool should “seamlessly integrate” with the Whole Child Integrated Data “to receive updated student data regarding attendance, student grades, student testing data, parent contact information and demographics.”

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web. 

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.” 

L.A. parents and students, we want to hear from you.  using AllHere’s Ed:

A Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson confirmed they’re investigating a listing on a notorious dark web marketplace, posted Thursday by a user named “The Satanic Cloud,” which seeks $1,000 in exchange for what they claim is a trove of more than 24 million records. The development comes nearly two years after the district fell victim to a ransomware attack that led to a widespread leak of sensitive student records, some dating back years. 

Simultaneously, federal officials were citing that earlier ransomware attack in L.A. and subsequent breaches, with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel noting that they’ve become a growing scourge for districts of all sizes.

“School districts as large as Los Angeles Unified in California and as small as St. Landry Parish in Louisiana were the target of cyberattacks,” Rosenworcel said, adding that these events lead to real-world learning disruptions and sometimes millions in district recovery costs. “This situation is complex, but the vulnerabilities in the networks that we use in our nation’s schools and libraries are real and growing.”

“So today, we’re going to do something about it,” she said.

The five-person FCC voted 3-2 to approve the pilot, which will provide firewalls and other cybersecurity services to eligible school districts and libraries over a three-year period. While the pilot aims to study how federal funds can be deployed to bolster the defenses of these vulnerable targets, some have criticized the initiative for being too little, too late. When Rosenworcel first outlined the proposal in July, education stakeholders demanded a more urgent and substantive federal response.

Districts selected to participate in the newly approved pilot will receive a minimum of $15,000 for approved services and the commission aims to “provide funding to as many schools and school districts as possible,” it . While the funding “will not, by itself, be sufficient to fund all of the school’s cybersecurity needs,” the fact sheet notes, the commission seeks to ensure that “each participating school will receive funding to prioritize implementation of solutions within one major technological category.”

The Satanic Cloud, which posted the most recent batch of LAUSD data, told ����Ӱ�� it’s entirely separate from what was stolen in the September 2022 ransomware attack on the nation’s second-largest school district. An executive at a leading threat intelligence company said his team suspects the data did originate from the earlier event.

The Los Angeles district is aware of the threat actor’s claims, a spokesperson told ����Ӱ�� in an email Thursday, and “is investigating the claim and engaging with law enforcement to investigate and respond to the incident.”

‘It’s definitely sensitive data’

In an investigation last year, ����Ӱ�� found that thousands of L.A. students’ psychological evaluations had been leaked online after cybercriminals levied a ransomware attack on the system. The district had categorically denied that the mental health records had been compromised, but within hours of the story, acknowledged that they had.��

Just last month, a joint investigation by ����Ӱ�� and The Acadiana Advocate revealed that officials at the 12,000-student St. Landry Parish School Board, located some 63 miles west of Baton Rouge, waited five months after a ransomware attack to inform data breach victims that their sensitive information had been compromised. The notice came after an earlier investigation by the news outlets uncovered that personally identifiable student, employee and business records had been exposed, despite the district’s assertion otherwise, and that St. Landry had likely violated the state’s breath notification law. Within hours of the first story publishing, the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office issued a notification warning to the district. 

The latest Los Angeles files were listed Thursday on the dark web marketplace BreachForums, briefly last month after it came under the control of federal law enforcement officials. The Federal Bureau of Investigation first targeted BreachForums in March 2023 when it, 20-year-old Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, at his home in Peekskill, New York. At the time, BreachForums was among the largest hacker forums and claimed more than 340,000 users. 

A sample file included in the L. A. listing is a spreadsheet with the names, student identification numbers and other demographic information of more than 1,000 students and their parents. Data disclose students who receive special education services, their addresses and their home telephone numbers. A list of file names suggest the records include similar information about teachers. 

Reached for comment through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, the BreachForums user who listed the Los Angeles data told ����Ӱ�� “there is no connections” to the previous ransomware attack. The breach, the threat actor said, originated via the Amazon Relational Database Service, which allows businesses to create cloud-based databases. The service has been the that led to the public disclosure of troves of sensitive information. 

Kaustubh Medhe, the vice president of research and threat intelligence at the threat intelligence company Cyble, said the latest threat actor has a history of engaging in discussions about cryptocurrency scams on Telegram but this is the first time they’ve sought to sell stolen data. Cyble’s research team, he told ����Ӱ��, sees “a high likelihood” that the data was sourced from files exposed in the earlier ransomware attack. 

“Historically, we have seen this kind of activity where old data leaks are recirculated on dark web forums by different actors,” Medhe said. Either way, Medhe said it’s incumbent on district officials to take urgent action. The files, he said, could be useful for “some kind of profiling or some kind of targeted phishing activity.

“It’s definitely sensitive data, for sure,” he said, adding that district officials should analyze the sample data set available online and confirm if the records align with their internal databases and, perhaps, those stolen in 2022. “They would need to do a thorough incident response and investigation to rule out the possibility of a new breach.” 

‘An important step forward’

During Thursday’s FCC meeting, Commissioner Anna Gomez said the pilot program was an issue of educational equity. She cited a federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency , which noted that as ransomware attacks and data breaches at K-12 districts have surged in the last decade, districts with limited cybersecurity capabilities and vast resource constraints have been left most vulnerable. Connectivity, she said, is “essential for education in the 21st century.”

“Technology and high-speed internet access opens doors and unbounded opportunity for those who have it,” Gomez said. “Unfortunately, our increasingly digital world also creates opportunities for malicious actors.” 

Faced with a growing number of cyberattacks, educators have for years s with money from the federal E-rate program, which offers funding to most public schools and libraries nationwide to make broadband services more affordable. It’s a move that more than 1,100 school districts endorsed in a joint 2022 letter — but one the commission declined to adopt. In a press release, the commission said the pilot was kept separate “to ensure gains in enhanced cybersecurity do not undermine E-rate’s success in connecting schools and libraries and promoting digital equity.” The pilot will be allocated through the Universal Service Fund, which was created to subsidize telephone services for low-income households. 

In , the American Library Association, Common Sense Media, the Consortium for School Networking and other groups said the selection process for eligible schools and libraries was unclear and could confuse applicants. On Thursday, the library association nonetheless expressed its support.��

“The FCC’s decision today to create a cybersecurity pilot is an important step forward for our nation’s libraries and library workers, too many of whom face escalating costs to secure their institution’s systems and data,” President Emily Drabinski said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our call for a long-term funding mechanism that will ensure libraries can continue to offer the access and information their communities rely on.”

Among the pilot program’s critics is school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who told ����Ӱ�� that many school districts lack sufficient cybersecurity expertise and, as a result, the advanced tools that the pilot seeks to provide may not be “a good fit for school systems with scarce capacity.”

“There’s no argument that schools need support,” said Levin, the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. But the FCC’s “techno-solutions point of view to the problem,” he said, is far too small to make a meaningful impact and could instead prompt a vendor marketing surge that “may end up convincing some [schools] to buy solutions that, frankly, they don’t need.” 

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has 45 days to draft a policy that makes co-location — as the arrangement is called — off limits at schools that serve low-performing, minority and poor students.

Charter school advocates lobbied hard against the plan, arguing that it unnecessarily pits the two sectors against each other and violates a state law requiring school systems to provide classrooms for both charter and district students. 

The state’s charter school association is threatening legal action. 

“We will not back down from protecting the rights of students,” said Keith Dell’Aquila, an advocate for the California Charter Schools Association in the greater Los Angeles area. “The board is bringing forward this notion that charter school students only deserve the leftovers. That’s not what the law says.”

While conflict over co-location has flared up in , the tug-of-war over facilities has been most intense in Los Angeles, which is home to almost a quarter of the state’s 1,285 charters. The arrangement has offered some benefits to districts. When voters passed in 2000, the measure made it easier to pass local school construction bonds by lowering the percentage of yes votes needed from two-thirds to 55%. That compromise seems less relevant now to board members and district staff who argue that charters squeeze district students out of space they need for everything from special education therapy rooms to clothing closets.

“There should be a sensible and reasonable way of looking at co-locations that makes it much less likely that schools that are struggling to raise student achievement will be interfered with,” board president Jackie Goldberg, who wrote the resolution with board member Rocio Rivas, said during Tuesday’s meeting. The resolution has support from United Teachers Los Angeles, and Rivas — a union-backed board member — promised to address the facility-sharing issue last year during her campaign.

Rivas and Goldberg want Carvalho to write a policy preventing co-location at schools that fall into three school improvement categories — the , which provides extra staff and emphasizes culturally relevant curriculum; the 100 low-performing “priority” schools, and community schools, which offer services for families like food pantries and counseling services. These schools “have enough on their plate,” said Goldberg, who argues that co-location hurts enrollment because charters lure families away from district schools.

, a special education teacher running to replace Goldberg, who is retiring from the board, said co-location requires schools to relinquish classrooms often used for meetings with parents or restorative justice programs. 

“This resolution protects all of the investments that the district has made in bringing innovative programs to our schools,” she told the board.

Board Member George McKenna, is also retiring from the board, which means the charter-district conflict would likely carry over into next year’s election.

‘Detrimental to families’

Those who oppose the resolution say it could actually lead to more shared facilities. If a charter school has to vacate its space, it might have to split its grades up across multiple sites. That’s what worries David Garner, the principal of Magnolia Science Academy-2, a charter.

“We believe that this resolution is detrimental to families — most importantly, high-need families,” he told ����Ӱ��. Parents who depend on public transportation, he said, might not be able to send their children to his school if it has to relocate.

Magnolia Science Academy-2, part of the Magnolia Public Schools network, is currently one of seven schools — four district schools and three charters — on the same property in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles County. Despite limited use of athletic facilities and other common areas, he said he has good relationships with administrators of the other schools. One of his daughters even attended Daniel Pearl Magnet High School, a district facility on the same campus.

“I’ve been on both sides of the district and charter space,” he said. “I don’t care about the politics; I just care about what the kids and the families want.” 

Goldberg said the vote won’t disrupt the 52 current co-location sites. But Dell’Aquila isn’t convinced, and said it will depend on how Carvalho writes the policy. The association wants the district to offer co-located charters long-term facility agreements to create more stability for staff and families.

The meeting underscored long-standing confusion over which spaces are available to charters. Goldberg said she’s always understood the law to say that charters could take over any empty classroom not assigned to a certified teacher with a roster of students. That interpretation would favor charter schools because it would make more rooms used for a variety of purposes, including the arts, STEM or discipline programs, up for grabs.

But José Cole-Gutiérrez, who runs the district’s charter school division, said that was a district practice and not written into state law. McKenna added that no one challenged it while charter-friendly board members were in the majority.

Rivas called the revelation an “injustice” that has disadvantaged district schools for years.

Carvalho, meanwhile, said ambiguity over the issue has only contributed to the conflict.

The superintendent’s challenge is to write a policy that protects the district from litigation. The charter association has sued the district three times over facility arrangements and in a Tuesday letter, accused the district of having a “sordid history of undermining and not complying” with the law. 

The resolution has been unpopular, not just with charter supporters, but also among organizations that work closely with the district. 

Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposed the resolution along with 25 other organizations, said she understands the challenges on both sides. It’s difficult for district schools to plan for growth because they don’t know which classrooms they might have to give up. Charters, meanwhile, have to frequently relocate and struggle to find “normal” office and cafeteria space. 

“Clearly, there’s a need for a better policy,” she said. But she called Tuesday’s resolution a “failure-to-launch effort” because it still favors district schools. Ultimately, she said, it will be difficult to implement anything that completely resolves the dispute.

“There’s no uniform way that all of these campuses use their space. Every school prioritizes their space differently,” she said. “I don’t know how a school board can make these decisions.”

Such unrelenting attacks — this time against a Bergen County, New Jersey, district —are what brought the first lady as well as some 200 federal cybersecurity officials, school district leaders and tech company executives together for a first-ever White House summit on strengthening school district defenses.

“It’s going to take all of us,” Biden said. 

The breaches have grinded school technology systems nationwide “to a halt,” the first lady said at the East Room gathering, forcing some districts to cancel classes as reams of sensitive student, parent and educator data were stolen and leaked online. In March, a Medusa attack on Minneapolis Public Schools exposed records about child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and campus physical security details. 

“If we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data,” she said. “Every student deserves the opportunity to see a school counselor when they’re struggling and not worry that these conversations will be shared with the world.”

Among the new strategies announced Tuesday is the creation of a Government Coordinating Council that will provide “formal, ongoing collaboration” between all levels of government and school districts to prepare for and respond to data breaches. Officials with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency would provide individualized assessments and cybersecurity training to 300 K-12 education entities over the next year. 

Tuesday’s cybersecurity event didn’t come with the announcement of any new federal regulations but was instead positioned as the first step in a new-found federal urgency around cybersecurity in schools. The Federal Communications Commission in late July proposed a $200 million pilot program to enhance cybersecurity in schools and libraries that still needs to be approved.

“When schools face cyber attacks, the impacts can be huge,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said. “Let’s be clear, we need to be taking these cyber attacks on schools as seriously as we do the physical attacks on critical infrastructure.”

In released by the Education Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the agencies recommended that school districts implement multi-factor authentication, enforce minimum password strength standards and ensure software is kept up to date. They should also consider moving on-premises information technology services to cloud-based systems. 

“Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who wish to do us harm,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “They have proven their willingness to steal and leak such private student information as psychiatric hospitalizations, home struggles and suicide attempts. Do not wait until the crisis comes to start preparing.” 

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who attended the summit, said it was a positive development to see the federal government, and the Education Department in particular, focus on the effects of ransomware on schools. The Education Department has been “mostly absent from these conversations” in the past, said the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange.

Meanwhile, several companies, including education technology vendors, unveiled new commitments to help facilitate digital security in schools. Amazon Web Services announced a new $20 million grant program to bolster K-12 school cybersecurity while Cloudflare committed to providing free cybersecurity tools to small districts with 2,500 or fewer students. 

Schools are now the single leading target for hackers, outpacing health care, technology, financial services and manufacturing industries, according to a global survey of IT professionals released last month by the British cybersecurity company Sophos.

In the U.S. school district cyber attacks reached a record high of 37 in the month of June alone, , but Tuesday’s event centered largely on a crisis that unfolded in Los Angeles nearly a year ago. 

Last September, a notorious ransomware group carried out an attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, that resulted in some 500 gigabytes of district data being published to the Russian-speaking group’s dark-web leak site. 

A major theme of the White House summit was the politically connected superintendent’s swift outreach to federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That collaboration, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and federal education officials said, set into motion a response plan that mitigated the attack, limited the number of files breached and avoided class cancellations. 

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called it “the Harvard Business School case study on how to get this right.” 

Other school districts should respond similarly, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. When school leaders suspect they’ve been the target of an attack, he said, it’s incumbent that they “please call us immediately.” In L.A.’s case, the FBI was able to have a team of agents on the ground in less than 24 hours, he said, enabling them to freeze vulnerable accounts and secure sensitive information that had been sought out by the threat actors. 

That coordinated response didn’t prevent some 2,000 current and former students’ highly sensitive psychological evaluations from being leaked on the dark web, an investigation by ����Ӱ�� revealed. Carvalho initially denied that such records were exposed in the attack, but the district acknowledged they were after the story was published. The district also initially said the attack began and ended on Sept. 3 — the Saturday of Labor Day weekend — but a follow-up investigation determined that an intrusion began as early as July 31, the .

While Carvalho didn’t comment Tuesday on the leak of sensitive psychological information, he said the number of stolen files “could have been much worse,” adding that the hackers “encrypted and exfiltrated very little thanks to our actions.” Among the actions they didn’t take, the schools chief said, was paying the undisclosed ransom demand because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”