April 4, 2017 – Kyle Stokes of 89.3 KPCC reports on the complaint filed by Public Advocates against the Long Beach Unified School District. The complaint states that the district has misspent $40 million dollars in state funds that were intended for high-need students. Angelica Jongco, senior staff attorney at Public Advocates, is featured in the story:
District officials “have to provide the justification as to how spending in a district-wide way is still something that is going to provide some primary benefit to [high-need] students,” explained Jongco, a senior staff attorney for the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates — the firm that also represented groups who sued L.A. Unified over similar concerns.
A school district, Jongco said, needed to provide not only a narrative rationale for how spending supplemental and concentration dollars on district-wide items would benefit low-income kids, English learners and foster children; the district would need to specify a way to measure whether these high-needs students are benefitting. “And yes,” Jongco added, “not doing that is a violation of the law.”
For the full story, click here.
