The Brief

Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed record levels of public funding for K-12 schools, but in several Southern California school districts declining enrollment and rising costs may still lead to cuts next school year.

The budget proposal allocates $125.5 billion, the highest-ever level, according to Newsom. That’s $20,427 per student.

“There's an increase in per pupil funding, but I wouldn't be fooled into thinking that those numbers indicate that schools really have more money to work with than in previous years,” said California School Boards Association spokesperson Troy Flint. The organization represents almost 1,000 districts and county offices of education statewide.

That’s because declining enrollment combined with rising teacher salaries, un-funded state mandates and other increased costs are squeezing local school districts.

LAist spoke to Flint and several other school finance experts to understand the financial challenges California districts face as they create their spending plans for next school year.

How does the state fund school districts?

The majority of the state’s general fund comes from personal income, sales tax and corporation tax revenue.

“That's great when the economy is good and state revenues are growing, and it's trickier when the economy is bad and state revenues are small,” said USC education professor Lawrence Picus.

California law guarantees TK-12 schools and community colleges a minimum level of funding each year, usually about 40% of the state’s general fund. (Property tax is a local revenue source, and considered to be less volatile but with limited growth.)

The state provides a base amount of money multiplied by each student and there is additional funding for every low-income, English-language learner, unhoused or foster youth student in the district. This system is called the Local Control Funding Formula.

How does enrollment affect school funding?

Since California sets funding rates per student, it needs a way to count those students. This is average daily attendance — how many students show up for class each day.

Currently, fewer students are enrolling at schools throughout the state, particularly in areas with high costs of living like Los Angeles. Students who are enrolled are also missing more school compared to before the pandemic.

“The intuitive response is, ‘well, if you have declining enrollment, you have fewer students, you should need less money,’” Flint said. “But in practice it doesn't really work that way.”

That’s because a district may lose a few students from each class across several schools each year, which may not justify laying off staff or closing a campus.

California education law blunts the immediate impact of declining enrollment by calculating funding based on the highest of three attendance counts: current year, prior year, or the average of the three most recent years, but over time fewer students means a smaller multiplier for state funding.

Increasing costs

Michael Fine is CEO of Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), the California agency that supports public schools' financial and business practices. He estimated schools are experiencing an estimated 5-6% cost increase every year.

The sources of that increase can include an increase in sexual assault claims (and the ensuing legal costs), utilities and insurance costs.

California provides money toward these increased costs through the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). This year’s proposed COLA is a 2.41% increase, less than half the estimated increase districts are experiencing, Fine said.

“At the state, they can say we are fully funding our commitment to TK through 12 education,” Fine said. “But at the local level, it feels like things are constrained. It feels like a pinch or actually a reduction.”

Another factor is the push to increase educators’ salaries in light of California’s high cost of living.

This year unions representing teachers at 32 school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, are negotiating contracts under a unified platform called “We Can’t Wait.” The campaign has already led to one strike and negotiations have stalled in more than a dozen districts, including LAUSD.

Federal, state budget uncertainty

This year’s state revenue projection is higher than expected, in part because of high salaries tied to artificial intelligence, but there’s no guarantee the funding will last.

Alix Gallagher studies school finance at Policy Analysis for California (PACE) and said that because revenue is unpredictable, lawmakers often opt to fund short-term initiatives rather than make long-term commitments.

“Whatever positive effects we're seeing [from short-term funding] are not the types of positive effects we might see if our funding was more stable,” Gallagher said.

For example, this year there is $1 billion for community schools, $757 million to support learning recovery related to the COVID-19 pandemic and $22.9 million for schools damaged by the January 2025 wildfires in L.A. County.

The budget also includes a one-time $2.8 billion grant that can be used for a variety of purposes from filling in the funding gap left by declining enrollment to supporting teacher training.

“Many districts will use that to mitigate some of their struggles,” Fine said. “All it does is buy time.”

The federal government also provides some money for education, but it’s also unclear how that funding will change in the second year of the Trump Administration’s second term.

In 2025, there were cuts to migrant education, mental health, and some internet access programs, although the courts ordered the administration to restore funding to several programs including teacher-training and afterschool programs.

What’s next for California school funding?

Newsom will present a revised spending plan in May and California lawmakers have until June 15 to pass the state’s budget.

In the meantime, local school districts will begin crafting their own budgets based on the governor’s proposal.

Fine said district administrators and elected school boards will have to manage the financial consequences of declines in enrollment over time.

“They make the hard decisions, their boards make the difficult, hard decisions to make, cuts to services and programs,” Fine said.

How can I monitor my school district’s financial health?

School budget proposals should be presented at public meetings, often the school board, where elected leaders can ask questions and the public can weigh in.

Districts may also create a working group, often called a budget advisory committee, of staff, families, community members and students to come up with a plan to address the district's financial challenges.

One indicator of your school district’s financial health are interim reports due in December and March to the County Offices of Education. These reports show how and whether the district can meet its financial obligations for the current and two following years and are labeled:

• Positive, the district can meet its obligations
• Qualified, the district may not be able to meet its obligations
• Negative, the district cannot meet its obligations without changes

Two of Orange County’s 32 districts filed qualified reports in December— Cypress and Saddleback Valley Unified. Los Angeles County's 79 districts filed positive certifications, according to the County's Office of Education.

Take the escalator to the third floor of a sprawling plaza on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood and you’ll find Perse, a different kind of Persian restaurant.

Farinaz “Naz” Pirshirazi and her brother, Farbod, opened Perse in February to challenge how Angelenos think about Persian food.

Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran, and for decades, nearby Westwood’s “Tehrangeles” has defined what Persian dining looks like here: kabob, a few familiar stews and rice.

Frozen in time

When Pirshirazi arrived in Los Angeles in 2011, she was surprised by what she saw when it came to food from her home country.

“It felt like they took 18 foods of that wonderful 3,000-plus types of dishes that we have in Iran… and kind of copy-pasted,” she said.

Walking into some restaurants felt like stepping into the pre-revolution Iran she’d seen in old movies.

“For me it was time travel,” she said.

She isn’t the only one who sees it. Naz Deravian — author of the cookbook Bottom of the Pot and a New York Times Cooking contributor who has lived in L.A. since 1996 — said the city’s Iranian food scene “was getting a little stagnant” over the past two decades.

Buffet shelves in Perse’s main dining room hold old books and black-and-white photographs, a nod to the decor found in traditional Iranian homes.

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“I hate to say this because I love L.A. so much,” she said.

Deravian quickly added that the classic kabob houses still matter: “Those restaurants have their place in the food culture.”

Why it stalled

It's hard to pin down why Persian food here hasn’t evolved the way Korean or Mexican food has. Pirshirazi thinks immigrant parents steered their kids away from the restaurant business. Deravian points to geopolitics.

“We can’t leisurely travel to Iran and experience the food there,” she said. “It’s not like just going to Italy for the summer.”

Still, there are exceptions. Azizam, which started as a pop-up, opened in Silver Lake in 2024, and Atlanta-based Rumi’s Kitchen opened in Century City in September. But restaurants that break from the kabob-house format remain few and far between.

Mazandaran and her mom

Pirshirazi’s upbringing shaped Perse's menu. During the Iran-Iraq War, her parents left Tehran to escape the bombing and settled in Sari, in Mazandaran province along the Caspian Sea. There, neighbors taught her mother to cook northern Iranian food, rich in herbs, seafood, and duck, with pomegranate molasses and sour orange for acidity.

The family returned to Tehran in 1989, and Pirshirazi was born the next year. But northern cooking stayed on the table, and as a kid she realized her classmates had never heard of most of the food she ate every day. She also remembered childhood road trips across Iran, when her father often stopped at local grocers and asked about regional favorites.

Regional differences

That regional range shows up across Perse's menu. Start with the fesenjoon, a slow-simmered walnut-and-pomegranate stew from Gilan, on the Caspian Sea. The stew is silky with an earthy texture from the ground walnuts, and it balances sweet and tart almost like a tangy mole. On top sits duck confit, which adds a rich, gamey note to every bite.

From Tehran comes the Bazari koobideh, which Pirshirazi modeled on the version served at the city’s Grand Bazaar, where she says older men eat it four or five times a week.

The Bazari koobideh, modeled on the kabobs served at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, comes with a saffron egg yolk sauce that, stirred into the rice, turns it almost carbonara-like.

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“Whenever they have their koobideh, they crack an egg yolk on top of the rice, mixing everything together with some butter, some sumac, some lemon juice, and then it becomes like a carbonara pasta,” Pirshirazi said.

At Perse, a skewer of ground beef and lamb arrives over flatbread with saffron rice, a grilled tomato, sumac, and a ramekin of egg yolk sauce. The sauce is her answer to the raw yolk.

“You can literally close your eyes, and it feels like you are eating koobideh in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran,” she said.

Next steps

Starting next year, Pirshirazi is considering a monthly four-course dinner, limited to 20 to 24 guests, built around a single city or region, such as Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, or northern or southern Iran.

“I think that would be a wonderful, wonderful idea to showcase each region,” she said.

That’s the kind of focus Deravian hopes to see more of, comparing Persian cooking to Italian food, which evolved beyond red-sauce joints into more regional cooking.

“Iranian cuisine is hyper regional, and we haven’t gotten to that place yet,” she said.

Ultimately, she wants Persian food to be an everyday choice rather than something saved for special occasions.

“It just needs to become … a popular cuisine to think of on a Wednesday night,” she said. “‘Oh, let’s go out for Persian food.’”

Democrats are now poised to take control of Congress by wide margins — and a critical driver of their success has been voter fury about how the war in Iran has driven up the cost of fuel.

Before the war, about one fifth of the world's oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz. As the war throttled that waterway, the price of oil rose: A barrel of Brent crude cost about $70 in late February, spent months hovering around the $110 mark, and is now close to $95.

That's driven up the price of everything that's refined from crude. A gallon of gas costs $4.12 on average — about $1 higher than a year ago. The price of diesel hit a record high in September at $6.52, and while it's fallen a bit since then, a gallon remains about $2.50 higher than this time last year, according to AAA.

These soaring prices helped major oil companies rake in huge profits over the past two quarters, while making the cost of fuel at the pump uncomfortably high for drivers, and boosting the price of nearly everything in a nation that is heavily reliant on trucking.

So now that the midterm results are in, could drivers see lower gasoline and diesel prices anytime soon?

Not so fast, experts say. Here's why.

What could Democrats do?

Nothing yet — members of the new Congress won't be sworn in until January.

And once they are seated, U.S. legislators have limited powers to directly affect the price of oil, which is dictated by a complex global market.

In the run-up to the election, most of the actions taken by the federal government to lower fuel prices came through the White House, not Congress. Hoping to stave off losses for his party, President Trump tried to ease the cost of diesel by loosening federal rules on dyed diesel, which is normally used for farming. He also announced a deal that would bring more Russian diesel to global markets, including the U.S., by temporarily lifting sanctions. Neither of these did much to move the needle.

But the new Congressional Democrats will have the power to push the president to end the war in Iran, in part by making it harder to authorize new war spending. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-NY) told reporters on Wednesday that Democrats are intent on ending the war and bringing down the cost of living, saying that "relief is on the way."

"What a unified Democratic Congress can do is make escalation considerably more costly: both chambers can pass resolutions, attach conditions to war spending and hold back confirmations of key officials," Claudio Galimberti, chief economist of Rystad Energy, wrote in a market note to the media.

Still, the president has veto power over legislation, as well as executive powers. " President Trump still retains full discretionary authority over military strikes, over blockades and sanctions, licenses, and so on," said Jorge León,  head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, in an interview with NPR.

Trump has sent mixed messages about whether he wants to end or escalate the war. In the past few weeks, he warned Gulf Arab countries to prepare for a new military campaign after the midterms. The U.S. struck Qeshm, an island in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran uses to launch its own strikes, on Nov. 2.

But on election night, Trump told The New York Times that he knew voters were unhappy about gas prices. And the next day, as the extent of the election rout became clear, Vice President JD Vance posted on social media: "The reason we lost is the war."

If the war ends, when would prices fall?

Jaime Brito, executive director of refining and oil markets for Dow Jones Energy, says if there's a deal to end the war, traders could be very excited. Brito said they might look for formal announcements from both Iran and the U.S. that the strait is reopening, and that both sides are pulling back their military presence in the area.

If market traders are convinced the peace will last? "If that scenario happens, then I personally see crude prices dropping, you know, $15, $20 [a barrel] immediately, in the next two, three days from the announcement," he said.

But for gasoline and diesel prices to fall, too, oil would have to start moving again. Ships that have been running long, alternative routes to avoid passing through the Strait of Hormuz would have to return to their points of origin, and then resume their former routes through the strait. León pointed out, that could lead to traffic jams.

From there, that crude will still need to be refined and make its way onto the market.

In the most optimistic scenario, Brito said, it could take three months after a ceasefire or deal is announced for gasoline and diesel prices to hit their prewar levels.

León thinks it would take more like six months for the price of crude to hit its prewar level, and then another month or two for gasoline and diesel to follow. But that's assuming all goes well. And, both of them said, there could be hiccups along the way that stretch the recovery timeline out for up to a year after a deal is announced.

" I don't want to say this, but, you know, expensive gasoline prices could be a new normal," Brito said.

The X factors

The first big X factor: the war in Ukraine.

If Ukraine continues attacking Russian refineries, the price of diesel may not drop as precipitously as gasoline might. That's because Russia's refineries normally bring much of the world's diesel to global markets. Resuming traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will help lower the price of diesel — but it may take longer to reach its prewar level, León said.

Other scenarios could make for a less rosy picture, León said. U.S. refineries have been running above 90% capacity — what if they need emergency maintenance just at the moment when there's more oil ready to bring to market? Or, what if hostilities restart again, despite a deal?

Brito agreed. Before the end of the year, there could theoretically be new attacks in the strait, he wrote, "if the current administration sees it as a 'window' to complete unfinished tasks before the new Congressional layout takes their seat in January."

And there's also one more factor at play: The war has raised the price of moving oil itself around the world.

Since the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked off for so long, freight costs have gone up; ships carrying oil have had to skirt around the strait, take longer routes and use more fuel in the process. Plus, the price of insuring those ships has gone up, since transit around the strait has gotten so much riskier.

That means that even the oil industry is paying more to be in the oil business. And if hostilities persist and those freight costs remain high, that could keep the price of Brent crude elevated for longer.

"Bottom line," Brito wrote, for any hope of a return to normal prices, "you need to see a definitive end of the conflict."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Billionaire Leon Black on Wednesday filed a federal defamation lawsuit against California Rep. Robert Garcia for public comments the Democratic congressman made tying him to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The court filing comes less than two months after the House approved a resolution holding Black in contempt of Congress for defying the Oversight Committee’s subpoenas in its investigation into Epstein.

In June, Black appeared for a voluntary interview at the committee during which he denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking network.

Weeks later, Garcia said during a TV interview that “Leon Black is at the center of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” and that Black “was one of the last people to actually interact” with Epstein before he committed suicide in prison.

In addition, Garcia said that he had “talked to survivors that have credibly named Leon Black as someone that was involved in direct abuse of women and was directly involved” with Epstein.

Those statements were false and were made maliciously, Black asserts through his lawyers. The defamation lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York seeks a jury trial and $7.25 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

“Congressman Garcia’s knowing lies have caused real and significant ongoing harm to Mr. Black. His physical safety has been threatened, he has received a barrage of hateful calls, emails, and social media posts, and his business and philanthropic endeavors have suffered,” the filing states.

Garcia’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

In September, Garcia called the contempt resolution against Black “an important step toward justice and accountability.”

Black had refused to respond to subpoenas asking him to appear and to turn over any potential nondisclosure agreements involving the investigation into Epstein.

Black’s lawyers have repeatedly denounced the Oversight Committee’s pursuit of the former head of a private equity firm as an abuse of congressional power. They have maintained he had no knowledge of any of Epstein’s criminal conduct.

Black was among several prominent figures, including Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, who had been asked to appear as part of the Oversight Committee’s long-running probe of Epstein. Survivors of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse have told personal stories of being young women in a trafficking enterprise organized by Epstein and his colleague Ghislaine Maxwell.

Black co-founded the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and stepped down in 2021 during the fallout over his ties to Epstein.

Lawmakers have alleged that Black paid Epstein $180 million during their yearslong relationship.

A 2021 review commissioned by Apollo found that Black paid Epstein $158 million from 2012 to 2017, after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. The review said the payments were for “bona fide tax, estate planning and other related services.”

Chemical manufacturer 3M will pay up to $7.35 billion to settle lawsuits by people who say they were sickened by groundwater contamination from compounds used in firefighting foam and other consumer products.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based company announced the settlement Tuesday. It will pay the money over nine years to as many as 120,000 people who say they were harmed by exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS. The chemicals contaminated groundwater near military bases, airports and other locations where the foam was used to extinguish fires.

3M did not admit liability for the contamination under the agreement.

Called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to health problems including liver and immune system damage and some cancers. The chemicals are also used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products, including clothing and cookware.

3M chairman William Brown called the settlement a “significant milestone” that substantially reduces uncertainty from the litigation. The company previously reached settlements in other PFAS-related lawsuits, including a $450 million agreement with the state of New Jersey to settle claims of natural resource contamination and a deal to pay more than $10 billion to many U.S. public drinking water systems.

Other manufacturers, including DuPont de Nemours Inc. and spinoffs Chemours Co. and Corteva Inc., have agreed to settlements totaling more than $1 billion to resolve PFAS claims.

Fred Thompson, an attorney with the Motley Rice law firm that helped negotiate the 3M settlement for the plaintiffs, called it welcome news for “the thousands of victims who have sought answers and accountability for nearly a decade.”

He said in a news release that the plaintiffs urgently need help covering mounting medical bills and other costs.

Under the terms of the settlement, the payouts will begin with $50 million this year, followed by yearly payments of more than $1 billion each year from 2028 to 2033.

3M could make additional payments if enough plaintiffs participate. If too few sign on, 3M has the option to cancel the settlement and continue fighting the lawsuit.

Environmental activists say PFAS manufacturers knew about the chemicals’ health risks long before they became public. They noted that the same attributes that make the chemicals so valuable in many uses — resistance to breakdown — also make them hazardous to people.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set strict limits on PFAS in drinking water from public utilities and requires testing, but those rules do not apply to private wells.

A study that would help federal regulators understand which industries dump the forever chemicals with their wastewater has been stalled for two years, awaiting review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.