The Brief

A public-interest law firm filed a lawsuit Thursday against the state of California, charging that its program to subsidize school construction perpetuates vast inequalities for students in low-wealth communities.

Public school students in some districts’ splendid campuses enjoy modern science labs, shaded outdoor spaces, and spacious auditoriums, while their peers in other districts attend rundown schools in deplorable conditions. At the heart of this issue is the state’s reliance on local property taxes in districts with vastly different abilities to finance school facility renovations, the lawsuit said.

The losers — property-poor districts — disproportionately enroll low-income students, English learners, and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, the lawsuit said. And it added that the state’s formula for contributing to districts’ efforts has compounded that problem.

“It is district wealth, not student need, that too often dictates whether students have access to safe, functional facilities,” said the lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court.

“The California Constitution promises every student a safe, clean, and equitable education. That includes the buildings we learn in. Right now, that promise is being broken for students like me and thousands of others across the state,” said Miliani Lexani Rodriguez, a senior at Coachella Valley High School and the named plaintiff in Miliani R. v. State of California, during a press conference.

Filed by San Francisco-based Public Advocates, the lawsuit seeks a complete overhaul of the School Facility Program and its formula for distributing funds for renovating school buildings. The lawsuit does not include funding for new construction, which does not show similar disparities.

There was no immediate comment from the California Department of Education and the Office of Public School Construction, among the agencies named in the lawsuit.

Seventeen plaintiffs are named in the lawsuit, including students, parents, teachers, and organizations encompassing disadvantaged districts throughout the state. They range from Del Norte Unified School District to Calexico Unified and include San Bernardino Unified, Stockton Unified, Salinas City Elementary School District and Lynwood Unified.

The 39-page declaration details the school conditions that led to the lawsuit:

• Portables that leak, exposing children to puddles and black mold at the 100-year-old Lincoln Elementary in Salinas City Elementary School District, whose school kitchens are too small and ill-equipped to cook the fresh vegetables grown on bountiful fields surrounding the district.  
• Buckets catching rain in dozens of classrooms in Lynwood Unified, where a lack of shaded spaces outdoors and cramped cafeterias force students out into the rain in winter and a scorching sun in summer.
• Poor ventilation and malfunctioning air conditioning, broken bathroom sinks and windows at Coachella Valley High, built in 1916, and playgrounds closed because of safety hazards at some of Coachella’s elementary schools.
• Rundown facilities in Stockton, where outdated science labs limit instruction at Edison High, students are cramped in old portables during the day and rats roam at night, and potential ankle-spraining holes in athletic fields make them unusable.

Those districts are among hundreds that cannot raise enough money through property taxes to create safe, healthy, modern and inspiring learning environments, the plaintiffs claim. They patch and repair, triaging facilities that in many cases should be torn down and rebuilt.

Homeowners and other property owners in many of those districts often face higher tax rates than property owners in wealthy districts, which can spread the costs of upgrades and repairs across a bigger tax base. “These high-wealth, low-need districts’ projects consequently can afford to be more numerous and more ambitious,” the lawsuit said. Without factoring in relative need, the School Facility Program then subsidizes those projects.

Tale of two districts: One superintendent’s experience

Gudiel Crossthwaite knows first-hand about the impact of those disparities. Until last summer, he was superintendent of Lynwood Unified in Los Angeles County. Damaged by historic redlining and state highway construction that lowered property values in its largely Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, Lynwood has one of the lowest amount of taxable property per student. This fall, Crossthwaite became superintendent of one of California’s wealthiest districts, Sunnyvale School District, in the heart of Silicon Valley with one of the highest amount of taxable property per student.

“One of my first meetings in Sunnyvale was at Bishop Elementary. I was inspired and in awe of how beautiful the facility was – having matching furniture, technology in place, the grounds with trees and grass and places for kids to relax in the shade,” he said.

“If you’re in Lynwood, and it’s 97 degrees and you don’t have running air conditioning or adequate HVAC systems for six, seven hours a day, and you’re supposed to focus on your learning,” he added, “It’s difficult to do that when you’re hot and sweaty and uncomfortable. That’s just a very simple thing.”

Last year, Sunnyvale passed a $214 million bond to continue upgrading its facilities. The projected impact on Sunnyvale homeowners was $15 per $100,000 of assessed value. Last year, Lynwood passed an $80 million bond, which will fall well short of renovation needs. Lynwood property owners will pay $50 per $100,000 of assessed value.

Seeking a remedy

The lawsuit asks that the court order the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to fully overhaul who is eligible for facility modernization aid and for how much.

Instead of addressing funding inequities, the lawsuit said the State Facility Program replicates them by providing nearly the same matching share to most districts. For new construction, the state splits the cost with districts. For renovations, the state pays 60% of an eligible project’s cost, and the local share is 40%. Since districts with a larger tax base can issue bigger construction bonds, they have grabbed the lion’s share of state funding since the program was created 27 years ago.

In its study of state funding over the past 25 years, the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley found that districts with the most assessed value per student on average received two and a half times more state funding than districts like Salinas City Elementary, Lynwood and the other plaintiff districts, with the least state funding per student.

Public Advocates’ threat in 2024

Public Advocates warned it might sue the state over the issue last year in a demand letter to state officials in the hope that it would prod action. The Legislature made modest tweaks to the formula used by the School Facility Program in writing Proposition 2, a $10 billion bond proposal that state voters passed in November 2024. Prop 2 includes a slightly larger state match for some districts and sets aside more money for smaller districts. And it broadened the criteria for districts with the lowest total assessed property values to qualify for “hardship” assistance, which the lawsuit dismissed as having “only illusory relief.”

But the first-come, first-served matching system remains largely intact. It has favored larger districts like Los Angeles Unified and wealthy smaller districts that can employ their own planning staff and consultants, enabling them to line up first for funding. Their projects will likely be funded, but if Prop 2 follows patterns of past state bonds, it won’t come close to meeting the demand. Other districts that miss the cutoff — some with urgent renovation needs — will have to wait in line for a future state bond to be reimbursed. And that may be years away.

Prop 2 “made minor adjustments” to the state program, “none of which alone or together meaningfully alter the systemic historic inequities” that low-wealth districts face, the lawsuit said.

Ties to Serrano v. Priest

The legal case for filing the lawsuit dates back a half-century. In a series of rulings in the 1970s known as Serrano v. Priest, the California Supreme Court held that financing school operations through property taxes violated children’s constitutional right to an equal educational opportunity.

The court ordered the Legislature to provide more funding to low-income districts. Several iterations of expanded state funding later led to the Local Control Funding Formula, one of the nation’s most equitable systems for funding school operations.

But the Serrano lawsuit did not include school districts’ capital expenses. And so the underpinnings for a parallel case, a bookend to Serrano, have lain dormant.

But the arguments for changing the system have grown over the past decade based on data. In a series of studies that examined the distribution of state matching money and districts’ ability to raise construction bonds, the Center for Cities + Schools at UC concluded, “Equitable funding to modernize school facilities is the great unfinished work of the State’s school finance revolution.”  

The Public Policy Institute of California reached similar conclusions after researching the issue. “School Facility Program funding has disproportionately benefited more affluent students and districts. Per student state funding has been highest in the districts with the fewest high-need students,” researchers Julien Lafortune and Niu Gao wrote in 2022.

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In 2016, then Gov. Jerry Brown opposed the first-come, first-served approach to state funding and refused to support the $9 billion state bond on the ballot; voters passed it anyway. In 2019, Gov. Newsom also criticized the matching grant formula, and held up moving a bond forward until his staff negotiated modest changes; voters defeated the $15 billion bond, poorly timed at the start of the Covid pandemic, in March 2020.

Michael Kirst, a Stanford education and business professor, who Brown turned to for advice in 1975 on addressing Serrano v. Priest, said school facilities weren’t viewed as an issue then, but agrees it is well past time to address them now.

“The issue has flown under the radar for so many years,” said Kirst, who co-authored the Local Control Funding Formula. “We need to complete the job of making California school finance more equitable. This is a long-overlooked and needed area for political action.”

Adds Supt. Crosthwaite, “States in the South have figured this out, and here in California, we tout ourselves as being more progressive. The reality is a majority of kids of color in low-income communities are in spaces that are not inspiring, not secure. We’ve got to do better.”

A theater project bringing the world of William Shakespeare to local veterans is gearing up for its first public performance on Sunday.

For the past year, a group of about a dozen veterans have met at the West Los Angeles VA campus to study the work of the Bard of Avon.

The project is in partnership with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, Veterans in Art and other organizations. The group is led by trained theater artist — and fellow veteran — Aaron Lyons.

Lyons is a longtime staple of L.A.’s theater community and is a member of the Antaeus Theatre Company. He said seeing this group express themselves through these timeless works has been inspiring.

“Helping them grasp Shakespeare, not only intellectually but emotionally, has been one of the most uplifting experiences of my life,” Lyons said.

Ranging in age from their 30s to their 70s, the group includes veterans of the Vietnam War and most of its members live at the West LA VA Campus, Lyons said.

The actor, who’s performed in more than half of Shakespeare’s plays, said part of his goal with the project was to demystify Shakespeare’s canon for veterans who might not have studied it since grade school.

“Watching this group of men and women understand it and be able to connect with it in ways that they didn’t think possible was really, really inspiring,” Lyons said.

The group will perform an original work called “Shakespeare Night Live” at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 15, at McCadden Place Theatre. The performance weaves through several Shakespearian monologues and scenes.

Tickets are $10 and available at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles website.

The war in Iran is rattling the aviation industry, from flight cancellations to rising costs for jet fuel. So if you're planning to travel this spring or summer, should you grab a ticket now, or wait?

"You should go ahead and book," says Sean Cudahy, an aviation reporter at The Points Guy travel and personal finance website.

It's generally recommended to buy international flights further in advance than domestic trips. But in the current circumstances, Cudahy says he would go ahead and book even domestic flights.

His advice is a sign of how the Middle East conflict is rippling outward, affecting prices and itineraries around the world, beyond the thousands of travelers who were stuck after the war forced a barrage of flight cancellations.

Airlines warn that ticket prices will rise with fuel costs

The war's effect on travel was sudden and striking, resulting in the cancellation of more than 46,000 flights in and out of the Middle East from Feb. 28 — when the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran — to March 11, according to Cirium, the aviation analytics company.

That includes Dubai International, the busiest airport in the world for international travel, according to Airports Council International, along with popular hubs in Doha and Abu Dhabi.

But even airlines far from the Mideast are facing a sudden surge in a core expense: jet fuel. At the beginning of the year, a gallon of jet fuel cost $2.11; by March 10, the price rose to $3.40, according to the Argus U.S. Jet Fuel Index, a gain of more than 60%.

The spike came after tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz came to a virtual halt, as Iran announced it would close the waterway that normally handles about 20% of the world's oil and liquified natural gas.

Mideast refineries had been sending some 470,000 barrels of jet fuel each day through the strait to airports in Europe and elsewhere, says Rick Joswick, who heads the near-term oil analytics team at S&P Global.

The price for a gallon of jet fuel soared close to $4 in the first week of the war, prompting United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby to say on Friday that airfare price hikes from higher fuel costs would "probably start quick."

As they absorb higher fuel costs, airlines could adjust prices higher across the board, or they might tuck an increase into premium fares, where they'll be less noticeable, Cudahy of The Points Guy says.

Several airlines have publicly confirmed that they'll be raising prices to compensate, as Reuters reports. Other carriers, such as Japan Airlines, publish a schedule of fuel surcharges triggered by cost increases.

"I do think that this is ultimately going to lead to higher fares for everyone," Cudahy says. "The only question now is how significant and how long does it last?"

Air travelers stranded by the Iran conflict are greeted in Athens, Greece, after arriving on a charter flight from Dubai on Saturday.

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Giannis Antwnoglou

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SOOC/AFP via Getty Images

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Crisis parallels earlier global disruptions

The higher fuel prices reflect a genuine struggle to ensure the aviation industry has ample supplies, says Joswick.

"It's not irrational. It's not some trader bidding up prices," he says. Comparing the situation to the COVID-19 pandemic, he adds, "The consumption of toilet paper didn't change. But you notice that all of the supermarkets ran out of toilet paper, right? Everyone wants to be sure that they have coverage of a critical need."

Both Cudahy and Joswick compare the Iran conflict's ripple effects to Russia launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which set off flight disruptions and higher fuel prices. As long as the Strait of Hormuz is closed, Joswick says, prices will keep rising.

"If that were to persist, this would be like a 1979 kind of [oil] crisis," he says. "Anything over a month, and you're seeing a substantial long-term price increase until the flows are restored."

The U.S. and other large economies can mitigate those effects by tapping strategic oil reserves — which they opted to do on Wednesday. But Joswick predicts that while such a move can help ensure adequate oil supplies, it might not bring a sharp drop in jet fuel prices. For one thing, he says, the U.S. reserve focuses on holding crude oil, not jet fuel. And he cites logistical challenges, such as California's reliance on jet fuel that it either produces or imports.

Tips for buying a plane ticket right now

If you're ready to take your chances and book a flight, Cudahy has some guidance.

First, don't buy a restricted, basic economy ticket that you can't change later, he says.

Instead, he recommends buying a regular, full-fare economy ticket: "If the price does eventually drop, you can then go back and change it and capture the lower price."

Another tactic, Cudahy says, is to use airline miles.

"You can generally cancel it and get all your miles back later, if the price goes down," he says.

Use services such as Google Flights to comparison shop and set up alerts for price changes. And if you book flights through a third-party site such as Expedia, be sure you understand its cancellation and change policies, in case they differ from the airlines.

Because of the chance for renewed hostilities in and around Iran, Cudahy says he would try to avoid nearby airline hubs for the next couple of months.

But he wouldn't wait to book a ticket.

"In the same way that we're seeing relatively long lines at gas stations with folks trying to get their tanks filled up before the price goes up even more than it already has, I would be thinking the same way when it comes to airfare right now," he says.

While you might drive an extra mile or two to find cheaper gas, airlines and airports don't have that luxury when they buy jet fuel.

"Prices are always set on the margin," Joswick says. "That last airport that needs to buy jet fuel, they will pay whatever it takes to get that. And that price then becomes the standard for the whole industry."
Copyright 2026 NPR

The story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles residents were walking dark streets and passing broken lamps even as the LAPD quietly disbanded a specialized unit in July that tracked thieves stealing copper wire from streetlights. 

Known as the Heavy Metal Task Force, the unit launched in early 2024 to combat persistent copper wire theft from lamps lighting the Sixth Street Bridge connecting Boyle Heights to Downtown L.A.

Lt. Andrew Mathes confirmed to The LA Local this week that the unit was eliminated in July 2025 as the department and city tightened budgets. The L.A. Bureau of Street Lighting, the department responsible for maintaining the lights, also had its budget cut by about 5% in the current fiscal year as its backlog of reports continues to grow. 

The team led investigations that exposed organized wire theft, resulting in more than 300 arrests. And it conducted inspections of local scrapyards to make it harder for people to cash in on high copper resale prices.

“When you get an eye for it, copper is everywhere,” Mathes said. 

Public concerns about lights persist

Calls for repair of streetlights surged from about 35,000 in 2022, the year the Sixth Street Bridge was opened to the public, to 46,000 in 2024. There was only a slight dip in such calls in 2025.

The calls made to the city’s 311 line for non-emergency services include lamps that were hit by cars or could be malfunctioning due to age. But the jump in calls starting in 2022 also include a surge in thefts.

Reports of copper wire theft doubled from about 7,200 in fiscal year 2022-23 to nearly 16,000 in 2024-25, according to data from the L.A. City Controller. But starting last year, the monthly calls began trending down, from 1,500 in October 2024 to about 200 in May 2025. 

After previously leading a similar team on catalytic converter thefts, Mathes was tapped for leading the unit on heavy metal thefts in early 2024. The team was based in the LAPD’s Central Division near where such thefts had been focused.

“LA is the copper theft capital,” Mathes said. “It’s the worst of the worst here.”

At their most active, Mathes said, the unit was conducting two or three operations a week.

They inspected scrapyards for stolen metal and warned the owners of the penalties they could face for purchasing it. They found people impersonating construction workers removing reams of wire for resale. He’d find makeshift processing operations in decrepit RVs, with huge spools of wire spun by hand and toxic fire pits where people would melt away plastic shielding because the unwrapped copper fetches a higher price.

Mathes said they tracked a 70% reduction in such thefts in the Newton Division, south and east of downtown.

So what happens if there is no specialized unit? 

Mathes said it was fitting that the first and last arrests made by the heavy metal unit occurred near the iconic bridge on Sixth Street. 

The officers who served on the unit developed valuable experience, Mathes said. And soon before it disbanded, he said they redoubled efforts to prepare the members to continue the work in their new assignments. Central, Hollenbeck and Newton police divisions have a specialist for these kinds of investigations.

When asked about wire thefts growing in other parts of the city in 2025, he presumed it was because of the intensive work the unit was doing near downtown.

“They had to find new places to target,” Mathes said.