The Brief

Embarking on a treasure hunt for the art and artifacts held by the Los Angeles Unified School District is no small feat.

The nation’s second-largest school district is home to 389,000 students and roughly 100,000 pieces of art, including paintings, sculptures, maps and murals.

The art can be found in schools and district buildings across the district’s over 700-square-mile terrain. It is part of its Art & Artifact Collection, which began sometime in the 1850s and morphed into a multi-million-dollar collection today.

Sure, the collection holds school records — classroom materials, photos, yearbooks. But it also has ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets dating back to 2100 BCE. Sculptures of “Don Quixote” by Salvador Dalí from 1979. A 1931 “Bugs Bunny & Friends” by the animator Chuck Jones shows Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and The Road Runner reading a book entitled “History of the 9th St. School.”

The collection predates the official formation of LAUSD in 1961. The city was served by the Los Angeles City School District and the Los Angeles City High School District, which later merged. Most of LAUSD’s notable pieces are donations from alumni, former administrators and members of the larger Los Angeles community. A 2008 appraisal estimated the value was more than $12 million, according to a 2022 district document obtained by EdSource.

“LAUSD history is Los Angeles history,” said Cintia Romero, the archive and museum’s curator and archivist. “We have all the people here; we have all kinds of buildings; we have all kinds of architecture; we have all kinds of cultures.”

It is rare for school districts to hold on to such artifacts, says Brenda Gunn, the president-elect of the Society of American Archivists.

“I don’t think it’s very common at all,” Gunn said. “I think what typically happens is that the school districts don’t really invest in any sort of preservation. It’s not often that a school district has an archivist, and if they do have any preservation efforts, it’s usually by a nonprofessional.”

Treasures at school sites 

School officials also collect items unearthed at school sites during renovations — such as old fire alarms — as well as yearbooks and photographs that document LAUSD history. Los Angeles Unified says it maintains “professional standards for archival care and are intended to ensure that important pieces of the district’s history are maintained for future generations.”

“School district records are like a continuous public diary of shifts in neighborhoods, how the school district has approached its curriculum, how did it manage desegregation or any big social and cultural events,” Gunn said. She added that some might also be interested in viewing them for something more personal, like understanding family genealogy.

There’s little the LAUSD archive turns down. The main criteria is whether the art can serve in an educational capacity or as a teaching aide, Romero said. While LAUSD does sometimes loan pieces out to other institutions, it is “not in the business of buying or selling artwork.” And sometimes, she said, selling wouldn’t be in the “spirit of the donors,” some of whom were the original artists.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be valuable to be accepted. It can be a teaching aid,” Romero said. “So, everything kind of has value, really. Everything can be somewhere.”

And it is.

The “X” on LAUSD’s treasure map sits in a warehouse at the school police headquarters in rows of boxes that house a large portion of the collection. That includes the district’s antiquity collection donated by Venice High School’s historic Latin Museum, which operated from 1932 to 1997, and is now defunct.

In a small museum at the LAUSD headquarters on S. Boundary Avenue, there is a display mimicking a late 19th-century classroom.

In the “classroom” are wooden phonics teaching tools with scrolling letters, antique maps and silver-colored vessels once used during home economics classes.

The classroom has a list of “Rules for Teachers 1872” that sits on the front desk: bring “a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session,” take “one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they attend church regularly.”

Preservation at schools 

But it is among the modern-day classrooms with digital tablets and smart boards where the rest of the treasure lies:

Typically, in most school districts, items just end up sitting idly by for years, succumbing to what archivists call “benign neglect,” Gunn said.

“There are all kinds of places that this archival material will end up,” Gunn said. “And staff are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to throw this away, but it can’t be in my office, so I’m going to store it somewhere,’ and then it stays there until the next person.”

For Gunn, the hope is that school officials may take the extra step to preserve art, documents and history. Leaving something in a storage closet or in a box and walking away is not enough, she says.

“You’re not hurting anything. You’re certainly not throwing things away, but you’re not helping this; you’re not improving the situation of the records,” Gunn said. “But, what you hope is that someone down the road will see them, open that door and say, ‘Oh, these are valuable. And, if we can’t keep them here, then maybe there is another archive that will take them.’”

In the case of the LAUSD archive, there have been several thefts, including a painting at Dorsey High School. Romero said that while there aren’t many details of the painting, the president of the school’s alumni association has since found it, and traded $25,000 worth of posters and plans to leave it to LAUSD.

Today, the district maintains that school security procedures, including key access, protect the pieces.

Ensuring public access

While LAUSD students might enjoy little treasures displayed on their school walls and in hallway display cases, it’s more challenging for members of the public to view items in the collection.

In the 1980s, a formal inventory of art was curated. And in 2004, the collection was digitized, Romero said.

So, since 2018, Romero and her small staff — made up of a volunteer and a small cohort of interns from Cal State Northridge and LAUSD’s Downtown Business Magnet school — continued to digitize items and add them to a public database, which can be viewed for free.

This process of digitizing the archive is largely made possible by donations and grants, though Romero’s position is funded through LAUSD’s general fund, according to the district.

But curating the collection isn’t just about LAUSD’s or Los Angeles’s past. It’s also about the future.

Romero and her team also keep tabs on ongoing renovation projects at school sites that could reveal new additions.

“We have so many schools, and each school has something,” Romero said. “Every school has some kind of history.”

Maybe the way out of California’s homelessness crisis is to prevent it in the first place, rather than focusing only on people who have already lost their housing.

That’s the thinking behind a program in Santa Clara County — and others like it around the state — that has gained traction and will soon test its strategy beyond California.

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of several thousand dollars, aid organizations can head off someone’s homelessness. That both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home, and saves the state or local government the potentially tens of thousands of dollars it takes to help someone after they become homeless.

The Santa Clara County program by nonprofit Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of 10 more pilot projects throughout the country, marking the first large-scale, multi-state test of this strategy. If it works in those test counties, advocates will push for a nationwide program.

Meanwhile, a bill introduced this year in California would require the state to come up with a broad homelessness prevention strategy.

“The single most obvious answer to homelessness is to not let it happen in the first place,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home.

Focusing on prevention marks a significant shift in thinking. Traditionally, cities, counties and the state reserve their resources for helping the people in most dire need — those currently living on the street — get back on their feet. The problem with that strategy is that for every one person they move into housing, multiple other people fall into homelessness. That leaves cities spinning their wheels without meaningfully lessening the problem.

But prevention has its own challenges: The aid is most effective when it goes to people imminently at risk of losing their housing, and determining exactly who that is can be tricky. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to evaluate how likely someone is to wind up homeless unless they get help. A Los Angeles County program uses artificial intelligence.

“The risk is you give out a lot of precious resources to people who otherwise would be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away from things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities. His team evaluated Santa Clara County’s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78% less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who got no funds.

Even among the people who didn’t get prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies tends to be small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who didn’t get help became homeless, compared to 0.9% who did get help). That’s because, despite the very visible humanitarian crisis on the streets of California, statistically speaking, homelessness is still extremely rare, said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, which helped develop a similar program in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of people are able to keep a roof over their head by getting help from family or friends.

How homelessness prevention works

Destination: Home helped launch Santa Clara County’s first homelessness prevention program in 2017. At the time, there wasn’t much help available for people on the brink of homelessness. Families staring down looming evictions were told to call back once they actually ended up on the street.

With a budget of $1 million secured through donations, the program helped 200 households that first year. Over the following years, the nonprofit got results — and buy-in from county officials. Now, the program has an annual budget of $30 million (most of which is publicly funded) and serves 2,500 households per year.

The program appears to be making a dent. Prior to its existence, for every homeless person who got housing, another three lost their homes. Now, for every one person housed, the math works out to 1.7 people losing their homes, according to Destination: Home.

People who apply to the program hear about it in different ways, including through food banks and other service providers, by word of mouth and through outreach workers in eviction court. Then they fill out a questionnaire designed to assess how likely they are to become homeless. Multiple factors could put them at greater risk: if they have experienced domestic violence, have been homeless before or are disabled, for example. If they check off enough risk factors, they qualify for aid.

Over the past year, people accepted into the program received an average of about $6,500 (including if they returned multiple times for help), most of which went directly to rent, security deposits and other housing expenses. Participants can use the money to address whatever problem is threatening their housing, including fixing their car so they can get to work, paying for a hotel while they are between apartments, covering medical expenses or paying down a credit card debt if the large monthly payment is hurting their ability to pay rent.

Participants can come back for help multiple times if they need, and many do.

“We’re providing temporary assistance to folks that are facing long-term, systemic problems, and we don’t expect that hanging out with us for a few months is all of a sudden going to increase the supply of affordable housing or living-wage jobs,” said Erin Stanton, director of family assistance at Sacred Heart Community Service, which coordinates the aid.

Mayor Sam Liccardo, takes part in the 2022 Point in Time Count for Santa Clara County in San Jose on Feb. 23, 2022.

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Aric Crabb

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MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images

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Now, Destination: Home is expanding its prevention model to 10 new places across the country, including San Mateo County in California, as well as Miami-Dade County, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin-Travis County, Texas; communities in Alaska and multiple tribal communities in Minnesota. The idea is to see if the model can be successful outside of Santa Clara County and to see how it might be tweaked depending on the community it is serving. The needs in an economically depressed community, or one saturated by addiction, will be different from those in a rapidly gentrying area, for example.

Destination: Home, which raised nearly $80 million for this effort from private donors, is giving each community $500,000 to plan their own homelessness prevention program modeled after Santa Clara County’s, and then at least $5 million to run the program for three years. The first programs are expected to launch this fall.

The University of Notre Dame will evaluate the programs to see if they work. If they do, Destination: Home plans to push for a nationwide prevention strategy.

San Mateo County signed on to be a test community because it’s an “exciting opportunity,” said Amy Davidson, director of the county’s Center on Homelessness. The county already runs an emergency financial assistance program, but it doesn’t screen participants to determine who is most likely to end up on the street. With Destination: Home’s help, the county will launch a second program that more specifically targets people at risk of homelessness.

“It seemed like a really great learning experience for us to try to learn what works really well, and what haven’t we done that we could consider doing,” Davidson said.

Lower rates of homelessness

Five other Bay Area communities, including San Francisco and Oakland, already have similar prevention programs, which together have served more than 30,000 people. They’re supported by the organizations All Home and Bay Area Community Services, which helped fund the programs and developed a standardized online form that evaluates each applicant’s risk of homelessness. A sixth program in Marin County is set to launch later this year.

In San Francisco, participants were 40% less likely to end up homeless than those in similar circumstances who didn’t get help. Between March 2023 and February 2025, less than 5% of program participants became homeless within a year of receiving prevention funds, compared with 8% of similarly situated people who didn’t receive funds.

In Los Angeles County, people helped by the Homelessness Prevention Unit were 71% less likely to later end up in a homeless shelter or use street outreach services. As in Santa Clara County, the overall rates of homelessness are still small: Less than 2% of people enrolled in the program became homeless and used street or shelter services within 18 months, compared to a little more than 6% of people in similar circumstances but not enrolled in the program.

Los Angeles County’s tool is unique because it uses AI to predict who is most likely to become homeless. Participants don’t apply to the program. If the AI model picks them out, program staff cold-call them and invite them to participate.

The county is still testing the program, and a detailed analysis is expected next year. In the meantime, local leaders have thrown their support behind it. The county recently poured additional Measure A funding into the program, and is launching a new prevention program focused on young people.

Feeding off the momentum generated by these efforts, a bill introduced this year would require the state to establish a statewide homelessness prevention strategy by July 2027. The state is expecting a budget deficit this year, and Assembly Bill 1924 doesn’t come with funding. But supporters say it’s still a step forward.

“Now that we have proven models from the Bay Area and LA, we believe that it’s time for the state to be doing more to articulate goals and strategies for having a prevention program, with the hope that in the future if there’s more budget surplus those strategies could get better funding,” said Irene Farnsworth, director of regional homelessness prevention for All Home, which is co-sponsoring the bill by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from Encino.

‘They won’t just leave you hanging’

Desiré Campusano knows how to hustle. She’s crashed with relatives when she couldn’t afford rent and worked multiple jobs at once. But in 2021, something unexpected happened: She became an emergency foster parent to two of her young relatives. She felt herself foundering.

That’s when she found Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program. It helped her stay afloat as she navigated moving into her own apartment in Milpitas, changing jobs and suddenly becoming a single guardian to two children.

She asked for help twice that year, once receiving her full rent payment of $1,575, and once receiving $1,000 to help her get by. The next year, her rent increased and she asked for help each time she couldn’t quite make the payment — for example when the kids got COVID and couldn’t go to day care, so she had to miss work and not get paid. She got help four times that year.

“I’d be fine for a month or two, and then I’d need it again,” Campusano said.

In 2023, her rent went up again and she had to move out. She went to stay with her godfather in Hollister, but that meant a grueling commute to San Jose for work every day. Then, at the start of 2025, Campusano moved into a subsidized apartment in San Jose. The county’s homelessness prevention program helped her secure the apartment by paying her first and last month’s rent.

That ongoing support was a gamechanger for Campusano, who finally feels like she’s back on her feet. She’s now teaching sociology and Mexican-American history at San Jose City College.

“They won’t just leave you hanging,” she said. “They’ll make sure you feel stable.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Phillippe is known for its French dip sandwiches.

But just as famous, many would argue, is the sawdust scattered about on the floor of the the century-old shop in Chinatown.

The quirky signature even (still) has an entry on the shop's FAQ page:

• Why is there sawdust on the floor?
  It is a tradition to Philippe.

Well, that quirk is no more. Philippe announced Wednesday on social media in a "sawdust update" bidding goodbye to the tradition because of safety reasons.

"After more than 100 years, the sawdust on our floors will officially be retired," the post reads. "While this wasn’t our decision, it was a necessary step to meet current safety and insurance standards. It’s a change we didn’t make lightly."

The granddaddy of French dips has been at its Chinatown location since the 1950s; the shop itself for more than 100 years. Philippe response on the origins of sawdust notwithstanding, restaurants apparently scatter the stuff around to prevent slip, help soak up grease and for better traction.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Baldwin Hills Branch of Los Angeles Public Library is now home to a nearly 100-year-old Black history collection containing thousands of historical records and items.

The Dorothy Vena Johnson Black History Collection is named after the poet, educator and co-founder of the League of Allied Arts and contains 2,300 items including newspaper clippings, magazines, photographs, biographies, autobiographies, nonfiction, scholarly texts, multi-volume sets and about 25 rare items found only at the Baldwin Hills Branch, according to Jené D. Brown, the director of the library’s emerging technologies and collections division. 

The library held a ceremony Saturday where they unveiled the collection, whose origins date back to 1927 when Miriam Matthews, the first Black librarian employed by the LA Public Library, began documenting and archiving California’s Black history to ensure its preservation, according to the library. 

“I’m glad it’s still being recognized and acknowledged,” Danielle Durkee, Matthews’ great niece said after attending the ceremony. “She always bought us books, she always had us involved in everything the library had to offer. So that’s what I was exposed to growing up.” 

Baldwin Hills is considered a part of LA’s Black cultural hub and the collection will be more visible and accessible at this location, library officials said during the ceremony. But it’s not just about changing locations, it’s about protecting the legacy of Black stories and placing the collection within a community that will honor it the most. 

“We have insisted that Black history is not a footnote but an essential and enduring part of the American story. This is why this collection matters,” said guest speaker Lura Daniels-Ball, president of the Our Author Study Club of Los Angeles. 

The Los Angeles Public Library displays a timeline at the Baldwin Hills Branch Library outlining how the Dorothy Vena Johnson Black History Collection began nearly 100 years ago.

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LaMonica Peters

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The LA Local

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The collection moving to Baldwin Hills was also an opportunity for the library system to recognize the people who were determined to preserve LA’s Black history for future generations. 

“(Matthews) recognized that our shelves did not represent the communities she was serving,” City Librarian John F. Szabo told The LA Local. “She saw it as such an important thing to develop a collection not only of books and ephemera, but of photographs that told not only the history of African Americans in Los Angeles but of Black history from everywhere.” 

The collection was renamed in 1971 and, until 2025, it was housed at the Vernon Branch Library on Central Avenue where Matthews once worked,  according to Brown, the library’s emerging technologies and collections director.  

Heather Hutt, LA City Council District 10 councilmember, was also in attendance at Saturday’s ceremony. She told the crowd she used to work in the downtown library and that her family loves books. 

“If you get a chance to really look at the collection, share that with other folks so they know what’s happening right here at the Baldwin Hills library,” Hutt said.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

More than half the money set aside by the city of Los Angeles for programs and services for unhoused people was not spent last fiscal year, according to an analysis by the city controller.

Los Angeles allocates more than $1 billion to agencies and initiatives responsible for helping the city’s unhoused population, which, at about 72,000 people, is among the largest in the nation.

In fiscal year 2025, the city left $473 million unspent.

These funds are intended to go to a variety of programs like emergency assistance for people facing eviction, substance abuse treatment and housing assistance, including shelter that can accommodate pets.

The controller provided several recommendations on how the city can better account for its homelessness budget, including spending housing grants in the same year they are reported, better communicating timelines to the public for when affordable housing will be available and to analyze the budgets monthly to identify issues faster.

Most of the unspent money comes from special funds that roll over into the next year. But the discrepancy between budgeting in one year and spending another muddies the public’s ability to track how money is being spent on one of the city’s most pressing problems.

“The large homelessness budget leads the public to believe that the city is spending much more on homelessness than it actually is, increasing the public’s expectations and causing frustration when results inevitably do not align with the budget,” Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a prepared statement.

The city’s unhoused population has decreased slightly over the last two years, even as it has increased about 18% nationally over that same time period. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has taken credit for recent drops in the city, one of the primary issues she’s focused on during her tenure.

Bass released a statement supporting the controller’s recommendations on how to better account for the funds.

“We are committed to transparency so Angelenos will have a clear picture and understanding of how much is being spent in one year and what funding is supporting programs over multiple years,” Bass said. “It’s important that we strategically spend funding over multiple years to ensure we can sustain progress despite state and federal changes.”

A spokesperson for her office told The LA Local that Bass has been committed to identifying ways the city can better address homelessness and supported the controller’s recommendations. But stopped short of providing concrete steps for what will be done next.

“She’s been cutting red tape in City Hall from Day 1 and will back any serious proposal to ensure every dollar the city spends is clear, accountable and effective,” the mayor’s press office wrote by email.

The L.A. controller’s analysis, released Monday, found that the largest share of unspent money came from a state housing grant. More than $223 million in Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) grants, which are issued by the California’s Department of Housing & Community Development, has yet to be used. 

A spokesperson for the state’s housing department told The LA Local that the HHAP grants are provided in multiyear rounds providing two-year windows for when they need to be used. That flexibility is part of what accounts for the delayed spending.

The second-largest amount was a little more than $99 million of unspent funds from Measure ULA, the city’s so-called “mansion tax” on property sales above $5 million. Those funds can also be retained and spent at a later date.

2025 was the second year in a row that the controller found a pattern of underspending homelessness funds. About $513 million went unspent in 2024, of the approximately $1.3 billion in funds set aside. This spending is particularly difficult to track because it comes from an array of sources and is distributed across a variety of agencies.

Mejia explained to The LA Local that tracking this spending was one of his priorities when he took office. His team created accounting codes, which hadn’t been done before, to better account for the money in various departments over several budget cycles.

“Once we started tracking homelessness spending, we were able to find out that the city wasn’t actually spending anything close to what it was budgeting for homelessness — for two years in a row,” Mejia said.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who represents District 4 and is running for mayor, said the budget included money set aside for a homelessness oversight bureau she helped create but which has not yet been staffed.

“Nearly a year later, not one staff member has been hired,” Raman said in statement attached to Mejia’s report. “Unless we are able to move with greater urgency to provide accountability to the public, Angelenos will lose faith that the city is spending these desperately needed dollars well.”