The Brief

L.A. County is bracing for a potentially devastating shortfall in funding for homelessness services in the years ahead as the federal government signals cuts, officials said Thursday.

The county’s financial concerns come amid a perfect storm of local, state and federal funding reductions, said Sarah Mahin, director of the county’s new homelessness department.

Her warning came on the same day President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to overhaul the way the U.S. manages homelessness, prompting more local concerns.

The order seeks to shift federal grant funding to states and cities that enforce prohibitions on urban camping, enforce prohibitions on drug use and adopt policies allowing people with serious mental illnesses or substance use disorders to be forced into treatment.

“The federal government is on an all-out assault on funding and services for our most vulnerable,” Mahin said at a meeting with county homelessness officials. “Our housing authorities no longer have vouchers to issue. Medi-CAL is being cut. Food assistance is being cut.  The people we serve are more at risk than ever before and resources are disappearing.”

Mahin, who began leading the new department this month, said local officials are still determining the full effects of the federal government’s actions on homelessness, but there will be more significant cuts to come.

Amy Perkins, homelessness advisor to L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, said representatives with the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently indicated they might pull more homeless funding from L.A.

"I think it's important to state that we met with HUD this week, with a Trump appointee who made very clear that he would recommend there would be no funding coming to our city,” Perkins said at Thursday’s meeting.

LAist reached out to HUD for comment, but did not receive a response.

The loss would be immense. In February, the L.A. Homeless Services Agency reported HUD had awarded more than $200 million in renewal and additional funds to help combat homelessness in the county. The agency said it was a $31 million increase over the previous fiscal year.

L.A. County homelessness officials say some federal funding sources are set to dry up soon, including from the American Rescue Plan Act. Several state grants will also be reduced.

Meanwhile, officials are anticipating potential reductions to federal funding for housing vouchers and various housing grants. In early April, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to shift funding away from LAHSA and establish a new county department dedicated to addressing homelessness.County officials say the bleak budget picture reinforces the need for that new department.

“ This is the beginning of an ongoing conversation as we move urgently to bring the county's homelessness response under one unified department to ensure accountability and faster results,” Mahin said.

In April, L.A. County began collecting sales tax revenue from Measure A, a voter-approved ballot measure that’s expected to generate about $1 billion annually for homeless services.

Trump's order on Thursday came nearly a year to the day that California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an order encouraging cities in the state to dismantle homeless encampments. 

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In December, fourth graders in a class at Delevan Drive Elementary School in Los Angeles were given a homework assignment: Write a book report about Pippi Longstocking, then draw or use artificial intelligence to make a book cover.

When Jody Hughes’ daughter asked Adobe Express for Education, graphic design software provided by her teacher, to generate an image of “long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out,” it produced nothing resembling the Swedish children’s book character she had accurately described. Instead, using recently-added artificial intelligence, it generated sexualized imagery of women in lingerie and bikinis. Hughes quickly contacted other parents, who said they were able to reproduce similar results on their own school-issued Chromebook computers. Days later, the parent group Schools Beyond Screens told the L.A. school board they were opposed to further use of the Adobe software.

The incident raised questions not only about the L.A. school district’s use of a particular AI product but also about guidelines state administrators provide to schools throughout California on how to safely adopt the technology. A few weeks after the incident, the state Department of Education published a new edition of the guidelines, which it had been working on for several months with help from a group of 50 teachers, administrators, and experts. The revision came in response to instructions from the Legislature, which passed two laws in 2024 telling the department, essentially, to get a handle on AI’s rapid spread among students, teachers and administrators.

Critics wonder if the guidelines would have helped avoid what parents referred to as Pippigate; the controversy, they say, provides evidence that districts, schools, and parents, who often lack the time or resources to ensure that software tools don’t produce harmful output, need more support from the state. The guidelines, they add, are also too vague in places and don’t do enough to define guardrails for how teachers use AI in the classroom.

The issues with the guidelines call into question whether the department can effectively respond to instructions from elected officials on how to safeguard a technology that, according to the guidelines themselves, can leave children isolated and with narrowed perspectives.

With AI rapidly becoming more prevalent in society, effectively managing the technology has become an urgent issue. Though OpenAI’s ChatGPT popularized generative AI just three years ago, polls show that a majority of teachers and students nationwide now use the technology in some capacity.

While AI can help save teachers time, personalize learning, and support students who do not speak English or who have disabilities, it can also inaccurately grade their papers and generate images that perpetuate or intensify stereotypes or sexualized imagery of women, particularly women of color. The majority of California K-12 students are people of color. Since the rapid expansion of generative AI adoption started, teachers who spoke with CalMatters have felt both a need to prepare their students for a future where AI is ubiquitous and a fear that AI tools can enable cheating on tests and lead to deficiencies in reasoning, logic, and critical thinking.

“Educators have a narrow window to set norms before they harden,” said LaShawn Chatmon, CEO of the National Equity Project, an Oakland group that helps teachers produce more equitable outcomes. “Local education agencies that take advantage of this opportunity to co-design learning and policy with students and families can help shift who gets to decide AI’s role in our learning and lives.”

A district spokesperson told CalMatters that images generated by the AI model don’t align with district standards and “we are collaborating with Adobe to address the issue.” Adobe VP of Education Charlie Miller said the company rolled out changes to address the issue within 24 hours of hearing about the incident. Miller did not respond to questions about how the tool was vetted before deployment.

As a result of what his child experienced, Hughes thinks students shouldn’t be told to use text-to-image generators for homework assignments. But he sees no attempt to place such limits on use of the technology in the Department of Education guidance.

“These tech companies are making things marketed to kids that are not fully tested,” he said. “I don't know where to draw the line but elementary school is too young because it can get real nasty real fast as we’ve seen with the Grok stuff,” he added, referring to recent abuse of the Grok AI system to nonconsensually remove clothing in images of women and children.

Issues with AI guidance

The guidance supplies a list of unacceptable uses of AI by students, such as plagiarism, and urges educators to integrate real-world scenarios and case studies into discussions to help students apply ethical principles to practical situations. It also says students should be taught to “think critically and creatively” about AI tools’ “benefits and challenges.”

Julie Flapan, director of the Computer Science Equity Project at UCLA’s Center X, said that the Pippi Longstocking incident called to mind a 2024 study that found young Black and Latino people are more likely to use generative AI than young white people. That data, in tandem with the historical disparity in access to computer science education, means, she said, that some parents and students will need help to think critically about AI.

“We often think about technological advances as ways to level the playing field,” she said. “But the reality is we know that they exacerbate inequalities.”

Flapan said it makes sense that the guidelines urge critical thinking and vetting of AI tools before use and encourage education leaders to engage communities in decisionmaking. But, she added, the guidance doesn’t detail how to do that.

Charles Logan, a former teacher now at a responsible tech laboratory at Northwestern University, said that the guidelines fall short by not offering teachers and parents clear guidance on how they can opt out of using the technology. A Brookings Institution study released in January, based on interviews with students, teachers and administrators in 50 countries, concluded that the risks of AI in classrooms currently outweigh the benefits and can “undermine children's foundational development."

Mark Johnson, head of government affairs at Code.org, praised the guidelines, but said the state should offer more AI education support to educators and make proficiency in AI and computer science requirements for graduation. A recent report by Johnson found four states adopted such graduation requirements after releasing AI guidance.

Katherine Goyette, who served as computer science coordinator for the Department of Education until January, when asked about the Longstocking incident, pointed to parts of the guidance emphasizing the importance of engaging families, communities and school board members when evaluating AI tools. She also said critical thinking is important in preventing such outcomes, pointing to guidance that pushes administrators to consider potential harms before use.

Additional direction is on the way for how to put the recently released guidance into practice: the department’s AI working group will introduce specific policy recommendations based on the guidance by July.

The pressure of the AI inevitability narrative 

The latest version of California Department of Education AI guidelines come as local educational agencies move away from blanket AI bans considered after the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Instead, districts are moving toward deciding when and how students and teachers can use the technology. Those local decisions will be critical to how the technology is actually used in schools, since the state cannot require school districts adopt its guidance.

Even the largest school districts in California can encounter serious issues when deploying AI. In June 2024, Los Angeles Unified’s superintendent promised the best AI tutor in the world but had to pull it from use weeks later. A week later, news emerged that a majority of members on the San Diego Unified School District board, the second-largest district in the state, signed a contract for curriculum that they didn’t know included an AI grading tool.

The move toward state and district AI guidance, rather than bans, reflects a broader sense of inevitability in the state around adoption of the technology. In his October veto of a bill that would have prevented use of some chatbots by minors, Gov. Gavin Newsom said AI is already shaping the world and that “We cannot prepare our youth for a future where AI is ubiquitous by preventing their use of these tools altogether.”

Logan, who recently advised San Diego parents about how to resist and refuse AI use in classrooms, pushes back against this idea. He says the California Department of Education guidance should address situations in which parents might want to avoid having their children use AI at all.

“It’s surprising that the guidance wants to make proficient AI users of kindergartners and there wasn’t space to say no or opt out,” he said in a phone call.

The statewide AI guidance joins a series of efforts to protect kids from AI, including bills now before the Legislature that seeks to place a moratorium on toys with companion chatbots and protect student privacy in the age of AI. Common Sense Media and OpenAI are working on getting a kids online safety initiative on the ballot for the election in November.

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

Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Moonlight, but don't expect to see him at this year's Oscars ceremony.

"I tend to stay away from the awards show," McCraney said. " I think I might have PTSD."

McCraney is referring to the viral moment from the 2017 Oscars ceremony, where La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight.

McCraney isn't new to theater. In fact, you could consider it his original home before his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue launched him into the Hollywood spotlight. But when the Geffen Playhouse asked him to be their artistic director two years ago, it called him back to the stage in a different way. Tapping a screenwriter for the position was a first for the theater, but McCraney said the roles actually overlap in more ways than one.

 "The job of the screenwriter most times is to make sure that everybody is understanding where the story is going and what the 'action' of the piece is," McCraney said. "So it's not that much different than being an artistic director.  My job here is to set the artistic goal for the organization. [To] point out its virtues and pitfalls, the dangers and the obstacles, and then move collectively as a single storyteller towards that goal."

McCraney said one of the great things about living in Los Angeles is its nuanced racial and ethnic communities, and he rides his bike around the city to better experience them.

"The landscape is constantly shifting and changing," McCraney said. "For example, Westwood has drastically changed over the past 15 years and will change irrevocably with the coming of the new train station down on Wilshire. It will change again with LA28 happening."

Just like Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse has had multiple transformations over its more than 30 year existence. Their world premier show, Silvia Silvia Silvia, is playing until March 8. Dragon Mama, starring Sarah Porkalob, begins March 4.

"Sarah is an incredible singer and writer and has created this incredible arc through a family that is both powerful and witty, but also deeply nuanced," McCraney said. "She's sharing that family with us, and family is our first community. They are the people we learn the most from. We learn unconditional love. We learn collective bargaining. Investigating family, investigating why we stay together and how we stay together through dire circumstances is a critical investigation for us right now."

When it comes to this year's Oscars ceremony, McCraney said he's rooting for all the nominees.

"It's been an incredible season," he said. "But Sinners is an incredible film that I've seen three or four times, so I'm really excited to see how it does."

The Long Beach Community College District has agreed to pay $18 million to more than 1,450 part-time professors to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged they were forced to work unpaid hours outside the classroom, grading papers and tests, meeting with students, preparing lessons and other duties.

The settlement, which the district board quietly approved last month, still needs the judge overseeing the case to sign off. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for July 1 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. It’s likely that Judge Stuart Rice will approve the deal. Last year, he ruled that the part-timers, commonly called adjuncts, were entitled to the pay they sought, writing he found “a myriad of problems” with the district’s claims that its practices did not violate state law.

The case has made “a major impact throughout the state already,” as some districts have begun negotiating contract terms to give adjuncts what they’ve long sought — pay for time they spend prepping and grading, not just for class time, said the plaintiffs’ lawyer Eileen B. Goldsmith, in an interview. (EdSource published an investigative series in the issue, Gig By Gig At California’s Community Colleges, in 2022.)

The Long Beach district recently set aside $20 million for the settlement and associated costs, its spokesperson, Stacey Toda, told the Long Beach Post in an email. “Resolving this matter allows the District to avoid prolonged litigation and manage risk responsibly, consistent with standard practices across public higher education,” Toda wrote.

The settlement “is a big deal, it is tremendous,” said John Martin, chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association, and a community college adjunct professor in Shasta and Butte counties.

Martin, a long-time advocate for better pay for adjuncts, is also the plaintiff in similar ongoing lawsuits, including one against the state Community College system.

In legal papers filed in the Superior Court, Goldsmith wrote that the proposed settlement, if approved, will result in 1,456 class members receiving more than “$11,000 — a very meaningful result for these class members, particularly given the novel issues in this litigation.”

The Long Beach Post contributed to this story.