Andrés Chait has worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District for nearly 30 years and has never tried the district’s famous coffee cake.
“For a long time, I would get teased about it, and so one day, I — and this was back when I was a principal — I told the kids, ‘I will have my piece of coffee cake on my last day of work with the district.”
It’s unlikely that day will be anytime soon. The district’s board appointed the longtime administrator superintendent of schools during its last scheduled board meeting of the 2025-26 school year.
Chait is the first LAUSD insider to fill the top job in a decade after two high-profile external candidates.
He started in the district as a kindergarten teacher at Mid-City’s Queen Anne Place Elementary School. He rose through the ranks to become chief of school operations and oversaw everything from safety to athletics districtwide.
He’s also the parent of twin daughters who will start middle school at an LAUSD campus in August.
LAist sat down with Chait to talk about:
- Why he took the job
- What he believes works about the district— and what doesn’t
- How the recently adopted strategic plan and budget will shape next school year
- How the district is supporting immigrant students and their families
- How the district is responding to declining enrollment
The following interview excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Why lead LAUSD?
LAist: You were asked in February to step in as the acting superintendent. Can you take us back to how you were approached about that and why you said yes?
Chait: The board reached out to me and said that there was a need for an acting superintendent.
I have always felt a real sense of commitment and ownership — I think in the best way — around L.A. Unified. I've told folks, other than my own family, this is my life's work. And so when that opportunity was put in front of me, I humbly accepted it because I knew that there was a need there, and I felt that I could certainly live up to it.
And you also made the choice to accept the job permanently. Why do that?
Very much the same thinking. One of the things that comes from having been with the district for a while is that I know the things that work well, but I also, of course, know the things that need some fine-tuning, that need some adapting.
I've never had an issue challenging the way we do things within the district, so I feel like this gives me an opportunity to apply that knowledge, obviously, from this ultimate leadership role.
Can you give a few examples of the things that you think work well and the things that you think could work better?
I'll start with the things that I think are working really well right now, and, and that's critically around our academic gains for our students.
We are going on three and, very shortly we'll be able to share more data around, a fourth year of really significant academic achievement for our students. So the things that we're doing in our classrooms, the systems that we have in place to support our students, both in terms of baseline instruction and intervention, are working.
And so that's something that — we absolutely need to maintain that momentum and keep that going.
In terms of things that we could be better about, I always go back to communication and accessibility.
One thing I often hear from parents, and again, I have some ... lived experience here, is we have so many amazing things going on in L.A. Unified, but we don't always make them easy for folks to access.
So how do we become better about that? How do we make sure that families know the resources that are available to them? It's not a complex solution. The execution can be challenging, but actually getting it done is certainly attainable.
LAUSD’s future, including its budget
The board just passed two major policy items that will really shape the next school year— the strategic plan, as well as the budget. How would you explain to a parent how those items will affect what their child experiences at school next year and how the district operates?
The strategic plan, this is basically our four-year roadmap for what are our critical priorities within our district.
So to a parent, I would say this is exactly what you're going to see in your child's classroom. You're going to see a focus on literacy, on numeracy. At the secondary level, of course, there's a focus on students graduating career- and college-ready.
I have always felt a real sense of commitment and ownership — I think in the best way — around L.A. Unified.
— Andrés Chait, superintendent, LAUSD
So not necessarily anything markedly different from what we've done the last four years. It's just an even more focused approach.
There's always a correlation between where we put our funding and what we prioritize. And so when we look at our budget for the coming year frankly, it's not going to be very different from the year that just ended.
We're going to have many of the same resources in place, and in fact, in some places, we're going to have even more resources than we had this past year. The challenges lie in what is sometimes called the out years — '27-'28, '28-'29.
Where are areas where you're really doubling down with resources?
A couple that I'll highlight — our attendance counselors and our social workers. Through some of the agreements that we were able to reach with our labor partners, many of our schools will have additional resources, both in terms of attendance and in terms of counseling, which we know continue to be absolutely critical.
The board also passed a fiscal stabilization plan that outlines some potential cuts in areas the district has really prioritized, the Student Equity Needs Index, the Black Student Achievement Plan. How do you explain to families why that might be necessary, but also what the district is doing to maybe mitigate some of those cuts?
I want to emphasize it's something that prospectively would happen in '27-'28, '28-'29 [school years].
So there's still a fair amount of time for us to advocate and ... to put in other resources.
The necessity around it is because — plainly speaking — we're spending more money than we're bringing in as a district, and so we have to address that.
Given some of the contract language that we have, given some of the other legal constraints that we have in our system, there are only so many places where we can make reductions, and it's unfortunate, but the spaces in some of those equity programs are where we have some degree of flexibility to make the reductions.
Now with that said, and I've said this publicly at board meetings, this is not something that we're just accepting as a fait accompli.
Part of what we're doing, and we were actually, I think, frankly, quite successful, just even this past spring, is continuing to advocate to Sacramento for the funding that our schools deserve.
If you look at the governor's budget proposal in January to what's sometimes called the May Revise, there was about $1.1 billion worth of additional revenue that came into L.A. Unified.
So we know the power of advocacy. One thing I really wanna emphasize there because I know folks have different narratives around this, we're not asking Sacramento for a handout.
We're not asking Sacramento for a favor. We're asking Sacramento for the dollars that are due to our students. As many of your listeners may know, there's currently a Prop 98 withholding of almost $4 billion. Now, obviously, all of that would not come to LAUSD, but a significant segment of that could potentially help our students.
Protecting immigrant students
The Trump administration has made the detention and the deportation of immigrants a top priority. Many students in the district either have family members who are immigrants or who are immigrants themselves. What is the district doing to continue to ensure that these students continue to have access to their education?
First and foremost, let me say, this is something that is very, frankly, personal to me.
You know, my family came here from Chile in 1983. I'm an immigrant myself, so I very much understand that lived experience. I went through the process of naturalization, and I know that it can be very challenging, and particularly more so in these times.
Second, in terms of the resources that we've already had in place for the last few years, that actually fell under my former role. So a lot of the strategies that we have in place, the supports that we have in place are part of a framework that I helped to create. And I'll highlight just a couple of examples.
One is home-to-school transportation that we continue to offer for families that have said to us, “We want our child to come to school, but unfortunately, we do not feel safe getting them to school." And so we actually were able to send buses out to pick up students from their homes and bring them to school, and we had well over 1,000 families last year that took that service.
We've also developed a pretty significant and robust network in terms of communication. And so when we do learn about immigration enforcement activity in our communities, we are able to very quickly deploy resources and let our communities know so that families can make an informed choice.
Serving the community
The district is about 40% smaller than it was two decades ago. How do you think the district has to change to best serve students who are attending its schools today?
This goes back to the fiscal stabilization plan that we were talking about and a lot of the hard choices that we're going to have to make over the next few years.
It's about our school count and how many schools we have in our system. L.A. Unified is a district of 710 square miles. We have well over 1,000 schools.
And like you referenced, I can certainly remember back to when we had an enrollment of 700,000-plus. You know, we're now at around 400,000, depending on how you count students.
And so we do have to take a hard look at how many schools we have, how many offerings we have.
I'll give you a very real-world example. When you look at elementary schools, when you dip below a certain level of enrollment, what you end up with is what we call split classes, where you have one classroom, for example, that has fifth-graders and sixth-graders in it, with the same teacher, with some additional supports.
That is not an optimal learning opportunity for our students, so that's something we definitely need to look at.
And how will the community be able to give input on what the district looks like in the future?
A couple things that I've always believed in in my career, particularly when you're having hard conversations, is transparency and communication.
When we get into next school year, it's really letting our families know the why. What is it that we feel needs to happen? What is the underlying why? And in many cases, what is the possible benefit to their children from that work?
So we have to operate in the spirit of transparency.
Obviously, that goes hand-in-hand with communication. We have to saturate our system with information. What I don't want folks to experience is saying, "I feel like this is something that was done to me instead of with me." These are hard conversations. The community should very much be a part of them.
