Sunday Opinion: A Functional Society Doesn’t Look Like This

An off-hours opinion piece from a Special Education teacher on the growing disconnect between LA’s spending priorities and public good—where teachers write textbooks while police misconduct payouts soar. My views, not my employer’s.

Let’s begin …

It’s a light Sunday read, this. Or so I tell myself, half sarcastically, as I sit down to write it in my off-time … between lesson planning, marking, and trying to convince the district that my students deserve an overhead projector that works, and window blinds that aren’t broken. I’m a Special Education teacher in Los Angeles. I fund most of my classroom supplies. This summer, I’ll be writing a textbook—The Story of Math—because our Learning Centre has been so thoroughly overlooked that I no longer expect the district to equip it. Not properly, anyway. And I’m not alone. Across LAUSD, teachers are scraping by, covering for vacancies, rewriting entire curriculums from scratch, and fielding an ever-growing list of student needs while being told the cupboard is bare.

Our union contract is set to expire in just under a month. UTLA and the district are, to put it mildly, not on the same page. The district pleads poverty—again. No room in the budget for what we’re asking. No funds for more mental health staff, or adequate prep time, or even basic inflation-adjusted raises. Just belt-tightening. Sacrifice. “Shared struggle,” I believe someone called it. That’s all very poetic until you remember that this city’s budget is still growing—just not for us.

Now, I know what’s coming. Someone will rush in to explain that the City of Los Angeles and LAUSD are separate entities, with separate budgets, separate funding streams, and entirely separate governance. And yes, I know. I do. But that’s not really the point, is it?

The point is this: A functional society does not have a shortage of teachers and nurses and an overabundance of police.

And by that measure, we are failing spectacularly.

This year, the City of Los Angeles is poised to spend nearly $2 billion on the LAPD. That’s more than a quarter of its general fund. The same budget proposes laying off civilian staff—clerks, technicians, community liaisons—to preserve the number of sworn officers. It includes no meaningful shift toward public health, education, housing, or youth services. And this comes after a record-setting year in which the city paid out over $320 million in legal settlements—most of them tied to police misconduct.

Let that sink in. Whilst LAUSD pleads poverty in its negotiations with teachers, the city is quietly pouring hundreds of millions into misconduct payouts, overtime, surveillance equipment, and tech contracts that benefit companies like Axon, whose profits have risen quite comfortably since the 2020 protests. The very protests, I might add, that prompted a flurry of promises about reform and transparency and accountability. Yet here we are. The footage is harder to access. The settlements are higher. The officers still on the payroll.

So when I sit in meetings and hear that there’s “no money” for another support provider, or “no funding” to repair broken assistive tech, or “nothing available” for students who need alternative materials—I don’t buy it. The money exists. It’s just been allocated elsewhere. Specifically, to the agencies tasked with responding after harm has occurred, rather than preventing it in the first place.

I’m not sure what people imagine we do in Special Education. Maybe they think it’s just about helping kids finish assignments. But most days, it’s triage. It’s paperwork and heartache. It’s building scaffolds where there should be systems. It’s standing in the gap between a child and the world, trying to interpret one to the other, without adequate tools, staff, or time. I work with students who’ve been failed by almost every structure they’ve encountered. Many of them have disabilities. Many are multilingual. Most are poor. When the city underfunds housing, or criminalises poverty, or deploys police instead of social workers, it shows up in our classrooms. Every time.

The systems are separate on paper. But in practice, they intersect constantly. Students living in encampments can’t focus. Students who see their siblings arrested at gunpoint don’t feel safe at school. Students without access to healthcare miss days for preventable conditions. And students who’ve been policed more than they’ve been supported arrive at school already resigned to punishment. So we adapt. We make do. We write our own textbooks.

What’s maddening is that we know what works. We know that mental health support, stable housing, restorative practices, and inclusive classrooms lead to better outcomes. But these things don’t produce arrest data. They don’t generate fines. They don’t fit neatly into the metrics used to justify bloated police budgets. So instead, we get more enforcement. More surveillance. More trauma.

And let’s not forget that LAPD’s clearance rates—its ability to solve serious crimes—remain unimpressive. Less than 60% for homicide. Lower still for rape and robbery. Property crime? Forget it. Most victims never even get a call back. So what, exactly, are we paying for? Because from where I sit, it seems like the city has built an immensely expensive apparatus whose main functions are protecting property, criminalising the poor, and generating paperwork after the fact. Meanwhile, teachers using GoFundMe to buy basic classroom materials.

There is no solution offered here. No tidy policy recommendation. Just a warning. Quiet, but insistent.

Soon, the money will be gone. Eaten alive by an out-of-control police department. There will be nothing left for schools, for parks, for libraries, for clinics. We will be told again that there is no money for raises, or for staffing, or for supplies. But the problem won’t be a lack of funds. It will be a lack of political will. A lack of moral clarity.

There’s a kind of sadness that settles in when you realise your city has chosen surveillance over students. When the loudest voices in power are property developers and police unions. When even the people writing the laws talk about children as liabilities rather than citizens.

I’ll keep teaching. I’ll keep writing. I’ll finish The Story of Math, and I’ll keep showing up for students who deserve far more than this city has seen fit to offer them.

But I want to be clear-eyed about the context. This is not a functional society.

And it shows.