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When she was laid off from her job as a Los Angeles Unified middle school teacher in the Great Recession, LAUSD school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin couldn’t have imagined she’d be back one day as the boss. 

But such is life. Ortiz Franklin took her layoff and went to law school for a second graduate degree, having already earned a master’s in education while teaching. 

While studying law at UCLA, she began working at the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which manages some LA Unified schools. And, in 2020 Ortiz Franklin won election to represent LAUSD’s District Seven, where she grew up and attended school herself, and which includes diverse neighborhoods such as South LA, Watts, Gardena and San Pedro.

Unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud, Ortiz Franklin actually seems to like discussing the elephants in the room. In her first term she oversaw successful efforts to limit the role of police officers in LAUSD schools and now leads the board’s School Safety and Climate Committee. 

Having won reelection outright in her primary last year, Ortiz Franklin is ready to share new ideas on how the district can succeed in a challenging time of demographic change and political upheaval. 

“I love the solutions,” she said. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Let’s start with maybe the biggest thing you’re responsible for on the school board, which is LAUSD’s budget of nearly $20 billion. How are things looking for the district, financially? 

We were so grateful to get the COVID recovery dollars, and we stretched them over a few years. But now both the state and the feds are giving us less. So everything is sort-of piling on. It’s not a rosy picture. We are not getting more money.

Do cuts at the federal level have an impact?

Everyone on the board supported a resolution to oppose federal funding cuts. And then, a week later, the [U.S.] Department of Education itself was cut. That was frustrating, not surprising.

But I think the idea that the federal government doesn’t need to help states and localities is really harmful. We love our local control, and yet, there is a fabric in this country of recognizing those who need more help and relying on our government as a safety structure to help them.

What do the district’s enrollment declines mean for its bottom line?

We were over 700,000 kids in 2001 when I graduated, and we’re at like 450,000 now.  It doesn’t make sense to keep the same number of campuses, especially when the cost of everything is increasing. And yet, that is a very hard conversation to have with members of the community who are afraid of losing their neighborhood schools.

What about school staff?

Just in terms of the trend, the number of employees goes up and the number of students goes down. But it’s not just about headcount. We need to deal with the real constraints of our declining enrollment, our structural deficit and the reduction of federal dollars.

The [unions] want more money and more members. That is really hard to ask for right now, because we don’t have more money. In fact, we have a lot less.

How can we address enrollment declines, since they’re apparently not going away anytime soon?

There are some things we can do, which we have been doing for a while now, like attracting kids to really special programs, such as our dual language programs.

We’ve also been doing some marketing to remind folks that school is here from literally six weeks old — if you want to get into an infant center — all the way up until grandparents’ age, if you want to go back and get a certification.

So, we’re trying to be both broad and deep, in terms of meeting the diverse needs of the community.

You chair the school safety committee for the board. The district’s own data show incidents are up in schools. Do you have a take on that?

It’s been a big concern of a lot of our community members that incidents have increased, and it doesn’t seem like we have quite a coherent response yet.

And it isn’t just about, to have or to not have school police. I believe safety lives in everybody in the district, including our students and peers. Classroom teachers, counselors, campus aids, so many people keep our kids safe.

We will continue to look at that data on how we’re reducing incidents of violence and harm, in and around campuses, and really hold the operational team to account.

Of course, it doesn’t help that there are fears of ICE raids on schools. But we need to make sure people know that we are not cooperating with immigration enforcement actions. That’s not our job.

Evaluating Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is part of your job. How’s he doing?

I was proud to support his leadership, and I still am. It was unanimous bringing him in [to lead LAUSD in 2022]. But obviously the board has shifted, and there will be more serious conversations coming up to his four-year mark. The number one thing he needs to do is reach our big goals. And that has been the challenge of every large urban district across the country. The truth of the matter is, we’re still really far behind, and our growth is just not as fast as it needs to be.

What else are you working on?

Our budget transparency tool, which I’m super excited about, is going to come out this year. A big priority for me is pushing that tool to completion, and then using it to make better, data-driven decisions for how we spend our dollars in the district.

That’s a lot!

The priority is always, is the board spending our time the way that we should be, are we focused on student achievement and directing our resources to move the needle for kids. I still want to make sure that student achievement is front and center.