Bracing for the return of President-elect Donald Trump, the Los Angeles school board is moving quickly to reaffirm the nation’s second-largest school system as a sanctuary for immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community and to propose a new high school course delving into current political events.
These efforts are coming forward at the Tuesday meeting of the Board of Education in four emergency resolutions sponsored by board President Jackie Goldberg in her last regular public board meeting before her retirement.
“We’re not going to be running in fear,” she said, speaking of Trump. “We’re going to fight you, every inch of the way.”
“It’s my parting shot,” she said.
One resolution aims to “Reaffirm Our Commitment to Immigrant Students, Families, and Staff,” as its title indicates, and also to update the district’s existing policy to “enforce the respectful treatment of all persons to include gender identity and gender expression.”
The resolution describes the 2024 presidential race as resulting in the “election of the candidate who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.”
Trump has pledged the mass deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally as among his top priorities, accusing them of increasing crime and taking jobs from citizens. In a Monday social media post, he confirmed a report that he would order the military to be involved in deportations as part of a declared national emergency.
Public schools are required under federal law to enroll any student within their jurisdiction, and in California, school officials are not allowed to ask about their immigration status. Many families have mixed immigration status — with some family members in the U.S. legally but others not.
The resolution refers to “a documented increase in anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the United States,” stating that “these narratives divide communities, elevate risk factors, and compromise mental health and school engagement.”
Although it notes that LGBTQ+ students already are explicitly protected by the school district’s nondiscrimination policies, the resolution would extend such protections to family members of students as well as to employees and their families.
“Lesbian and gay kids and trans kids and non-binary kids are really going to hear a lot of crap in the society as a whole,” Goldberg said. “And we just want them to know we have their backs. We have their parents’ backs. We have their teachers’ backs. We have the cafeteria workers’ backs — everybody who works for us and works with us and all the kids and their families. We can’t necessarily stop the bigots from being who they are, but we’re not going to let you have to face them alone.”
Under the banner of parent rights, Trump wants to end school board policies that limit the ability of school staff to notify parents if their child changes gender identity or pronouns at school.
Trump recently voiced strong support for this view of parental rights at a conference organized by the conservative group Moms for Liberty.
“Some of these people on the boards, I think they don’t like the kids very much,” he said at that gathering. “You have to give the rights back to the parents.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in July shielding teachers from retaliation for supporting transgender student rights and prohibiting K-12 “forced disclosure” rules.
A second Goldberg resolution deals with sanctuary for immigrants. It, too, reaffirms existing policy and also takes aim at Trump, calling him “the candidate whose previous administration created a brutal policy of immigrant family separation which did irreparable harm to thousands of immigrant children and parents.”
Trump has defended the policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, calling it an effective deterrent to immigration.
The school system had acted similarly in declaring schools a sanctuary in 2017, early in Trump’s first term, establishing L.A. Unified schools as “Safe Zones for Families Threatened by Immigration Enforcement.” The earlier resolution prohibited district staff from “voluntarily cooperating in any immigration enforcement action, including sharing information about students’ and families’ immigration status with any immigration agent.”
The new resolution would direct L.A. Unified Supt. Alberto Carvalho to develop within 60 days a plan that would include “training for all teachers, administrators, and other staff on how to respond to Federal agencies and any immigration personnel who request information about students, families, and staff, and/or are attempting to enter school property, as well as a thorough effort to communicate the District’s sanctuary policy and plan to all District families in the language that they speak.”
About 1 in 5 students are considered to be learning English; many of them are immigrants, although they are not necessarily in the country illegally.
A third Goldberg resolution takes aim at the education portion of Project 2025, a think tank effort that set out policy goals for a second Trump administration. In terms of education, there is strong but not complete alignment between Project 2025 and Trump’s statements on education.
Project 2025 strongly emphasizes giving parents the right to use their share of public education funds to subsidize private school tuition, a goal that Trump supported in his first administration. The policy framework also calls for “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.” Backers say they want to take liberal politics and indoctrination out of the classroom.
Critics see this policy proposal as an effort to whitewash history, limit diverse perspectives and shut down discussion of controversial topics.
The Goldberg resolution vows, “we will do everything in our power to protect and defend students, families, and staff from the harm intended by Project 2025, and to defend all students’ right to a public education.”
Under the resolution, Carvalho would, within 60 days, present a report with a “comprehensive overview of all of the Project 2025 policies that impact public education and public school students, families, and staff, and a detailed overview of the District’s plan to defend public education and the students, families, and staff we serve.”
The fourth Goldberg resolution takes aim at recent widespread efforts to remove the discussion of controversial subjects or current events from classrooms.
The resolution states that, to make students “ready for the world,” they must become “critical thinkers, to be able to understand current events, to be able to understand how events impact our politics, to know the effects of specific policy proposals, and to be able to understand all sides of key political issues.”
Moreover, “it is the district’s responsibility to prepare students to be able to make distinctions between news and opinion in an increasingly fractured information environment rife with misinformation, polarization and questionable sources.”
England and France, Goldberg said, “start what I would call political education in the upper elementary grades all the way through high school, and their kids have a lot better take, in my opinion, of what’s going on in modern, contemporary political issues.”
An example, she said, is “what can Trump actually do, and what things does he say he can do but he really can’t.”
Within 160 days, Carvalho would have to report “about the feasibility of establishing a Contemporary Political Issues course” for the high school level and whether it could be required for graduation.
The staff analysis also would cover “what credentials and professional development would be required to ensure the district has the workforce to implement this new course, and what would be the most appropriate grade or grades for students to take this course.”
Also under review would be changes needed to curriculum at all grade levels to prepare students for high school coursework in this area.