Equity Advocates Want California Court to Suspend Billions in School Construction Funding

Backers of a lawsuit who claim that state funding to repair and update school facilities illegally favors wealthy school districts will ask a Superior Court judge Friday to expedite action in the case.

By John Fensterwald

EdSource

Attorneys who filed Rodriguez v. the State of California seek to freeze more than $3 billion of voter-approved state funding to modernize schools until the court has heard full arguments in the case and issued a verdict.

If Alameda County Superior Court Judge Patrick McKinney agrees, the preliminary injunction would prevent a state agency from processing hundreds of district applications. An injunction could also pressure Gov. Gavin Newsom to settle the case and reform a building assistance program that Newsom has acknowledged is flawed.

If McKinney denies an injunction, the decision to fight or settle would fall to Newsom’s successor, who takes office in January. The state would continue to grant hundreds of districts hundreds of millions of dollars in building assistance while the lawsuit drags on.

Litigating the case without the pressure of an injunction could take years, since the likely multi-week trial has not yet been scheduled. It also may be years before voters pass the next state bond to underwrite the cost of modernizing school buildings. No new bond measure will be on the ballot in November.

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Lawsuit Has 17 Plaintiffs, Including Parlier and Firebaugh Districts

In October, the San Francisco-based public interest law firm Public Advocates filed the lawsuit on behalf of 17 plaintiffs. They are parents, teachers and two students, including lead plaintiff Miliani Rodriguez, a senior at Coachella Valley High School, and three grassroots organizations.

What the plaintiffs have in common is that they live in low-income, low-wealth school districts where below-average taxable property values per student undermine their ability to repair substandard and deteriorating school facilities. These include Salinas City Elementary School District; Lynbrook Unified in Los Angeles County; Firebaugh-Las Deltas Unified and Parlier Unified in Fresno County; Stockton Unified; Calexico Unified in Imperial County; and Coachella Valley Unified in Riverside County.

The three plaintiff organizations are True North Organizing Network, an Indigenous-led nonprofit based in Eureka and Crescent City; Alianza Coachella Valley, an education justice nonprofit based in Riverside and Imperial counties; and Inland Congregations United for Change, based in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

The lawsuit states that the system of awarding state matching money on a first-come, first-served basis compounds inequality and thus discriminates against children in low-wealth districts by denying them the opportunity for an equal education.

Without an injunction, plaintiffs argue, the $3 billion would be parceled out, preventing their districts from receiving an equitable share of state matching money. The current “stark and enduring disparity” would continue, in which “students in high-wealth districts attend modern, well‑equipped schools, while students in low-wealth districts attend facilities with unsafe and degrading conditions,” they said.

I would love for state officials to come see where our students are going to school every day and the conditions for our staff, too.

Amy Campbell-Blair, organizer for True North Organizing Network

Those conditions detailed in the lawsuit relegate teachers and students to schools with malfunctioning toilets, leaking roofs, failing electrical systems and malfunctioning heating and cooling systems that sap energy in the summer and chill them in the winter.

“These conditions inflict immediate and ongoing educational harm, undermining student health and concentration, limiting access to academic opportunities, and driving teacher attrition,” the motion for an injunction stated.

“I would love for state officials to come see where our students are going to school every day and the conditions for our staff, too,” Amy Campbell-Blair, an organizer for the True North Organizing Network and mother of two children in Del Norte Unified, told EdSource. “They’d see chipped tiles on the gym floor we haven’t been able to replace and when it rains, there’s mold. It’s not a great smell.”

“I feel like they (district officials) are doing their best,” she continued. “They have to triage. The amount of money to update and make sure everything was up to where it needed to be is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Money the district cannot afford, she continued.

Rodriguez v. California is challenging about $3.2 billion of the $4 billion earmarked for upgrading or replacing school buildings from Proposition 2, a $10 billion bond that voters approved in November 2024. The plaintiffs are proposing to exempt from the injunction $800 million for several hundred projects that the allocation board has already approved. The lawsuit does not target state funding assistance for new school construction, which analyses show does not follow the same distribution pattern that the plaintiffs charge is discriminatory.

State attorneys representing the State Allocations Board, which oversees distribution of State Facilities Program funding, and the Office of Public School Construction, opposed the motion. In their response, they argued that the petition failed to meet legal requirements for an injunction: that the motion would probably prevail on the merits and that, on balance, the delay would create more harm than good.

They argued an injunction would bottle up matching money that districts, including several districts cited in the lawsuit, are counting on. The plaintiffs’ “blithe argument fails to recognize, and dramatically understates, the immediate and tangible harm a preliminary injunction would cause,” they wrote.

Two Different Standards of Equity

Unlike locally based funding for school facilities, the state allocates funding to operate most school districts through a formula that provides a uniform base amount statewide, with extra money for high-needs students.

School districts switched to a more equitable system after a series of California Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s, Serrano v. Priest, ruled that reliance on local property taxes in districts with widely varying property values produced unconstitutionally wide disparities in per student funding.

The Serrano decisions did not apply to school facilities’ construction and upkeep, and so they remain largely a local responsibility, funded by property taxes that are rife with inequalities.

Communities with large tax bases per student — some urban areas like Los Angeles and Oakland, and wealthy communities with high-value homes like Palo Alto and Newport Beach, can afford spacious, clean and fully equipped schools that look like college campuses, with wellness centers, manicured athletic fields, STEM labs and performance halls.

The contrast is stark compared to many isolated small and rural districts, as well as to Fresno, Modesto and other Central Valley cities with low property values per student. The lawsuit says that a disproportionately high percentage of low-income Black and Latino families live in those school districts.

State Aid Compounds the Problem

Since 1998, the state has contributed limited funding — about 20% of the cost of school construction over 25 years — to districts through state bonds on a matching basis. The money has been split 50-50 for new construction and 60% state/40% local for qualifying modernization projects.

The lawsuit argues that the state’s funding has amplified the inequalities for several reasons.

Large districts and property-wealthy districts can afford in-house construction staff and consultants to line up first for the money. Property-poor districts wait years for their turn for funding and face escalating construction prices.
Property-wealthy districts can afford bigger projects at lower tax rates than property-poor districts.
Districts with smaller tax bases are more likely to bump up against the state cap on tax rates for issuing bonds, which, in turn, restricts the size of the bonds they can issue. That’s why many small districts can only afford to patch up old buildings, not replace them.

The combination of factors is why the wealthiest districts have received 2 1/2 times the amount of state modernization aid per student than the most property-poor districts through 2023, according to an analysis by the Center for Cities+Schools at UC Berkeley. And that disproportionate pattern has continued for the first batch of projects approved under the new Prop. 2 bond, the center found.

“California K-12 school facility funding remains fundamentally wealth-driven: Proposition 2’s reforms are only marginal,” wrote authors Sara Hinkly and Jeff Vincent.

State lawyers deny that the state discriminates because all districts have access to modernization money. And in the latest state bond, the state increased the criteria for districts like Del Norte to apply for hardship funding that can cover the full cost of a project.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys say the state’s hardship program, which has funded 8.4% of modernization projects since its inception, is insufficient to overcome disparities. University of Miami Professor Bruce Baker, a national expert in school funding whom the plaintiffs hired, agreed in a written declaration.

“It’s a state obligation to ensure equitable access to decent school facilities for all children,” the lawyers reiterated.