Los Angeles school district settles with parents who sued over distance learning

Parents have agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleged the distance learning program used by the Los Angeles Unified School District during the COVID-19 pandemic failed to meet state educational standards and disproportionately harmed Black and Latino students, a lawyer for the families said.

Attorneys for parents who filed the class-action lawsuit in 2020 said the agreement would require the nation’s second-largest school district to offer at least 45 hours of significant tutoring services a year to more than 100,000 of its most vulnerable students over the next three years in addition to teacher training and mandatory assessments. The goal is to help the district’s most disadvantaged students, the lawyers said.

The deal must be approved by the court to take effect.

“For nearly five years, we have fought tirelessly on behalf of LAUSD students and their families to enforce students’ constitutional right to basic educational equality,” Edward Hillenbrand, one of the plaintiffs’ pro bono attorneys, said in a statement on Wednesday.

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said in an email that the district doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

The agreement ends a five-year court battle over Los Angeles Unified’s distance learning programs during school shutdowns. The case was dismissed in 2021 once schools were reopened but the parents, who have been supported by educational non-profits Parent Revolution and Innovate Public Schools, appealed. A state appeals court reinstated the case two years later.

The parents argued that the district failed to engage their children online at the same rate as other large California school districts and that state-mandated instructional minutes often lacked actual instruction. They said teachers would sometimes dismiss kids after checking they turned in their work and without going over new material, and complained it was not always possible to connect to the district’s platform.

In turn, they said their students began lagging behind grade-level standards and grew disinterested in school. The challenges disproportionately affected Black and Latino children, they said, who had lower weekly participation rates online than other students soon after the shutdowns began.

California schools had a range of pandemic learning models including some that offered hybrid schedules where students toggled between distance and smaller class settings and others that were solely online. Many districts were not allowed to fully reopen schools due to infection rates under the state’s rules.

Today, Los Angeles Unified has 400,000 students through 12th grade, and more than three-quarters are economically disadvantaged, according to district data.

Plaintiff Maritza Gonzalez said in the statement that the support is too late for her son, who is now in college, but she is thankful her daughter, who is starting high school, will have access to tutoring.

“After all the time, effort and years invested in this lawsuit, this victory feels like a step in the right direction,” Gonzalez said.