Education Law
School Funding & Expenditures
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Bond Measures. As counsel for school districts, we draft bond propositions and provide districts with ongoing advice regarding bond-eligible expenditures. We have drafted and advised one of the largest school districts in the nation on multiple successful bond measures, which together have generated nearly $26.2 billion for the district’s school-construction program.
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Local Control Accountability Plans. We help districts develop complex and compliant Local Control Accountability Plans and have successfully defended plans before the California Department of Education and the courts.
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Litigation. Our education attorneys are talented litigators with experience securing funding for schools under California’s complex financing laws. Representative matters include:
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We obtained $2.4 billion in additional revenue for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), ensuring that school districts receive the billions of dollars of revenues to which they are entitled under the Community Redevelopment Law. (Los Angeles Unified School District v. County of Los Angeles, et al. (2010) 181 Cal. App. 4th 414; Los Angeles Unified School District v. County of Los Angeles, et al. (2013) 217 Cal. App. 4th 597.)
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We defended the financial interests of schools in the dissolution of redevelopment. (California Redevelopment Assn. v. Matosantos (2011) 53 Cal. 4th 231.)
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We secured $650 million in Proposition 1A proceeds for a school district after successfully challenging the State Allocation Board’s rules for distributing state-bond funds, resulting in the establishment of new rules for the allocation of bond funds. (Godinez v. State of California, L.A. Sup. Ct., No. BC227352.)
School Governance & Constitutional Law
School governance in California implicates state, local, and federal laws. As experienced counselors and litigators in the trial and appellate courts, our attorneys are regularly called upon by school districts to settle novel constitutional questions of first impression ranging from conflicts between state and local laws to a church’s First Amendment challenge of a school district’s eminent domain action.
Representative matters include a challenge to the constitutionality of 2021’s SB 244, which purported to allow an unelected county committee to modify the manner of electing school board members even when that manner of election is set in a city charter, and a successful challenge to statewide legislation that would have removed the authority of LAUSD’s elected Board of Education and handed over control of a significant portion of the school district to a private entity headed by the Mayor of Los Angeles. (Mendoza v. State of California (2007) 149 Cal. App. 4th 1034.) We have also counseled a mid-size school district on its development of a new equity policy.
School-Related Ballot Measures
Charter Schools
High-Stakes & Complex Litigation
School districts have often turned to us for their high-stakes litigation. For example, the firm represented LAUSD in multi-year litigation to enforce a pollution legal liability insurance policy that its insurer had refused to comply with. The firm reached a favorable settlement through complex litigation to vindicate the value of a $100 million environmental insurance policy it had purchased from the insurer to support its epochal school construction program. After preliminary motion practice and an initial document discovery phase, the firm persuaded the insurer to consent to a limited course of four depositions per side, followed by mediation to address the parties’ core legal contentions. Despite the insurer’s reputation for eschewing settlement, this process led to a swift and favorable resolution of the case after only two days of mediation.
