Los Angeles Unified School District Construction Program

For nearly three decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had no comprehensive construction program and had not built a single new high school. The nation’s second largest school district—which spans more than 704 square miles (1,824 k) and serves 727,000 students living in Los Angeles and 26 additional municipalities—was in the throes of an overcrowding crisis, forced to bus thousands of students to schools many miles outside their communities and to place more than half of the district’s student population on an abbreviated academic calendar. Moreover, the city and surrounding municipalities were running out of land on which new, large-scale schools could be built.