LOS ANGELES — Powerful unions have joined forces with former Los Angeles schools Superintendent Austin Beutner to call for state intervention to stop what they allege is the misuse of voter-approved funding to expand arts education in California.

In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials, Beutner and the unions claim that some school districts are taking funding, approved by voters in November 2022, to expand arts education and are using it for other purposes. This year that funding totals $938 million.

The unions that signed the letter are California Teachers Association, the largest state teachers union, and CFT, the other major statewide teachers union. Also signing the letter are the largest unions in the L.A. Unified School District: Local 99 of Service Employees International Union, which represents the greatest number of non-teaching school employees, and United Teachers Los Angeles, the second-largest teachers union local in the nation. Other unions include Teamsters Local 572, which also represents L.A. school district workers, and the teachers union for Oakland Unified.

"Some school districts in California are willfully violating the law by using the new funds provided by Prop. 28 to replace existing spending for arts education at schools," the letter states.

Under the new law, the money must be used by schools to increase arts programs and each school can decide how best to add on to their programs. The arts windfall is drawn from the state's general fund — at an amount equal to 1% of all money spent on schools serving students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade. Thus the money is ongoing and will generally increase each year.

The letter lists no specific examples and does not name districts that are suspected by unions of being in violation of the law. Beutner said there is concern that whistleblowers could become targets for retaliation.

The unions and Beutner are calling on the state to require that districts certify within 30 days "that Prop. 28 funds have not been used to supplant any existing spending for arts education at any school." In addition, the signatories want the state to require school districts to list "additional arts and music teachers" employed by each school district in the current school year and "how that compares" to the prior year.

"We say more means more," said UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz. "That means every student at every school in the entire state, and that also has to translate to more educators and classified workers in every school."

Beutner authored Proposition 28 after he left L.A. Unified in June 2021 and voters subsequently approved the ballot measure by a nearly two-thirds margin. Students were to benefit starting in the current school year.

The text of Prop. 28, points to research that the overwhelming majority of public schools "fail to provide a high-quality course of study across arts disciplines" and that "access to arts education is worse for high-poverty schools," adding that "the cause of the steady decline in arts and music education is directly linked to inadequate and unstable funding of such programs."

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