A Brand New School and No Students

Best read of Tuesday morning is an LA Times story about a high-tech new high school in Riverside that has just been completed -- but won't have any students because of budget cuts.

This isn't as strange as it seems. Local school districts have quite a bit of freedom, if they can get voters to go along, to build new campuses and buildings by passing bond issues. But in California's system, funding for school operations is centralized, with the decisions on school funding made in Sacramento. So such a situation -- with the locals building schools that the state doesn't provide enough money to operate -- shouldn't surprise us.

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