In 2013, California passed an unusual law that aimed to revolutionize how school districts receive state funding. The Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, gives school districts the autonomy to decide which programs and services to spend state funding on. And it’s far more than another boring funding provision: Its primary goal was to ensure equity by devising a complex recipe of budgeting mechanisms, in part by giving additional money to districts based on their numbers of high-needs students—English learners, low-income children, and foster youth. The law’s passage marked the first time in four decades that California underwent such a dramatic shift in school finance.

“The LCFF—it’s kind of a first. It’s trying to do something equitable in funding,” said Sarah Omojola, a statewide education-rights advocate for Public Counsel, a Los Angeles-based pro bono law firm. Before the law was put into place, it was pretty much a mystery as to how the districts got their money; there were different grants, different sources, and no explicit measures aimed to equally distributing resources. “It was very confusing,” Omojola said.

Long Beach’s 152-page spending plan makes little reference to the needs of underprivileged youth.

But many others haven’t. In fact, both the Los Angeles Unified and West Contra Costa Unified school districts have faced lawsuits for budgeting money meant for these children on other expenses, such as special-education services and teacher raises. And Long Beach Unified School District, just south of Los Angeles, could be next. It has received international acclaim for the caliber of education it provides. In 2003, it even won the $1 million Broad Prize, an annual award meant for public-school systems that improve student performance while narrowing achievement gaps between low-income and minority students and their peers. In part because of those strides, it’s spent much of its state funding on things like AP classes. Still, while such spending certainly furthers the school district’s aims for prestige, some worry it ignores the basic needs of underprivileged youth—children who are underrepresented in advanced programs and overrepresented in suspension rates, according to Angelica Salazar, a senior policy associate with the Children’s Defense Fund in California.

Given the way the district is using its money, “you really have to question: ‘Is this really going to help this population in a targeted way?’” Salazar said. “The priority [for the district] is getting more students to take AP classes. [That] priority is not making sure we provide social-and-emotional wellness for every young person in our district.” And when it comes to school discipline and climate, promising programs such as restorative justice aren’t high on the Long Beach district’s list of funding priorities; instead, it’s setting aside some of its supplemental money for things like campus law enforcement—including more than $6 million for school police and campus security, among other services. It also plans to spend more than $14 million on employee benefits.  “There’s always differences of opinion when it comes to how best to use these resources,” said Robert Tagorda, the director of Long Beach Unified School District’s Office of Equity Access and College and Career Readiness.

Earlier this month, the law firm Public Advocates sent a letter to the Los Angeles County’s education office accusing the district of shortchanging high-needs students by roughly $24 million during the past school year; it even asked the county’s education office to veto the district’s spending plan altogether. Long Beach’s 152-page spending plan makes little reference to the needs of underprivileged youth, the firm argues, instead touting how programs such as music education and the Common Core standards will help all students. “These broadly available services and programs tend to operate like park benches which are available to all, but in the economy of choices, it is primarily those who need rest who use them,” the plan states. Public Advocates has the support of a coalition of legal experts and community groups.

The idea behind the Long Beach spending plan is, ostensibly, that English learners, low-income, and foster youth will be able to discern which programs they need. Yet many of those children are trauma survivors, without stable housing and with tenuous connections to school, and critics say they need more than simply the option to choose. According to the plan, schools with especially large high-needs student populations will receive additional resources, but it doesn’t specify how much. After that, the rest of the money will be spread district wide, including to schools in middle-class areas. “This district is deciding all of the money is to be used wherever,” without detailing how it will or won’t affect high-needs students, Public Counsel’s Omojola said. The notion that students who most need services will use them, she argued, “is not following the spirit of the law.”

“They also fail to realize that as the students that actually go to those schools, we see what it is that we need.”

The task of making sure districts use the money they’ve allocated for high-needs students in their spending plans sometimes falls to parents and other community members. But that can be tedious given the length of these documents. (Los Angeles Unified School District’s 2015-16 spending plan exceeded 400 pages.) A California Department of Education survey of 571 parents, school administrators, advocates, and others found that they think school spending plans have grown too complex, making it difficult to see how the money will benefit vulnerable students. The state plans to simplify the planning process in the fall, but even the revised templates won’t require districts to specify how their expenditures will benefit high-needs youth.