According to the report, prosecutors allege that Long Beach book buyer Corey Frederick recruited two librarians—Veronica Clanton-Higgins, a librarian in the Lynwood Unified School District, and Shari Stewart, a librarian in the Inglewood Unified School District—plus a campus supervisor, a former warehouse manager, and nine others to allegedly steal textbooks in literature and language arts, economics, physics, anatomy and physiology from schools in Los Angeles, Inglewood, and Bellflower from 2008–2010. Prosecutors allege that the participants stole at least 7,000 textbooks from the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, although they could not confirm how many in total were stolen.

Prosecutors allege that ringleader Frederick sold both new and used books through intermediaries to various textbook distributors—including Amazon, Seattle book distributor Bookbyte, and Follett Educational Services—and, in some cases, even sold books back to the institutions from which they were originally stolen weeks before.

Prosecutors uncovered the scheme after Inglewood Unified School District police notified prosecutors of an alleged embezzlement in their district, according to the report, which notes that Frederick is charged with 12 counts of embezzlement and 13 counts of offering a bribe. The individual school employees face charges of embezzlement and accepting a bribe.

The funds for its ambitious one-to-one technology program are coming from capital raised by Proposition 30, which passed in California last year and is set to bring $6 billion back to the state’s public school and university system. Passing with just 54 percent of voters, the initiative raises sales tax by a quarter-percent for the next four years, while also increasing income tax on residents whose income exceeds $250,000 for the next seven years. In a state that has seen severe cuts to its educational system—and, in particular, school libraries—the Proposition had fairly wide support, from Gov. Jerry Brown to LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy.

Still, while many in the district support LAUSD’s ability to avoid layoffs, not everyone sees the decision to spend on technology as the correct course of action—particularly after years of budget reductions.

“Money from Proposition 30 needed to go to all those savage cuts over the last several years,” says Warren Fletcher, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), who has worked in the public schools for the past 30 years, most recently as a high school English teacher. “We have students with no access to school psychologists, and elementary school after elementary school that have had to close libraries.”

Indeed, LAUSD has had to cut “thousands,” says Tom Waldman, LAUSD’s director of communications and media relations. “We’ve had a $2.7 billion cumulative budget deficit since 2007,” he says. And while cuts to positions were avoided this year, he notes that’s possible because the responsibility to pay for mental health counselors, for example, is now shifting from schools to LAUSD’s central office. And Waldman says that schools may still actually lose these positions in the end.

“I don’t know,” says Waldman, when asked if schools who currently have these people assigned to them will keep them.

Where LAUSD is putting resources for the coming school year is on a district-wide one-to-one technology program that will first pilot at 47 K–12  schools, most of them Title 1, and costing the district $50 million, says Waldman. Schools will be allocated laptops, tablets, or other tools, along with funds for professional development so teachers can incorporate them into student learning. The plan is to phase in the remainder of the 786 K–12 schools for the 2014–2015 school year with the entire program coming in at about $500 million.

Whether individual schools or LAUSD’s central office will be paying for the materials that can be accessed by the digital devices—from ebooks to online databases—is still unclear, says Waldman. But he adds that there’s “no point in having tablets without the latest materials.”

In addition, Waldman states that the district believes the new technology is necessary to both prepare students not just for careers in this 21st Century but also for new electronic testing that California is rolling out for the 2014–2015 school year.

Yet, UTLA’s Fletcher believes that funding a technology program should not be launched at the exclusion of restoring other missing elements to the LAUSD’s system. Instead, he believes that multiple programs can occur simultaneously—and that the district’s first priority should be to first restore what had been removed.

“It’s not one thing versus another thing,” says Fletcher. “Proposition 30 was a bandage to stop the bleeding, which is not that students don’t have technology but that kids don’t have libraries, and have classes with 30 students.”