LA School Report covers the 2017 LAUSD school board race: See all 13 candidate profiles Name: Imelda Padilla Board district: 6 Age: 29 Job: Community organizer for Pacoima Beautiful, then with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and started her own nonprofit Together We Do More, which aims to help middle and high school students start to think...

Last year LA Unified board members were shocked to learn that higher utility rates could jack up the district’s utility bill by $24 million. So they swung into action with energy-saving measures. But on Tuesday they learned they could be facing even steeper increases — up to 50 percent more. Even with a 13 percent...

The only pre-arrest juvenile diversion program in California is seeking nearly $1 million to expand into the San Fernando Valley, so its leaders came Tuesday to the cash-strapped LA Unified to ask for about half of it. Although four of the seven school board members at the budget committee meeting spoke positively about the program, they...

LA School Report covers the 2017 LAUSD school board race: See all 13 candidate profiles Name: Carl J. Petersen Board district: 2 Age: 49 Job: Manages shipping production for start-up company Arecont Vision that supplies security cameras. Married: Nicole Thiroux-Petersen Children in LAUSD: Three stepdaughters who are triplets: one at Granada Hills Charter High School, one...

*UPDATED Seven federal agencies united in a raid Wednesday in Los Angeles of a charter school network that oversees high-performing schools but had come under scrutiny for its financial and management practices. The raid of Celerity Educational Group, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, came after an investigation by LA Unified’s own Office of...

Some LA Unified officials see teaching dual language at an early age as a way to save the district, which is faced with educating the largest English learner population in the nation. With speakers that included a program director from Sacramento, parents from dual language schools and school administrators from the superintendent’s office, the Early Childhood Education...

Despite record-breaking rainfall over the past week in Los Angeles, the number of leaks and flooding issues at LA Unified schools is minimal and administrators credit the preparations they did for last year’s rather wimpy El Niño.  As of Monday morning, there were 2,000 open service calls for issues throughout the district, but only 20...

  About 400 parents, teachers and students joined union leaders at a Los Angeles elementary school on Thursday, one day before the presidential inauguration, to protest the incoming administration and to support public schools. The demonstration, called a “Shield Our Schools Action,” drew thousands throughout LA Unified, said President Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers...

  About two dozen pilot programs throughout LA Unified are helping prepare the entire district for new, more comprehensive state science tests that fifth-, eighth- and 11th-graders will start taking in 2019. The new California Science Test (CAST) will replace the California Standards Test (CST). It will be taken on computers rather than on paper and...

Charter schools were mostly approved on consent agendas at the LA Unified school board over the past two meetings. Some charters that were rejected by LA Unified ended up being approved on appeal by the county. In one case this month — as has happened in the past — a school recommended for denial by the...