UPDATED After a long tense day that resulted in all LA Unified schools being closed due to a bomb and weapons threat, normal routines came back to schools across the district this morning. “Things have gone extraordinarily smoothly,” board President Steve Zimmer told LA School Report. “It’s as close to normal as possible. Even so,...

LA Unified officials said tonight that all district schools have been declared safe and will reopen tomorrow. The decision was made after law enforcement officials determined that an email foretelling violent acts across the district was judged to be “not a credible threat” by investigators, in the words of Mayor Eric Garretti, who joined city...

Walter Reed Middle School in Studio City, has “zero periods,” when students with electives go to classes before school begins. When teachers arrived at the school early today to prepare for their regular class time, they were greeted by their colleagues saying, “Leave the school, we’re on Level 1 alert. This is serious!” Minutes before...

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made it very clear: He didn’t close the schools. Neither did the police chief, nor the county sheriff. That decision was made by LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines, who was supposed to be on his way to retirement this week. “I made the decision to close the schools,” Cortines said...

It wasn’t by accident that all seven LA Unified school board members happened to be at this morning’s press conference with the mayor, the sheriff, the police chief and superintendent as they announced closing the schools today. The school board had already plan to continue closed-door deliberations to select a superintendent to succeed Ramon Cortines....

An email that threatened violence with “explosive devices, assault rifles and machine pistols” provided LA Unified officials today with the rationale for closing all schools across the district. Those details and others, which began emerging today, convinced city and school officials that closing schools was the more prudent action, especially in the aftermath of the...

UPDATED All LAUSD schools were closed today due to a “serious threat” called into the district. The threat was not aimed at any specific school, but was judged credible enough for school officials to close all the campuses, which serve 643,000 students in 900 traditional and 200 charter schools. “This is a rare threat, we get...

As the year winds down, the the seven elected LAUSD school board members have pushed almost everything off their calendars except for picking the next district superintendent. The selection process continued for eight hours yesterday, ending at 5:30 pm with plans to resume the deliberations at 8:30 am tomorrow. While the board is winnowing its...

By the end of next week just before winter break begins, 95 LA Unified schools will have been issued computer devices for the year — one for every student, according to Bill Wherritt, the district’s Distribution Project Manager for the Instructional Technology Initiative Task Force. The remainder of the 103 schools in a pilot program for...