An independent Financial Review Panel yesterday detailed drastic measures that LA Unified must take to remain afloat in what school board President Steve Zimmer calls a “perfect storm” of financial trouble for the district. “There’s a fiscal cliff that is immediate if different decisions are not made,” warned Bill Lockyer, the former California attorney general and...

In presenting a detailed accounting of community input for LA Unified’s superintendent search, the president of the search firm urged the seven board members to reach consensus on what they are looking for in their ideal candidate. “You do not want to make this decision on four votes,” said Hank Gmitro of Hazard, Young, Attea...

It doesn’t matter if the next superintendent is a he or she, but it does matter if the he or she is bilingual. The person should be good at communicating and love Los Angeles. And, the candidate should have been a teacher at one point in his or her career. Those are some of the...

In what looks to be a marathon LAUSD school board meeting tomorrow, members are scheduled to hear a detailed report on community input for the superintendent search, an analysis of a district finances conducted by non-district analysts and a number of proposals involving charter schools. At the open session at 10 a.m., the board will hear...

In a new video on the LA Unified website, Board President Steve Zimmer  provides the latest count of how many people offered opinions on the superintendent search and what the next steps are in the process. Zimmer said 13,500 people went to the website to read about the superintendent search, more than 8,000 filled out the...

LA Unified is on the brink of a severe financial crisis and if officials don’t act now, the whole district could go bankrupt. That’s the overall conclusion of a report by an outside panel asked to look at the financial situation of LAUSD. Its findings are scheduled to be presented at the regular school board meeting...

Despite recent media reports that the arts are doing poorly at LA Unified schools, the director of the district’s arts programs, Rory Pullens, said quite to the contrary, things are better than they have been in a long time; it’s just that nobody knows it. “We are really encouraged and really excited about what’s been...

An LA Unified anti-bullying campaign for at-risk youth that includes an innovative arts program culminated today in an emotional speech by a father, whose 11-year-old son killed himself after being bullied. Students, teachers, even police officers had tears in their eyes at Bret Hart Preparatory Middle School. For some of the officers, it got personal....

At a time of high employment demand for computer experts, fewer than half of LA Unified’s 98 traditional high schools offer computer science classes. “We could have students go through LAUSD without any access to computer science at all,” Suyen Moncada-Machado, a district instructional specialist told a district board committee yesterday as part of a...

LA Unified 2nd graders will be taking a California comprehensive science test when they reach 5th grade in 2019, and district science coordinators are already gearing up for it, according to a presentation before the school boad’s Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee. But it’s a huge undertaking. District officials leading the effort told the committee that...