For the first time in 36 years, all LA Unified district students are starting school at the same time, now that the last school — Bell Senior High School — has ended its multi-track schedule. In 1981, Bell and nearly 80 percent of the district’s schools went on a year-round schedule to alleviate overcrowding. Even though...

Feeding the kids of Los Angeles has its own set of unique challenges. Not only is it one of the largest school populations in the country with 665,000 mouths to feed every day, the district is now open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at most of its 1,100 locations, dishing up 132 million meals a...

Since it is still the lazy days of summer, we thought we’d dive into some refreshingly cool facts about swimming pools located at schools throughout Los Angeles. At LA Unified, more than one-third of all the high schools in the district have swimming pools, and it costs about $3.9 million annually to maintain them all....

Expect more diligent searches at schools this fall as LA Unified officials push principals to meet their daily requirement of metal detector scans of students and random searches of lockers for knives, guns, or drugs. An internal report revealed that some schools are still not doing the mandatory searches of students that the district requires,...

(Click on photo to play video of the school board meeting.) It was one of the most uncomfortably dramatic moments at any LA Unified School Board meeting in recent memory — maybe the oddest of any in the country this year. Flanked by her friends, 15-year-old Lila Copeland stood in silence for a minute and a...

*UPDATED Philanthropist and former LA Times publisher Austin Beutner said he doesn’t see the new task force he is co-leading as a body that has any intention of usurping the new LA Unified School Board, or telling the superintendent what to do. “We are here to support Michelle King, and offer suggestions,” Beutner said in...

When Nick Melvoin unseated LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer, teachers threatened to strike. Others worried about having to find a new job. A national reporter was surprised to learn in an interview that opponents were all wrong when they portrayed Melvoin as a Trump supporter. And there was palpable trepidation by a server who...

Teacher advocacy groups are concerned that California’s definition of an ineffective teacher is too loose and won’t be bolstered before the state has to turn in its federal accountability plan in two months. Each state must submit its plan to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act by Sept. 18, and one accountability measure...

* UPDATED An independent city panel gave the LA Unified school board members a 174 percent raise on Monday night, from $45,627 to $125,000, but according to new board President Ref Rodriguez, it was an unexpected development. “This is a total surprise,” Rodriguez told LA School Report. “But it will help all of us with our...

LAUSD charter schools on multiple sites have gone down. The number of LA Unified charter schools that will be splitting their classrooms across two or more traditional school campuses will drop by more than half this fall. According to district data provided to LA School Report, 63 independent charter schools will share space at 74...