Board member Tamar Galatzan volunteered yesterday to lead a task force examining LA Unified’s email deletion and retention policy, which is intended to eliminate unnecessary emails even as some some board members fear it could lead to the destruction of important records. “It is critical that the public have confidence in the district’s commitment to...

MiSiS mistakes were made, and LA Unified can expect to fork over millions more dollars to fix the software system’s myriad problems and get the program functioning properly. In all, it was another demoralizing revelation about the MiSiS rollout debacle last night, and school board members’ frustrations quickly boiled over, leading to a verbal beat...

The Office of the Independent Monitor, charged with overseeing the implementation of the MiSiS program, told LA Unified yesterday, in great detail, how the introduction of the student data system was a massive failure from start to (un)finish. The district was forced to develop the computer software program as a result of a 1993 lawsuit...

The LA Unified school board is entering one of its most crucial periods of the year, meeting again tomorrow to deliberate a change at the top, the on-going contract negotiations with the teachers union and a solution to a range of scheduling problems at Jefferson High School. Nothing is more urgent than what happens to...

In the latest disagreement between contract negotiators for LA Unified and the teachers union, UTLA, the district says the teachers’ latest salary demand would cost way more than the district can afford while the union president charged that the district could afford it, if the district had the right spending priorities. The new demand of...

When California’s first set of “Parent Trigger” schools in Adelanto Unified and LA Unified were taken over in 2013, the expectation was that a once failing school could turn innovative teaching and learning methods into academic improvement. Advocates of the controversial law argued that that an overhaul was required for progress. Short of parent testimonials, advocates...

Community groups supportive of Superintendent John Deasy have sent a second letter requesting a meeting with the LA Unified school board to discuss Deasy’s annual performance review. In a letter sent yesterday to board President Richard Vladovic, the groups chided him for being unresponsive to their concerns about the lack of transparency in the evaluation...

* UPDATED LA Unified today finally released a report that confirming that two charter schools, Magnolia Science Academy 6 and Magnolia Science Academy 7, were operating with insufficient funds and for years and have been financially mismanaged. The 78-page report, prepared by an outside firm for the district’s Office of the Inspector General, concludes that...

It’s an old story in LA Unified: Two schools are put together in one campus under the state co-location policy. The merger is always complicated and messier still when it’s a last-minute arranged marriage and neither side is consulted ahead of time about the partnership. It sometimes explodes into smithereens, as it did last year...

Could there be a hint of progress in negotiations between LA Unified and the teachers’ union, UTLA? Negotiators for the district say they were encouraged by the union’s latest — and most comprehensive — contract proposal, which was submitted last week. Vivan Ekchian, the district’s chief labor negotiator, told LA School Report, “I considered it...