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LAUSD loses appeal over how it spent $450 million of LCFF funds intended for needy students
LA Unified has lost its appeal to the California Department of Education on how it spends hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds that are supposed to be directed to its neediest students. The ruling reestablished the state’s opinion that LA Unified’s spending of $450 million over the last two fiscal years on special...
By Craig Clough | August 8, 2016
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School board elections heat up with 4 more candidates jumping into race
Four more candidates have entered the race to run for two school board seats in the March 7 election. Three people in the last 10 days have filed with the city Ethics Commission an intent to raise money to challenge Monica Garcia for school board in District 2, and one person has entered the race for...
By Sarah Favot | August 8, 2016
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‘We can do it’: It’s girl power at opening of LA’s first single-sex charter school
More than 100 girls and their parents gathered last Thursday to sign up for the first all-girls charter middle school in LA Unified. They were nervous, excited and wary as they lined up to get their pink T-shirt emblazoned with “Power, Flexibility, Focus, Balance” on the front and “GALS” on the back. GALS — short...
By Mike Szymanski | August 8, 2016
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California sprints to the head of the class on sex education, as all students this year will be taught about consent
He sexually assaulted an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. But Stanford student Brock Turner received a mere six-month prison sentence for his “20 minutes of action,” because anything longer would have had “a severe impact on him,” the judge in the case decided. The story, which generated enormous outrage after the young woman’s powerful victim...
By Kate Stringer | August 8, 2016
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Scott Folsom, longtime watchdog of LA Unified, dies at 69
By Howard Blume Scott Folsom, a freelance Hollywood producer who never made a big splash in show business, found his true calling in another role, that of official and unofficial watchdog over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Folsom, 69, died Thursday after a two-year battle with cancer that almost never kept him from school board...
By LA School Report | August 8, 2016
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Morning Read: Ballot measure may end ban on bilingual education
Not a bang but a whimper: Bilingual education ban’s likely exit Eighteen years ago, bilingual education was about as hot a political topic as there was in California – today, not so much, despite the best efforts of Donald Trump to make immigration a wedge issue. This November, the question comes back as voters have...
By LA School Report | August 8, 2016
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ICEF charter opens first new building after bringing schools from the brink of bankruptcy
Yvonne Dunigan walked the halls of the new $19.6 million school on South Crenshaw Boulevard and remembered when on that same street corner there was a Ford dealership where she bought her car 13 years ago. She’s still driving that same car, but much else about the landscape has changed. “I knew someday that this...
By Mike Szymanski | August 5, 2016
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Morning Read: Los Angeles school eyed for ‘After School Satan’
The Satanic Temple of Los Angeles reached out to Superintendent Michelle King to host a club at an elementary school The Satanic Temple hopes to compete with a Christian after-school program, saying: “We only ask we get to do the same thing as the evangelicals.” Satanic Temple is specifically requesting to host a program at...
By Mike Szymanski | August 5, 2016
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California NAACP proposes moratorium on new public charter schools, sparking backlash from other civil rights advocates
The NAACP may soon have one message for state governments and others looking to expand charter schools in urban communities: don’t. During its 2016 National Convention last month, the group’s delegates passed a resolution that reaffirmed the association’s opposition to spending public money on charter schools but went a step further by calling for a...
By Naomi Nix | August 4, 2016
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LA Unified reopens all district libraries — but forgets about the books
For the first time since some school libraries were shuttered during budget cuts in 2008, all of the LA Unified school libraries will be back up and running when school starts again on August 16. But according to the latest district estimates, the majority of students across Los Angeles will still be forced to rely...
By Mike Szymanski | August 4, 2016