LA Unified campuses are safer this year with increased security efforts that reflect concerns over school violence, particularly shooters that might make their way on to campus. The district this year has implemented new training and new policies, with an increased number of safety personnel at elementary schools and other campuses. Steve Zipperman, the district’s...

As LA Unified continues distributing iPads, the district for the first time is providing cost estimates for continuing the program beyond its current end date, December 2015. And in a presentation planned for tomorrow’s school board meeting, the Common Core Technology Project committee, chaired by board member Monica Ratliff, is also revealing several possibilities for how...

Either as a response to iPad problems or as prelude to the LA Unified School Board’s meeting tomorrow that’s focusing on technology — or maybe both — the district sent around a one-pager last week to set the record straight on the iPad program. It takes the form of “myth busting.” Here is a concise...

A new proposed statewide ballot initiative that would allow school districts to fire employees accused of abusing children or selling drugs to children has been submitted for certification and could go before voters a year from now. LA School Report has learned that the initiative, called “Stop Child Molesters, Sexual Abusers, and Drug Dealers from...

What’s the reaction to the Phase 1 rollout of LA Unified’s iPad program? By one very unscientific measure, not so bad. At the request of Monica Ratliff, who chairs the board’s Common Core Technology Committee, the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the group representing school principals and assistant principals, surveyed schools among the first 47...

Despite all the sky-is-falling-rhetoric over the past week, things at LA Unified are much as they were: John Deasy is still the man in charge as superintendent, and teachers union president Warren Fletcher continues as his chief adversary. While Deasy was keeping out of the spotlight today — he was attending an event in Albuquerque...

LA School Report has learned the deal to extend the contract of LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy might not have been possible without the involvement of former LA mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. According to three people with knowledge of events, none of whom would speak for attribution, Villaraigosa made a flurry of calls to both Deasy and...