LA School Report

*UPDATED It took a series of violent crimes on and near school campuses to spur LA Unified’s strict policy requiring every secondary school conduct random daily metal detector searches. Daily searches have been required for more than six years, but the policy is now being reevaluated as the district called this year for principals to...

LA Unified’s daily random weapons searches get mixed reviews from the students themselves. Saisha Smith from Dorsey High says it’s a violation of her civil rights that “wastes valuable teaching time when all they’re doing is taking away my hand sanitizer and cough drops.” But student school board member Benjamin Holtzman from Hamilton High says,...

Weapons found on or near LA Unified school campuses increased by 2.7 percent last year, to 568. The number of rifles and shotguns more than doubled. Those numbers for the 2016-17 school year were revealed last Tuesday at a special meeting of the school board to review the district’s policy of mandatory daily random searches...

When my parents moved our family here, I knew it was their dream to come to the United States to provide a better life for my siblings and myself. At the time, I couldn’t put that into context. As an 11-year-old kid, far away from our home in Guatemala, all that consumed me was the...

The number of homeless students at LA Unified grew by 50 percent last year to 17,258 students — the highest number recorded by the district. Because of that, you might think that LA Unified would be among the school districts in the state with the highest proportion of homeless students, but it doesn’t even crack the...

In the desert just south of San Diego, towering 18 to 30 feet in the air, are eight prototypes for the wall President Donald Trump has promised to build along the 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. But as the administration tests designs for keeping undocumented Mexicans out of the U.S. and cracks down on...

Creating a partnership between parents and schools to achieve student success has been the mission of Families in Schools (FIS) since its foundation in 2000. For the past five years, under the leadership of Oscar Cruz, the organization’s president, that mission of developing parent engagement across schools in Los Angeles has expanded to other school...

Diana Montelongo’s immigration story resembles those of a lot of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients. She remembers living in a small town in Mexico and walking to the alfalfa fields from her grandparents’ house. She doesn’t remember a whole lot else. That’s because a “coyote” drove her across the U.S.-Mexico border when she was...

Even though it’s eight months until next year’s primary election, the candidates hoping to be California’s next governor are starting to reveal their positions on education. The key issues being discussed? Whether mayors should be given control of their local school boards, a moratorium on new charter schools, and more money for early childhood education....

Six years ago when I became the principal of Jordan High School (part of the Partnership for LA Schools), in Watts, I walked onto a campus where 20 percent of students were suspended, 34 percent graduated, and 62 percent felt they were safe on campus. In 2016-2017, we had a 2.0 percent suspension rate, we...