LA School Report

“Wooooow. They built this just for us?” By Glenn Gritzner This week, a significant milestone is being achieved for the students of LAUSD that deserves to be celebrated. The final school — Bell High School — is coming off the year-round calendar, meaning that every school in LAUSD will now be on the traditional nine-month...

When the Maywood Center for Enriched Studies welcomes students next week, it will be the last school — the 131st — to open under the district’s more than $20 billion school building project. But as the district’s enrollment has plummeted since the building program began, the state of the district is far different now than...

The deportation order for a Los Angeles father, Romulo Avelica-González, has been removed by the Board of Immigration Appeals and he could be released by the end of the month. His attorney, Alan Diamante, said Avelica-González still has a pending immigration case that has been returned to a local immigration court, including his pending U...

*UPDATED LA Unified is opening its first all-boys school next week, but so far only half the number of hoped-for students have enrolled. The Boys Academic Leadership Academy is starting with sixth- and seventh-grades, offering 100 spots for each grade. Eventually, the South LA school is approved to go through high school, opening a new grade each...

The school year starts Tuesday for most of the 664,000 LA Unified students, but don’t plan your vacation for late next summer yet, because it’s not clear when school will start next year. The second-largest school district in the nation has flip-flopped a number of times about when school should begin, and there are at...

LA Unified administrators plan to review a controversial plan that requires all middle schools and high schools to perform random searches every day of student lockers and to scan students with metal-detector wands. School board President Ref Rodriguez said Superintendent Michelle King contacted his office on Monday to discuss the issue and review the district’s...

The number of LA Unified employees housed in “teacher jail” while the district is investigating disciplinary complaints against them has dropped by nearly a quarter, but officials are projecting it will cost roughly the same to pay their salaries as they await adjudication. The number of teachers who are “reassigned, pending investigation,” the official name,...

The nation’s second-largest school district will start a new school year next week “standing with immigrant families,” which it signaled Tuesday with a new website and guides that pull together resources for immigrant students and their families. Superintendent Michelle King used her annual “State of the District” address Tuesday to unveil the “We are one...

Superintendent Michelle King gave her second “State of the District” speech on Tuesday morning, touting new accomplishments for LA Unified and new programs that got wild applause from the audience of mostly principals. A middle school pilot program trying out later start times, 10 early education dual-immersion language pilots in Korean and Spanish, 28 new transitional-kindergarten...

*UPDATED LA Unified’s former food services director who resigned under a cloud of controversy has been charged with 15 counts of misappropriation of public funds, embezzlement of public funds, conflict of interest, perjury, and forgery. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced the charges Tuesday against David Binkle. Binkle, 55, pleaded not guilty in...