LA School Report

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Supreme Court grants emergency order to block transgender male student in Virginia from using boys’ restroom The Supreme Court intervened for the first time Wednesday in the controversy over transgender rights and blocked a lower court ruling that would have allowed a transgender boy to use the high school restroom that fits his “gender identity.” In...

Seven months out from the primary, L.A. Unified school board member Monica Garcia has already raised nearly 150 times more money than her opponent, including donations from former L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and both charter school and L.A. district employees. Garcia, seeking her third term on the seven-member board, collected $119,858 in donations between...