LA School Report

The March 5 elections are less than three months away, and campaigns and advocates are busy hiring campaign consultants. The San Francisco-based SCN Strategies political consulting firm has confirmed that they will manage the independent expenditure (IE) campaign for the Coalition for School Reform. Meantime, three individual candidates — both union-endorsed and otherwise — have hired SG&A Campaigns to...

LAPD to Step up Presence at Elementary, Middle Schools Chief Charlie Beck sets a goal of having uniformed officers visit campuses every day, saying this was the ‘new reality’ the department must address. LA Times See also: KCET, KPCC, LAist Districts Face Questions in Spending Long-Term Bonds for Short-Lived Technology Last month, the Bond Oversight...

Sunday’s LA Daily News picks up on the Board of Education’s new requirement to approve grant applications ahead of time, reporting that a majority of the Board feared that Superintendent John Deasy and his staff had “hijacked” the grant application process but that their votes had set off a string of events that “could stem the...

Man Arrested After Threatening to Shoot up L.A. Schools, Police Say A Los Angeles man was arrested Sunday in connection with a Facebook post that threatened to conduct shootings at multiple area elementary schools, people familiar with the investigation said. LA Times LAPD to Beef up Security at K-8 Schools LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announces...

The Los Angeles City Clerk’s office released the final lineup of qualifying LAUSD Board candidates on Friday, December 14. Here it is: To see the Clerk’s office’s full press release, click here.

The media tends to pay a lot of attention to UTLA, the powerful local union that represents classroom teachers. LA School Report is no different. But there’s another union that arguably just as influential when it comes to LAUSD issues: SEIU Local 99, which represents non-certificated school employees (also called classified employees) such as teacher assistants, bus...

Both LAUSD and UTLA issued statements in response to the rampage at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut this morning, in which the assailant is reported to have killed nearly 20 children and several adults, including his mother, a kindergarten teacher at the school, and the school principal.  Read below, via HuffPostLA

LAUSD — specifically “LA Unified School District” — was one of the most frequent searches on Google for the LA area in 2012, notes the blog LAist — along with pop culture and mainstream topics like Whitney Houston, Lakers, and Batman.  Is the district’s search popularity because of increased interest, or frustration?  Nobody really knows.

There could be small signs of change going on inside UTLA. This week’s internal elections for the 350-member House of Representatives were contested in 22 of 32 districts for the first time in recent years.  Some of those seats were expected to have been won by a new caucus within UTLA, called NewTLA, which is...

It’s still very early goings in the school board race, but Antonio Sanchez is already emerging as the favorite in the East Valley’s District 6 — especially since Ernie Cardenas dropped out earlier this week (see: Cardenas Explains Withdrawal – Sort Of). The 30-year-old Sanchez aims to bridge the bitter divide between unions and school choice...