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...

Romulo Avelica-González, an undocumented immigrant and Los Angeles father who could have been deported to Mexico on Monday, was granted an “emergency stay of removal” by the Board of Immigration Appeals on Monday morning. Avelica-González, 49, will not be deported until the board reviews his case, according to his attorney, Alan Diamante. Avelica-González was arrested...

*UPDATED The election is 10 months away, but the two candidates for the state superintendent of schools have together raised nearly $2 million. Marshall Tuck, who narrowly lost the 2014 contest against Tom Torlakson, leads in fundraising, reporting $1.2 million in contributions from Jan. 1 through June 30, according to the latest reports filed with...

A network of charter schools in Northern California this month will launch the nation’s first teacher residency program focused on personalized learning. Twenty-four teachers-in-training will be part of Summit Public Schools’ first Summit Learning Residency Program, which will train teachers to lead students in a personalized learning classroom setting, a hallmark of the Summit model....

Half of high school students surveyed nationwide say they feel academically prepared for college, a new survey reports. YouthTruth, a national San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, surveyed 55,000 high school students between September 2015 and December 2016 in 21 states through anonymous online surveys about school climate and culture. It released Tuesday an analysis of the...