LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines said yesterday he plans to initiate an immediate nationwide search to replace the district’s out-going chief of external affairs, Edgar Zazueta. “We are beginning the search immediately, we have put the word out,” Cortines told LA School Report at the Instructional Technology Initiative Task Force meeting at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex....

By Kate Schweitzer Share this everywhere… Alyssa is 7!!! Not only is her mother a military veteran but, she took the time to teach her… Posted by Brenda Hatcher on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 When a teacher reprimands a student, you can safely assume the kid in question did something wrong. Maybe she pushed a classmate in line, or...

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines dropped some news on the crowd Tuesday when he announced that Chief of External Affairs Edgar Zazueta is leaving the district. Zazueta, who was onstage at the time, moderating the district’s “Back to School” forum at the  Edward R. Roybal Learning Center,  is the district’s chief lobbyist in Sacramento and Washington D.C. “This...

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines is praising the high performance of the district’s magnet schools on on the recent Smarter Balanced standardized tests, which based on a district analysis shows 65 percent of them scoring higher than the state average in English language arts and 56 percent of them scoring higher than average in math. “The performance...

By Issie Lapowsky On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in San Marcos, California, Guadalupe Lopez is guiding me through Alvin Dunn Elementary’s concrete grid of a campus. Dressed in a black sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse ears on the hood, she’s striding along with the eager confidence of a soon-to-be 7th grader just weeks away from the first day of...

An advisory committee studying options for LA Unified’s academic calendar are considering six different plans, and one them is a radically different approach that would shorten the summer break to five weeks and increase the winter break to seven weeks. In addition, the plan would potentially add a 20-day “winter intersession” for some students to...

LA Unified listed the names of the first 117 schools to get Transitional Kindergarten (or TK) classes in order to replace the closed School Readiness Language Development Program (SRLDP) classrooms. The rest of the 173 schools with the SRLDP pre-school programs will make the transition in the 2016-2017 school year. In the plan, none of...

This 12-minute video was posted on the LAUSD website today and will be shown to all 6th to 12th graders to warn them of the dangers of “sexting.” It is part of a campaign that will include lesson plans, posters, bilingual tip sheets and other resources for 900 elementary, middle and high schools. The video...

Hundreds of LA Unified employees and parents filed into the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center‘s downtown auditorium yesterday for a “Back to School at LAUSD” forum, hosted by Superintendent Ramon Cortines and other key district leaders. The event wasn’t called to unveil a specific agenda, but more for an open panel discussion on issues facing the...