For Ivey Steinberg, the last straw occurred when her son, Jack, who uses a wheelchair, was left on the second floor during a fire drill at a public school. She needed to find a school that treated her son like all the others, and she found WISH (Westside Innovative School House) Charter. Then, she helped create...

* UPDATED Applications for six new charter schools will come before the LA Unified school board at its meeting tomorrow, the biggest wave of requests since the Broad Foundation proposed a plan to expand the number of charter schools in LAUSD. In addition, eight other charters are seeking renewals. While the board will not vote on...

Parents, teachers and school administrators from Larchmont Charter School in West Hollywood are protesting a cell phone tower proposed for a church bell tower next to the campus, with a large turnout expected at a public hearing at 6 p.m. tomorrow at the West Hollywood Library. The independent charter school is overseen by LAUSD but...

The Soulsville neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn. has the unpleasant distinction of being the 12th most dangerous in the country. Local residents have a one-in-nine chance of becoming a crime victim there within a year. The Soulsville Charter School is located on College Street, and the joke is that the street name is as close as most...

The LA Unified’s Office of Inspector General told a school board committee this week that it needs an additional $570,000 to audit charter schools, according to a recent report. The OIG once had a staff of 83 and is now down to 57, according to Inspector General Ken Bramlett, whose office oversees a $7.6 million budget....

An LAUSD budget committee discussing the unlikely possibility of establishing an all-charter school district today found merit nonetheless in seeking waivers from state rules that grant charters a greater degree of autonomy than traditional schools have. Mónica Ratliff, chair of the Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee, said that it didn’t seem fair that the charter...

In what appears to be a strategy to undermine the Broad Foundation’s proposal to move half of district students into charter schools, LA Unified board member Mónica Ratliff is exploring the possibility of turning the entire district into a charter organization. Part of the agenda of the Nov. 17 meeting of the district’s Budget, Facilities and...

In what looks to be a marathon LAUSD school board meeting tomorrow, members are scheduled to hear a detailed report on community input for the superintendent search, an analysis of a district finances conducted by non-district analysts and a number of proposals involving charter schools. At the open session at 10 a.m., the board will hear...

LA Unified School Board President Steve Zimmer kept up his attack against the Broad Foundation charter schools expansion plan, appearing on KNBC’s “News Conference” yesterday and calling the plan a “perversion of what the charter movement was supposed to be.” “The reason why I’m concerned is because this is really a business plan that doesn’t address all students,”...

The LA Unified board is going to the end of the earth, or close to it, to accelerate the search for the district’s next superintendent. The seven board members are gathering at 10 a.m. Sunday at the Point Fermin Outdoor Education Center in San Pedro, about a quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean, for a...