Students and staff at the Emerson Adult Center are concerned that their building will be taken over by a charter school and that LA Unified is growing less committed to adult education. The message from LA Unified’s board: relax. The board and LAUSD officials say there is no commitment to separate the adult programs from the...

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...

An independent Financial Review Panel yesterday detailed drastic measures that LA Unified must take to remain afloat in what school board President Steve Zimmer calls a “perfect storm” of financial trouble for the district. “There’s a fiscal cliff that is immediate if different decisions are not made,” warned Bill Lockyer, the former California attorney general and...

LA Unified school board member Scott Schmerelson is bringing a resolution before the board today, asking it to go on record opposing a plan by the Broad Foundation to add 260 new charter schools to the district over the next eight years. The plan has drawn rebuke from other board members and the LA teachers union,...

It’s one thing when LA Unified’s Chief Financial Officer appears before the school board and warns of budgetary troubles ahead, based on current projections and obligations. That’s her job. It’s quite another when a panel of outsiders, brought in to take a fresh look, reaches the same conclusions and expresses them in a hair-raising way...

LA Unified is on the brink of a severe financial crisis and if officials don’t act now, the whole district could go bankrupt. That’s the overall conclusion of a report by an outside panel asked to look at the financial situation of LAUSD. Its findings are scheduled to be presented at the regular school board meeting...

Despite recent media reports that the arts are doing poorly at LA Unified schools, the director of the district’s arts programs, Rory Pullens, said quite to the contrary, things are better than they have been in a long time; it’s just that nobody knows it. “We are really encouraged and really excited about what’s been...

At a time of high employment demand for computer experts, fewer than half of LA Unified’s 98 traditional high schools offer computer science classes. “We could have students go through LAUSD without any access to computer science at all,” Suyen Moncada-Machado, a district instructional specialist told a district board committee yesterday as part of a...

The federal government has awarded LAUSD a $700,000 grant to assist struggling at-risk students to stay in school and keep on track to get to college or into the workforce. The grant will build on the district’s collaboration with the Los Angeles city government, the Los Angeles County Departments of Mental Health, Probation and Health Services...

Months after LA School Report found confusion, dated information or simply no information on the websites of LA Unified board members, a number of them still appear to be squandering them as their most direct social media asset to reach constituents. In a self-described era of board openness and transparency, some members have made significant improvements on their...