Students explain how Linked Learning works at LAUSD schools

A group of college students told the LA Unified board this week that its effort to reach non-Internet-connected people as part of the superintendent search was inadequate. “We walked through neighborhoods and found more than 200 community members who lacked Internet access and didn’t have a means of travel to the community meetings, but care about education...

The LA Unified School Board convened at 10 a.m. and didn’t adjourn until more than 12 hours later yesterday, in a series of meetings that ran the gamut from moving forward on finding a new superintendent, to confronting ugly budget realities to diving into the minutiae of charter school applications. For background information, each member...

In presenting a detailed accounting of community input for LA Unified’s superintendent search, the president of the search firm urged the seven board members to reach consensus on what they are looking for in their ideal candidate. “You do not want to make this decision on four votes,” said Hank Gmitro of Hazard, Young, Attea...

It doesn’t matter if the next superintendent is a he or she, but it does matter if the he or she is bilingual. The person should be good at communicating and love Los Angeles. And, the candidate should have been a teacher at one point in his or her career. Those are some of the...

The union representing school support personnel is pressing LAUSD to provide the same health benefits for all its members, fearing that the district wants to create a second-class level of employees. Among the 35,000 members of Service Employees International Union Local 99 (SEIU) are about 7,000 who work as teacher aides, community representatives, after-school coaches and...

In what seemed to be a routine agenda item last night, the LA Unified school board found itself debating a fundamental issue: When you have a few extra bucks do you save for a rainy day or do you pay off your debts right away? The question arose when the board was trying to figure...

Even before the superintendent search team passes out the first public survey, members of the LA Unified school board yesterday raised questions over questions that they want the community to consider in finding a successor to Ramon Cortines. The board held most of the discussion in a closed meeting last night with the search team...

Steve Zimmer may think that being elected as the new LA Unified board president was the tough part. But now he has to live up to the expectations of his fellow members of the board. Even before he was voted in unanimously last week, the board members laid out their expectations of the future president....

Among the non-iPad and MiSiS issues before the LA Unified board yesterday was approving the hiring of Ruth Pérez as the deputy superintendent of instruction. The vote was 6-0, with Monica Ratliff abstaining. Most recently superintendent of  Norwalk-La Mirada school district, Perez has also served as a teacher and administrator in Florida and as chief...