This morning, 350 students at Valley Academy of Arts and Sciences in Granada Hills are getting computer devices. The rest of the school’s 800 students already have theirs. And, by next week five schools will receive iPads, laptops and Chromebooks. Another 30 schools are in line for their devices, 19,000 of them, said Sophia Mendoza,...

A group of LA Unified students joined local and national educators last week to describe academic challenges they face and to suggest ideas for what could help them. The four-hour discussion last Thursday evening kicked off a weekend of activities sponsored by UTLA in conjunction with the “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African...

The first big step was getting a pay raise. That happened earlier this year. So what’s next for UTLA? United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl says extensive input from teachers over the summer points to conditions in the classroom and the future of health benefits as among the issues most important to the union membership. He...

LA Unified said today its inspector general is “looking into” the possibility that nearly 100 district employees used district email addresses to contact ashleymadison.com, a website that promotes extra-marital affairs, calling itself “the most famous name in infidelity and married dating.” The district’s legal office has sent employees a memo yesterday, reminding them that the...

The AUP is becoming the RUP. “That’s to prevent unauthorized access and … to comply with CIPA, COPPA and FERPA. Furthermore, the RUP clarifies the educational purpose of District technology.” Got it? That’s an excerpt from a new document that parents and students were given last week for any plan of going online or using...

The anticipated thousands of 7th graders being sent home for not having their vaccinations didn’t quite happen last week, the first week of school. LA Unified students were at 93 percent compliance, according to Ellen T. Morgan of the district communications office. That percentage “increases every day,” she said. There are about 36,000 7th graders...

LA Unified students are learning about water conservation methods needed locally because of the drought, and the effort got a big boost last week from a $50,000 federal grant. An award from the Environmental Protection Agency is intended to support a pilot program to teach students how to conserve water. It’s part of the “One...

For most kids, getting expelled in the seventh grade for bringing a weapon to school is the beginning of a sad story, the first step into the school-to-prison pipeline. But for Eduardo Pacheco, a recent graduate of LA Unified’s Woodrow Wilson High School, it ended up being a low point from which he slowly rose to...