High Schools

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

A 23-year-old gang member who shot and killed a high school football star he mistook for a rival gangster in 2008 should be put to death, a Los Angeles jury decided Wednesday. Jurors reached the verdict after about a week of testimony in the penalty phase of the trial for Pedro Espinoza, a member of the 18th Street gang. The panel was asked to decide what punishment Espinoza should receive for the slaying of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw II. Prosecutors said Shaw was killed execution-style because he was a young black male carrying a red Spider-Man backpack, which led Espinoza to believe he was a Bloods gang member.

Some came to California as infants or teen-agers, from war-ravaged countries or impoverished towns, where education was an impossible dream. Some were born in the United States, children of middle-class parents who wanted them to achieve more than they had. Others were brilliant beyond their years, excelling in school from the moment they walked through its doors.

As if on cue, all faces turn alertly toward the front of the classroom where Bridget Brownell has set up a slide show at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. They are about to view diseased sex organs. "First," she said, "let me take attendance, and then I will shock you. " Brownell belongs to a declining breed: She's a certified health instructor leading a one-semester health class in a California public high school. The Los Angeles Unified School District nearly killed health as a required course, to focus more on its new mandate that all students complete college-prep classes.

Recently, Robert Carrelli has thought a great deal about Mare Winningham. Carrelli, head of the Chatsworth High School drama department for 20 years, directed the Emmy Award-winning actress in a production of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" during the late 1970s. He is directing the same play--set to open Dec. 2--with a new group of students. But the memory of Winningham's brilliance remains strong.

The Arizona Legislature has never been shy about weighing in on hot-button issues. (Exhibit A: SB 1070 , the state's illegal immigration law.) The latest such move: a vote to allow public and charter schools to teach students about the Bible. The Arizona House this week voted to allow high schools to offer a class called “The Bible and Its Influence on Western Culture,” which would focus on how the Old and New Testaments have influenced everything from law to literature.  According to the Arizona Republic, five states already provide similar classes: Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Oklahoma.  The Arizona bill's opponents don't dispute that the Bible is a ripe topic for academic study.

As Southern California awoke to the wreckage from a recent massive windstorm, music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr. was assessing a different sort of devastation in his band room at South Gate High School . Thieves had pried open a door and torn the room apart while hunting for a specific instrument. "All they took were tubas," Gonzalez said. Losses included an upright concert tuba and a silver sousaphone - or marching-band tuba - worth a combined $13,000. Several weeks earlier, band members at Centennial High School in Compton experienced a similar shock when they found that eight sousaphones were missing.

Los Angeles school district officials are moving to retake control of Birmingham Community Charter High School, citing numerous alleged problems at the campus that broke away from the system three years ago. L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy has faulted the leaders of the Lake Balboa campus for allegedly mishandling student expulsions and services to disabled students and for failing to respond adequately to allegations of racial discrimination. School officials said they are looking into the allegations, but are aware of no major problems.

When David Huffaker moved to Castaic in 1985, he was certain that one day his children would graduate from a brand new high school that the community had been promised for so long. But his son is 20 now and serving his Mormon mission in Salt Lake City and Wyoming. His daughter is a senior at West Ranch High in Valencia, the next suburb over. And Castaic still lacks its own high school. Residents in this semirural canyon community on the far edge of Los Angeles County have waited more than a decade for a high school to call their own. They voted -- twice now -- in favor of multimillion-dollar bond measures that they expected would go toward building the campus and waited in frustration as site after site was considered and rejected.

The first thing a visitor notices about Los Angeles International Charter High School is its campus, a leafy, hilltop aerie that looks like the private school it once was. Then there are the students, preppy in white shirts and ties, their black sweater vests emblazoned with the school seal. Appearances aren't necessarily deceiving: L.A. International does have an exceptional campus, perched on a bluff in the tiny community of Hermon, overlooking Highland Park. It formerly was the campus of the now-defunct Pacific Christian High School.

ROME - A bomb exploded at the entrance of a high school in southern Italy named for the wife of a slain anti-Mafia judge, killing a 16-year-old girl and injuring at least four people as students were arriving at school for Saturday classes. Police were investigating the possibility of organized-crime involvement in the attack in the Adriatic port city of Brindisi, but authorities said it was too early to exclude other possibilities. They noted that the school is named for Francesca Morvillo, the wife of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

MUSIC Proving they have way better taste in music than you did in high school, the kids at Champs Charter School are putting on a music fest with some the best names in the L.A. beat scene, including Shlohmo and Jonwayne, alongside a bevy of food trucks and school group performances. We already feel old marveling at the precocity. Champs Charter High School, 6952 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys. noon Sat. $10. aertalk.com

Rank, School (Record) Division 1. ORANGE LUTHERAN (22-3) SS1 2. MATER DEI (21-5) SS1 3. EL TORO (25-5) SS1 4. PACIFICA (23-5) SS2 5. HARVARD-WESTLAKE (23-4-1) SS2 6. LONG BEACH POLY (24-6) SS1 7. RIVERSIDE NORTH (24-5) SS1 8. BONITA (26-2) SS3 9. CYPRESS (24-6) SS2 10. LAKEWOOD (25-6) SS1 11. AGOURA (22-4-1) SS1 12. ALEMANY (21-6-1) SS1 13. LONG BEACH WILSON (23-7) SS1 14. REDLANDS (22-5)

The number of eligible California high school graduates entering the state's public four-year universities has plunged in the last five years, as budget-strapped institutions increasingly adopt practices to reduce enrollment, a new study has found. At University of California and California State University campuses, enrollment rates dropped by one-fifth, to fewer than 18% of all state high school graduates in 2010, from about 22% in 2007. The report, released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that these declines have occurred even as demand has risen: The number of high school graduates in California reached an all-time high of 405,000 in 2010; the number of seniors who completed college admission requirements increased dramatically, as did the number of students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams.

A Washington Post investigation into Mitt Romney's years at the Cranbrook School in Michigan, which included a disturbing account of Romney bullying a student who later turned out to be gay, earned an unusual apology from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Thursday morning. The incident came to light one day after President Barack Obama said he supports same-sex marriage, and Romney reiterated his opposition. “Back in high school, I did some dumb things,” Romney said during a radio interview Thursday morning.

The 17-year-old football star's skin was black and his backpack red. Were it not for those colors, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday, Jamiel Shaw II might never have been murdered by an 18th Street gang member eager to earn his stripes. Deputy Dist. Atty. Allyson Ostrowski said Pedro Espinoza, now 23, shot Shaw execution-style in 2008 thinking he was a Bloods gang member because he was African American and was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack. Shaw, who played for Los Angeles High School, was killed in March of that year just a few houses away from his Arlington Heights home.

Better medical care for high school athletes is an oft-stated goal, but trying to mandate it through legislation has been a political football in California for years. Nearly a decade ago, Assembly Bill 760 was passed, providing $500,000 to place certified athletic trainers at some schools. Before it could happen, though, the money was swept back into the general fund to help replace budget shortfalls. The California Athletic Trainers' Assn. has spearheaded several legislation drives since then, with the stated goal of "requiring licensure for all athletic trainers" and "for every school in California to employ one. " None of the bills has passed.

Eli Kase of Van Nuys Birmingham and Melanie Henson of Woodland Hills El Camino Real won boys' and girls' City Section one-meter diving titles at Valley College.

A court ruling has invalidated the lease of a high-performing charter school in Glassell Park, threatening it with closure when the school year ends in June. The Alliance Environmental Science and Technology School, whose students have some of the highest test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District, will lose its campus under a ruling last week by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ann I. Jones. Her ruling came in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District filed by a coalition of community groups over the college district's compliance with environmental laws.