Los Angeles Schools

Debra Engle went to a celebration of the city school district's arts program with a dark cloud hanging over her head. Like almost 7,000 other school district employees, Engle had received a preliminary layoff notice earlier this year and could lose her job by midsummer. For the last several years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has faced large budget shortfalls and the school board has approved cutting positions and programs to try to balance the budget. The nation's second-largest school system is facing an estimated $408-million shortfall, and many unions have agreed to their members' taking four unpaid days off. But, depending on the state's budget, district officials could still approve cutting jobs over the summer.

Three decades after leaving her native Panama, Vielka McFarlane hasn't forgotten how a first-class education can transform a poor kid with a hard-knocks life. The Los Angeles charter school operator remembers leaner days and long hours helping her struggling family sell empanadas from a street cart. Her eyes mist when she speaks of her hardworking parents, who sacrificed to send her to the best schools in Panama, despite discrimination from that society's upper-class, and then to Los Angeles in 1982.

The cafeteria fund for the Los Angeles Unified School District has run a multimillion-dollar deficit since 2007, when board members approved a plan to provide health benefits for part-time cafeteria workers, district officials said last week. The benefits have helped low-paid workers who need healthcare assistance, and the expense isn't the only one pushing food operations into the red. But the fund's cash shortfall has exacerbated a systemwide budget crunch caused mainly by the state budget crisis and declining enrollment in the state's largest school system.

The race between Bennett Kayser, the teachers union-backed candidate, and Luis Sanchez, the mayor's pick, for the Los Angeles Board of Education remained unclear Wednesday as Kayser claimed a thin lead and thousands of ballots still needed to be counted. Kayser, a retired educator, had received about 300 more votes than Sanchez, the chief of staff to the school board president, who was backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several labor groups and other elected officials. But more than 13,000 ballots remained to be counted throughout the city, according to the city clerk's office, and many of them are for other races, not the runoff for the school board's 5th District, which stretches from Los Feliz to Maywood.

Weeks after stepping down as chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District's $20-billion construction program, James D. Sohn took a job at a company that has profited from public contracts he approved. Sohn's hiring by Seville Construction Services Inc. of Pasadena highlights the tight bonds between the public officials in charge of building Los Angeles schools and the companies they hire to manage construction. Sohn, now executive vice president of Seville, is the third consecutive chief facilities executive at L.A. Unified to resign and go to work for a construction management firm whose work he had overseen for the district.

The Los Angeles Times on Sunday is releasing a major update to its elementary school teacher ratings, underscoring the large disparities throughout the nation's second-largest school district in instructors' abilities to raise student test scores. The posting — the only publication of such teacher performance data in the nation — contains value-added ratings for about 11,500 third- through fifth-grade teachers, nearly double the number released last August. It also reflects changes in the way the scores were calculated and displayed.

Just shy of a year ago, the students on Granada Hills Charter High School's Academic Decathlon team told themselves that they would win a national title. It took months of practice, weekends and holidays lost, and spring break spent hunkered down in a classroom, studying guides thicker than a phone book. But in a hotel banquet hall here Saturday, the students embraced each other, their parents screamed, their coaches looked to be in a state of shock: Granada Hills was the national champion.

Los Angeles schools will remove high-sugar chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk from their lunch and breakfast menus after food activists campaigned for the change, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced this week. Deasy revealed his intent, which will require approval by the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education, during an appearance with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" Tuesday night. The policy change is part of a carefully negotiated happy ending between the Los Angeles Unified School District and Oliver.

In Houston, school district officials introduced a test score-based evaluation system to determine teacher bonuses, then — in the face of massive protests — jettisoned the formula after one year to devise a better one. In New York, teachers union officials are fighting the public release of ratings for more than 12,000 teachers, arguing that the estimates can be drastically wrong. Despite such controversies, Los Angeles school district leaders are poised to plunge ahead with their own confidential "value-added" ratings this spring, saying the approach is far more objective and accurate than any other evaluation tool available.