Los Angeles Unified School District

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday approved nearly $1.6 billion in cuts over the next three years that will result in layoffs and increased class sizes and could one day mean the elimination of such key programs as all-day kindergarten and summer school.

Because of the state's budget uncertainty, the Los Angeles school board agreed Tuesday to potentially lay off up to 2,300 teachers if no other options become available this year. The Los Angeles Unified School District faces up to a $250-million shortfall, and the move could shave about $50 million from that figure. But Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, in his first board meeting as head of the district, said he hoped not to send the notices. "This is strictly a place-holder," he said.

An 18-year-old former student at Foshay Learning Center testified Thursday that she told a school administrator that she had had a sexual relationship with an assistant principal and that the administrator had advised her to recant statements she had made to police after she expressed concern that the man could go to jail.

The financially strapped Los Angeles Unified School District says it cannot afford to hire any new teachers next year from Teach for America, a prestigious program that places high-achieving college graduates in low-income, underperforming schools. The district has worked with the nonprofit since the early 1990s; more than 600 Teach for America members have taught in L.A. Unified classrooms since 2004.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday he will push the school district to allow outside operators to bid for control of hundreds of campuses, a move he described as the centerpiece of education reform for his second term. The proposal drew the ire of the teachers union, which has strongly criticized the mayor's own school-improvement efforts at 10 schools, including Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights. Villaraigosa, in turn, called the union "the biggest defender of the status quo."

Sipping a cup of coffee in the Los Angeles courthouse where he is on trial for fraud, math teacher Matthias Vheru said all he wanted to do was write the best algebra book possible to help his students and those of his colleagues. "I spent my life trying to help underachieving kids," said Vheru, wearing a tie with a mathematical equation that read: 2 teach is 2 touch life 4 ever. "I'm just trying to make the language of math easy to understand."

When the writer's strike left him idle last year, Jeremy Kromberg decided to give up on the film industry, where he had worked in postproduction, and slide in on the ground floor of the next big thing. That is how the 37-year-old from Hollywood found himself at an adult school on the Eastside on Monday, practicing his technique for fastening solar panels onto rooftops. "We just do it over and over," he said. "We build them up and tear them down just as fast as we can." Not that he minds.

As many as 2,300 teachers could face midyear layoffs because of the state budget crisis, Los Angeles Unified School District officials said Tuesday. The state deficit has created a shortfall of at least $250 million in the school district's nearly $6-billion budget, prompting officials to propose sending the layoff notices to 1,690 elementary school teachers and 600 math and English teachers in middle and high schools.

No teachers will lose their jobs this school year, Los Angeles Unified School District officials announced Friday, a calculated gamble that will preserve classroom continuity in the short term but lead to a larger deficit next year. The decision reverses course from last week, when the school board voted to give Supt. Ramon C. Cortines the authority to send pink slips to nearly 2,300 instructors.

More than five years ago, Ivy Academia's campus was a Hilton hotel. Students poured water from silver pitchers and teachers used ballrooms as classrooms, taping paper to the walls as modified blackboards. The Woodland Hills charter school today has four locations, and officials are still fighting the Los Angeles Unified School District for a permanent campus. And they, like many other charters in the district, aren't having much luck. The Board of Education voted Jan.