Los Angeles Unified School District

Garfield High, which became nationally known as the real-life setting for the film "Stand and Deliver," will be among the initial 12 local campuses, including six high schools, eligible for takeover because of persistent academic failure, officials announced Friday. The nation's second-largest school system will invite bidders from inside and outside the district to run these schools next year through a proposal process that is still being developed. The Los Angeles Board of Education authorized this school-control plan in August; it applies to low-achieving existing schools and to 51 new campuses set to open over the next four years in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Guy Mehula, the highly regarded head of the Los Angeles Unified School District's massive school construction program, has resigned after an apparent power struggle with district leadership. In a brief letter to subordinates Monday, Mehula gave no hint of discord, painting his departure as an opportunity to search for new challenges. "The work that we have done together and the investments we have made in our schools, community, and economy are significant," he wrote. But critics say Mehula's resignation is fallout from a growing rift between his facilities services division and district headquarters, prompted by policy changes made by Supt.

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.

Los Angeles' top education official went door to door Monday to urge teens to return to school, netting about a dozen students with the effort and drawing attention to a growing problem. Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was among 150 staffers and school board members who joined campus employees in the first-time, broad-based initiative, which targeted 10 truancy-plagued middle and high schools. This school year, about 20,000 of the district's 680,000 students have failed to show up as expected, officials said.

Veteran substitute teachers, who have recently lost teaching assignments because of an effort to help laid-off full-time instructors, won't be getting the work back any time soon, Los Angeles school officials confirmed this week. L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines stands by a one-year deal signed in July with teachers union President A.J. Duffy, according to a district statement. Under the pact, full-time teachers who were laid off have priority for random substitute assignments, even if that means passing over veteran substitute teachers with more seniority.

For the first time in Los Angeles, parents will be able to initiate major reforms at low-performing individual schools, rather than waiting for the school district to make changes, under a plan unveiled Tuesday. This new parental power has emerged as part of a school-control resolution that allows for groups inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District to take over campuses. Supt. Ramon C. Cortines has included 12 underachieving schools and 18 new campuses in the process, but the parent option could add others to the list, especially in future years.

An apparent exodus of students to charter schools, combined with an overall enrollment decline, is disrupting Los Angeles-area schools and exacerbating an ongoing budget crisis. Local independently run charter schools added more than 9,500 students this fall, a surge of almost 19% to more than 60,000. At the same time, enrollment is down more than 19,000 students, about 3%, at schools affiliated with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Total district enrollment has fallen to 678,441, down from a peak of 747,009 in 2003.

The application deadline for the popular local magnet-school program is three weeks earlier this school year. Parents will have until Dec. 18 to turn in applications for their choice among 173 magnet programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Magnets were established in the late 1970s to promote voluntary integration -- and in that aspect they have achieved limited success. But many have become wildly popular academic showcases for the nation's second-largest school system.

Lowe's Cos. posted fiscal third-quarter profit that met analysts' estimates. Net income fell to $344 million, or 23 cents a share, from $488 million, or 33 cents, a year earlier, the home-improvement retailer said. Excluding a write-down in the value of some stores and a tax benefit, earnings totaled 24 cents a share, in line with analysts' estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue declined 3% to $11.4 billion in the three months that ended Oct. 30.

A relic of the tortured Belmont Learning Complex project was laid to rest last month when school officials voted to spend $35.9 million to turn an abandoned shopping center shell beneath the school into a training and testing center for teachers. The commercial space was to have been part of an ambitious re-imagination of what a school could be -- as well as a potential money-generator.