Magnet Schools

The deadline to apply for magnet schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District is Friday. The district receives up to 65,000 applications each year for an estimated 16,000 spots in magnet schools, which include some of the best-known campuses. Applications can be picked up at any district school, at any city library or on the 16th floor of district headquarters at 333 S. Beaudry Ave. in Los Angeles. Applications must be delivered to the district or be postmarked before 5 p.m. Friday.

When the 2011 winners of the coveted National Blue Ribbon Schools award were announced, only one of the 305 recipients was in Los Angeles, and that was a charter school. By contrast, two were located about 30 miles away, in Santa Ana - in a school district less than one-tenth the size of L.A. Unified. Yet Santa Ana Unified is far from affluent. A higher percentage of its students are poor and not fluent in English than in L.A. Unified . Close to 95% are Latino - making Santa Ana the most demographically homogenous school district in Orange County.

How exciting to read about the two new magnet schools in Los Angeles for those interested in math, science and health services! A student can't help but achieve in an environment that is physically, mentally and emotionally geared to his/her well-being and advancement. As a teacher, what sort of magnet would I create next? It would be a school with many of the qualities already incorporated in the existing ones: excellent teachers, small class size, pleasant surroundings, time for ongoing planning among teachers, ethnic balance, etc. But my dream school would be for ordinary kids--no special IQs, talents or interests.

President Obama began the official rollout of his new budget proposal Monday morning with a visit to a math and science magnet school, pointing to such public-education programs as the kind in which the federal government should invest more money. Education investment is an area where he'll likely find agreement among Democrats and Republicans, but Obama is delivering a budget on Monday that contains an array of spending choices certain to set off a vigorous debate about priorities.

Your article on magnet schools ("Magnet Schools Deter Immigrant Pupils," Oct. 15) revives many sore issues within the Los Angeles Unified School District. I am a teacher in the "other" Euclid Avenue school which services the regular children in our Eastside neighborhood. More than 70% of our children are immigrants or children of immigrants, and more than 60% benefit from a bilingual program. The magnet school concept is a relic of the racial desegregation battles during the late '60s and early '70s during which white families began to leave public education en mass.

Applications for the Los Angeles Unified School District's magnet schools and centers or the Permits With Transportation program for the 2000-2001 school year will soon be in the mail. Information about the district's 150 magnet programs will be sent during the last two weeks of December to parents of all students currently enrolled in kindergarten through 11th grade. Applications must be postmarked by Jan. 28.

Many of the arguments over the year-round schedule are quite laughable. Highest on the list is board member [Jeff] Horton's comment that moving the highly gifted magnet would set a terrible precedent. Just ask teachers at South Gate, Bell, Huntington Park and Belmont high schools about their opportunities to create magnet schools over the past 10 years. As overcrowded schools, on year-round programs for more than a decade, they have been precluded from magnet programs. Why? These schools have not had the capacity to house the students in their respective neighborhoods, let alone support the district integration program for which magnet schools were originally designed.

Application brochures for the Los Angeles Unified School District's magnet schools and centers or the Permits With Transportation program for the 2000-2001 school year will soon be in the mail. Information about the district's 150 magnet programs will be sent during the last two weeks of December to the parents of all students currently enrolled in kindergarten through 11th grade. Applications must be received or postmarked by Jan. 28.

Welcome to the first day of school — not. The Tuesday after Labor Day marks the traditional opening of the academic year for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but not this time around. Budget cuts have resulted in a shorter school year and unpaid furlough days for teachers and other employees. That reality, combined with the Jewish High Holy Days, has pushed things back to Sept. 13. So why are students already attending public schools in some parts of the nation's second-largest school system?

Paul Gutman L.A. judge upheld race-based magnet admissions Paul Gutman, 78, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who ruled that L.A. schools could continue using a race-based formula for magnet school admissions, died June 13. The cause was complications from spine surgery, according to his family. Appointed to the bench in 1993 by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, Gutman oversaw criminal cases before serving as a supervising judge of the Van Nuys-based Northwest District. In his 2007 ruling on magnet schools, Gutman wrote that the Los Angeles Unified School District had been ordered "quite clearly and beyond dispute" in 1981 "to employ race and ethnicity to ensure that the magnet schools would in fact be desegregated."

At their best, charter schools in Los Angeles shatter the conventional wisdom that skin color and family income are the greatest predictors of academic success. Setting standards high and wringing long hours out of students and teachers, the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to levels of achievement, as measured by standardized tests, more typical of affluent, suburban students. If such schools were the norm, any debate over the value of charters would be moot.

The well-regarded Cleveland Humanities Magnet in Reseda is hardly a secret: On average, two students apply for every available spot. But even parent boosters don't precisely know how their magnet compares to others -- or to other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. FOR THE RECORD: An article in Thursday's Section A about new data on L.A. magnet schools incorrectly referred to Hillcrest Drive Elementary as Hillside Elementary. That's because the district does not publicly release the test scores of magnet programs.

Pamela Krys, who moved to Woodland Hills a year ago, made a confession during a school fair this month at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park. "I don't understand the points," she said, referring to one aspect of the application process for magnet programs. "They don't do points in Florida." Understanding the points system is just one of the complications surrounding school choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although its "choices" website is improving, the school system provides no central location -- online or off -- to help parents manage all their options if they don't want their children to attend their neighborhood school.

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.

The mystery began in July when an attorney called Blair International Baccalaureate School and told it to be on the lookout for a large check. Two weeks ago, officials at the Pasadena magnet school opened a letter that contained a bequest of $440,011 from a woman named Joyce Stallfort Davis, who died last year at age 81. Officials were thrilled, but there was one problem: No one knew who Davis was. "I've worked at Blair for 34 years and...

A Woodland Hills school building that has sat empty for more than a decade was designated for future use as a magnet school Tuesday night by the board of the L.A. Unified School District. Collins Elementary School, which was shut years ago because of dropping enrollment, is one of several closed schools included in a master plan that sought to reopen the buildings to reduce overcrowding, open special and career-technical programs and provide space for charter schools. Nearby Ivy Academia charter school has been lobbying to use Collins for five years.