School Closings

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary and graduate school for Judaism's Reform movement, is facing such deep financial troubles that it is considering closing two of its three U.S. campuses, which include a location near downtown Los Angeles.

Grappling with a budget shortfall caused by declining enrollment, trustees of Orange County's largest school district voted Tuesday to close two schools in June as part of a plan to cut $15.6 million in spending for the next school year. Closing Grant Elementary and Taft Intermediate schools will save the Santa Ana Unified School District $723,000 annually.

On a recent sunny afternoon, a small plane towing a banner was seen flying over the city's Uptown neighborhood. Its message entreated, "Save Newcomb College." Signs making the same plea have sprouted from lawns and appeared in windows across town. Online forums have been abuzz with calls to action over the dissolving of a historic women's college last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The fight to reopen H.

After a dizzying 2 1/2 -hour discussion, a divided Los Angeles school board Tuesday postponed a vote on whether to close a Pacoima charter school that has been beset with low test scores but claimed a near-perfect record of getting its low-income minority students into college. The delay on the future of Discovery Preparatory Charter School came after a compromise plan to extend the charter for a year unraveled under a barrage of conflicting legal opinions and last-minute developments.

Antioch College, known for its offbeat approach to education, will close in 2008 because of a money shortage and will try to find enough funds to reopen four years later, the school said. Enrollment at the private liberal arts college in Yellow Springs has dwindled from more than 2,000 students in the 1960s to 400 this year, and a small endowment and heavy dependence on tuition revenue combined to hurt operations, the school said.

It was perhaps the last great protest at Antioch College. The call to arms came last week, when Antioch College's board of trustees announced that the school -- emblematic of the '60s counterculture and the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements -- had run out of money and would close in July 2008. The news came as a shock to students, local residents and alumni -- who descended upon this village Friday with one goal: to fight "them" and save their alma mater.

Troubles at St. Anne Catholic School in Santa Monica were so dire at one point that Father Michael D. Gutierrez turned to his congregation for help. He refused to give his sermon until at least 10 families stepped forward to consider enrolling their children in the financially strapped parish school. A grim economic reality has been building for years in the nation's Catholic schools: Hit by rising costs and tuition and declining enrollment, many are fighting for survival.

Parents of students at Daniel Murphy High School, a Catholic boys academy scheduled to close in June, said Saturday that they would be willing to pay higher tuition, recruit students and raise extra money to keep the Fairfax district campus open. Hundreds of supporters of the school descended on the Los Angeles Archdiocese's downtown Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, demanding that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony reverse the decision to close the campus.

Averting a mid-school-year closing, Renaissance Academy Charter High School and the Los Angeles Unified School District have reached an agreement that will provide a location for the troubled Westside school and keep it open through the end of the academic year. The Board of Education approved the deal in a closed session Tuesday, the same day it had been scheduled to vote on a staff recommendation to revoke the taxpayer-supported, independently operated school's charter.

Amid the continuing debate over the role of women's education in American colleges, six Tulane University alumnae and nine students filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block the school from dismantling a historic women's college as part of a sweeping restructuring plan launched after Hurricane Katrina. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, seeks an injunction blocking Tulane from closing its 120-year-old H.