School Closings

Maclay Middle School and Primary Center, the only two Los Angeles Unified School District campuses to be closed as a result of the powerful winds, will reopen today, officials said. About 1,400 students from the two schools were scheduled to return from winter break Tuesday. Instead, students received an extra day of vacation when officials canceled classes because of the danger posed by wind-whipped debris.

The winds reached 97 mph at one mountain peak. More than 380,000 homes lost power. Thousands of trees snapped, blocking roads and damaging property. Scores of schools were closed, as was Griffith Park. And motorists battled gridlock caused by broken traffic signals and blowing debris. The storm, which produced some of the strongest wind gusts in more than a decade, was caused by a highly unusual weather system that even had experts marveling at its power. While Santa Ana winds are common this time of year, this storm was anything but. The winds were produced by two separate weather systems that channeled cold air from the north into the Los Angeles area.

The Ocean View School District Board of Trustees backed away from a controversial plan to close three district schools as a budget-cutting measure and voted Wednesday night to postpone any school shutdowns for at least a year.

For 24 hours Wednesday, Greece's public sector lay in a coma. Flights were grounded, state schools closed and government offices stopped services as tens of thousands of civil servants walked off their jobs to protest a fresh batch of brutal budget cuts and a debt crisis showing no signs of ending. Organized by the country's two biggest labor unions, the strike was the first since Greece's beleaguered socialist government last month unveiled new controversial austerity measures that include more pension cuts and property tax and plans to terminate 30,000 public sector jobs by the end of the year in a desperate bid to stave off a dangerous default.

A private nursing school shut down Friday, closing the doors on nearly 600 students who attended classes at campuses in Santa Ana and Chula Vista. Pacific Coast College officials disclosed little information about the closing, referring all questions to the school's corporate parent in Los Angeles, United Education and Software.

A planned demonstration was canceled Tuesday night after a teachers union announcement that an adult school would be closed was found to be incorrect. The news release from United Teachers Los Angeles--the union representing more than 30,000 teachers and other professionals--said night classes at Virgil Middle School, a branch of the Belmont Community Adult School campus, would be transferred to another school.

A day after an Encino school for chefs abruptly closed, officials at the state agency overseeing vocational education said they spent most of Tuesday trying to reach the owner and learn what had happened. "You figured they would have called back after all the desperate messages we left," said Deborah Godfrey, an analyst with the Bureau for Private Post-Secondary and Vocational Education. "But still no word from them."

La Habra High School students got an unexpected holiday Monday after a maintenance worker left a valve open while changing a chlorine tank on a swimming pool filter, causing toxic gas to spread across the campus, authorities said. School was canceled for the day and only a skeleton crew remained to answer phones while La Habra's 1,580 students and 120 teachers, administrators and staff were sent home as they arrived for classes this morning.

Garvey Intermediate School was closed for the day Tuesday after the body of a 32-year-old man was found in the schoolyard before classes began. The body of Lauro Vasquez of Rosemead was found by a groundskeeper at 6:45 a.m., sheriff's investigators said. He appeared to have been stabbed to death, but an autopsy was scheduled. Investigators said that Vasquez was not a known gang member but that the possibility his death was gang-related has not been discounted.

The prospect of more heavy rain pelting Southern California has forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to close all 651 campuses today, the first time in district officials' memory that schools have been shut down because of inclement weather. Initially, the district intended to make school closure decisions on a case-by-case basis. But Supt.

Flu spreads faster in schools than rumors about a pop quiz. But science is revealing more about how germs jump from child to child and strategies that might prevent larger flu outbreaks. The latest science shows that flu predominantly spreads from boys to other boys and from girls to other girls. The study, conducted by a consortium of researchers that included experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also found that flu transmission is more intensive within students sitting in the same class.

Portions of Rhode Island and Massachusetts went into survival mode Tuesday as homes were flooded, schools were closed and flights and trains were delayed because of record rainfall. Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri asked residents to get home by dinnertime to avoid the worst flooding in the state in more than 100 years. Thousands of basements were flooded across the state, the governor's office said. National Guard troops were activated in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Green Dot Public Schools, a leading charter school operator, is shutting down a campus because of low enrollment, financial pressures and subpar performance, officials confirmed Monday. The action prompted a daylong student protest Monday at Animo Justice Charter High School, south of downtown Los Angeles. The closure marks a first for locally based and nationally recognized Green Dot, which has 19 area campuses and one in New York City. The nonprofit Green Dot opened five independently run, publicly funded charters, including Animo Justice, four years ago, near long-struggling Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles.

When Eastern Sierra Unified School District Supt. Don Clark stared down a projected budget deficit, he did what school administrators across the nation have had to do: consider laying off teachers and closing campuses. But that decision, in a rural district sprawled along U.S. 395 between the snowy Sierra and the deserts of Nevada, has exposed deep resentments between parents of students in traditional high schools and those with teenagers in a college-prep academy designed for high achievers.

A fierce storm ripped across the Midwest on Wednesday, stranding travelers, closing hundreds of schools and cutting off power to thousands of people across the country's heartland. The National Weather Service warned residents in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan of "extremely dangerous blizzard conditions" with near whiteout driving conditions. "This is a very big and very fast-moving storm," said Jack Hales, a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service's storm prediction center in Norman, Okla.

Lawn signs and bumper stickers around town still rally support for Antioch College -- an academic icon of the '60s counterculture and the civil rights and antiwar movements that ran out of money and closed more than a year ago. The dream of bringing the college back has never wavered among the residents of this Ohio village of 3,800. The school and its owner, Antioch University, were among the largest employers in Yellow Springs, and many alumni have never left: At least one in five people attended the college or had family that did. "I haven't talked to anyone who doesn't want the college back," said Tom Gray, owner of Tom's Market, the village's grocery store.

Powerful winds that swept through the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles caused enough problems at one Valley school to force officials to close it. Maclay Middle School and Primary Center in Pacoima closed early Monday because of heavy winds and will stay closed today. Classes at the school had been scheduled to resume today after being closed for winter break. Officials said the windstorm sent pieces of the building's roof flying, posing a hazard for students and teachers.

Before deciding whether three schools should be closed because of declining enrollment, the Ocean View School District board will hold a study session and public hearings on the issue. At the board's meeting Tuesday night, trustees scheduled 7 p.m. hearings June 4 and 6 for teachers, parents and other residents who want to comment on the proposed closure of Golden View, Haven View and Lake View schools. Trustees plan to vote on the issue after the June 6 hearing.

As the Station fire spread Sunday, lives were lost; homes and dense forests were destroyed. There were other consequences as well. Here is a look at three: Air quality The fire reduced air quality to hazardous levels in foothill communities of the San Gabriel Valley and San Fernando Valley, officials said Sunday. The cities of Altadena, La Cañada Flintridge and La Crescenta were directly affected by the smoke, as were the Los Angeles communities of Tujunga and Sunland.

Billed as a town hall meeting, the gathering of selected parents in Boyle Heights this week more closely resembled a mayoral pep rally to promote the idea of opening 50 new Los Angeles-area schools to outside management. We heartily support the proposal too, as one of the most visionary ideas to come along in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The resolution by school board Vice President Yolie Flores Aguilar, which the board will vote on this month, would allow organizations as varied as charter operators, parent groups and teachers unions to submit proposals to run any of the 50 schools scheduled to open in the next few years.