Schools Los Angeles

Most weekends, vandals make their way into Hollenbeck Junior High School in East Los Angeles and pry the padlocks off many of the gates. Most Mondays, the maintenance crew puts new locks back on. Unfortunately for 14-year-old Heber Reyes, they didn't do it quickly enough this week. Reyes was critically injured Monday when he fell down a 20-foot air shaft during his lunch break while clowning around with some friends.

At Gault Street Elementary, waves of parents flow through the campus daily. Sometimes the tide is stronger, said parent center director Rosalva Waterford, but they are always there. Volunteers make copies for the teachers using one of the center's three copy machines - including the one they call la viejita (the old woman) a decades-old, yellowing behemoth that frequently gets passed over for the newer models. Parents sometimes help move classroom furniture for an activity or clean up afterward.

In an effort to boost student achievement, Los Angeles school officials are assigning nearly 100 additional administrators to campuses beginning this month, part of a plan assailed by critics for expanding what they say is an already-bloated educational bureaucracy. Under the new setup, the Los Angeles Unified School District will also add three new assistant superintendents, who will be responsible for improving classroom instruction. The changes do not cost any more money.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to settle a lawsuit over allegations that soil underneath a high school campus in Glassell Park was contaminated by chemicals that originated at a nearby city-owned property. On a 10-0 vote, the council agreed to pay $2.5 million to the Los Angeles Unified School District and its law firm, Musick Peeler & Garritt, city officials said. The money will be paid from the city's Sewer Operations and Maintenance Fund. L.A. Unified filed a lawsuit earlier this year demanding $4 million to pay for cleanup at the new $239-million Sonia M. Sotomayor Learning Academies north of downtown.

Edutrain Charter School has taken the first step toward court action aimed at regaining its status and funding by filing legal documents with Los Angeles Unified School District. One of 10 independent schools in Los Angeles, it began educating dropouts at its Downtown campus in July, 1993. Its charter was revoked Dec. 5 by the school board, which cited concerns about attendance and financial accounting procedures.

The students at Audubon Junior High School have had enough. They've had enough of being scared while walking to school, playing in their own yards or even sleeping near a window. They've had enough of gangs.

To celebrate Red Ribbon Week, a nationwide anti-drug abuse program that started Monday, students in the Reseda area have gathered at school-wide assemblies, a pep rally and other drug awareness activities. At Reseda Elementary School, students and teachers kicked off the week's activities by tying red ribbons around the trees in front of their campus. They will wear smaller red ribbons on their clothing all week.

The Los Angeles school board voted Monday to hire enough music teachers to offer music instruction at least once a week at every one of the district's 400 elementary schools. The district will hire five new teachers this year, and add 16 in the next five years. Now, the district's music instruction program consists of 73 roving instructors who move among 330 schools, visiting each one day a week.

A Northridge teen-ager pleaded guilty Tuesday to selling 4.8 grams of cocaine to an undercover police officer. The youth faces up to 60 years in prison and a $3-million fine because the drug trafficking occurred near a school. Michael Enders Jr., 19, wept quietly as U.S. District Judge William D. Keller ordered him detained at a residential drug treatment center pending sentencing on Aug. 26.

Despite some community outcry, school officials said they plan to recommend four sites for new schools in the northeast San Fernando Valley that could include taking at least 85 homes and apartments as well as 30 businesses. At a school board committee meeting today at district headquarters in Los Angeles, officials will recommend that the district conduct feasibility studies on the sites to relieve overcrowding in the East Valley.

The Los Angeles Police Department has agreed to avoid ticketing tardy students who are on their way to school, lawyers and advocates for students announced Thursday. The tickets, which carry steep fines, are exactly the wrong method for achieving better attendance, said those involved. Under new and "clarified" procedures agreed to by the LAPD at the request of advocates for students, truancy sweeps will no longer occur during the first hour of classes. And daytime curfew sweeps cannot be conducted except in response to suspected criminal activity by youths in the sweep area.

Scores in the culminating Super Quiz contest of the 2011 Academic Decathlon were so close in both Los Angeles Unified and Los Angeles County school districts Saturday that at least a dozen schools were in striking distance of the regional titles. Among L.A. Unified Schools, Granada Hills Charter High and Marshall High tied for first place honors with scores of 57. San Fernando High finished second, with 49 points, and Canoga Park High and Franklin High tied for third place with 48 points.

Altair Maine said he was so little supervised in his first few years of teaching at North Hollywood High School that he could "easily have shown a movie in class every day and earned tenure nonetheless." Before second-grade teacher Kimberly Patterson received tenure and the ironclad job protections it provides, she said, "my principal never set foot in my classroom while I was teaching." And when Virgil Middle School teacher Roberto Gonzalez came up for tenure, he discovered there was no evaluation for him on file.

There are many nightmare scenarios out there about what could happen on election day. An electoral college tie. An electronic voting glitch in a state that has moved to a new voting system. A call for a recount in a state like Ohio that still uses punch cards. A disruption by a terrorist group. Thinking about such scenarios is fair game after the 2000 debacle, in which the outcome was decided in mid-December after intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Imagine a system that determines where a person is placed based on skin color or gang ties or territorial lines. Sound like what happens in the state prison system? It also happens in the high schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District. When the Los Angeles school system's busing czar tries to find space for kids crowded out of their neighborhood high schools, he must consider more than bus routes and classroom seats.

Gloria Vasquez wakes and dresses her 10-year-old daughter Yvonne each morning, starting with a fresh diaper. She spoon-feeds breakfast to the girl, then takes her to the Salvin School for disabled children in South Los Angeles, where Yvonne is being trained in basic life skills. She never learned to read. Milo Howell is an example of a different type of special education student in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At age 8, he started classes at a school for the blind.

A hastily launched program to turn around 10 under-performing Los Angeles city schools is angering some union members, who warn that the district will face labor strife if it does not proceed carefully. Despite their protests, however, leaders of the teachers and administrators unions have tentatively endorsed the reform plans submitted to the state Friday. They mostly fault the district for seeking quick solutions to problems that they say have been ignored for years.

Every kindergartner should be as lucky as Shinese Jobity. The little girl with dimples began school Monday at a kindergarten campus of just six classrooms. There were no crowded hallways or big kids smacking balls across the playground. Instead, Shinese found waiting in her classroom a little wooden mailbox with her name, along with two teachers and an aide, who greeted her warmly. "Nice and happy," a smiling Shinese said of her first day.

A hastily launched program to turn around 10 under-performing Los Angeles city schools is angering some union members, who warn that the district will face labor strife if it does not proceed carefully. Despite their protests, however, leaders of the teachers and administrators unions have tentatively endorsed the reform plans submitted to the state Friday. They mostly fault the district for seeking quick solutions to problems that they say have been ignored for years.

The highly regarded Southern California Institute of Architecture will move its campus to downtown Los Angeles in a major boost for civic efforts to revive the central city with new cultural and educational institutions. SCI-Arc, as the school is known, will bring its more than 500 students and staff to a $60-million commercial and residential development planned for the artists' loft district.