Category: Media News

For her 17th birthday, Jeramie Naya Vives Osorio’s family showered her with gifts: a dozen pink roses, a stack of Beard Papa‘s cream puffs, a Strawberry Sweet cake from the Korean bakery Tous les Jours and a small silver necklace from Tiffany. 

Michelle Vives knew her middle daughter — Jer to her friends, Mia to her family — would never wear the necklace. But she wanted Mia to have it all the same.

“She loves Tiffany, so every birthday I get her something,” Vives said. “This year I bought her the infinity one” — a silver charm on a fine cable chain. Read more…

School shootings — on the overall rise for decades — have broken last year’s record high at 306 shootings with just under two months left to go in the year.

Published Nov. 10, 2023 K-12 Dive

The number of U.S. school shootings in 2023 surpassed last year’s record-breaking number of 305 school shootings on Thursday, according to a count by the K-12 School Shooting Database. The number of incidents this year has reached 306 — yet another record high for the third consecutive year. Read More…

Los Angeles Unified School District will pay $19.9 million to settle sexual abuse claims against a former teacher’s assistant at a North Hollywood elementary school, including an allegation that he made one young girl repeatedly position herself in a “puppy pose” while he rubbed his hands against her. 

The latest settlement adds to a long string of sexual misconduct payouts by the nation’s second-largest school system.

The former teacher’s assistant, Lino Cabrera, was originally charged with five felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and one count of continued sexual abuse — and had been accused by prosecutors of sexually abusing six girls, ages 10 and 11, between September 2016 and May 2019 at Oxnard Street Elementary. Read more…

Attorneys have finalized a settlement involving litigation brought against the Los Angeles Unified School District that, if approved by a judge, will pay millions of dollars to multiple girls who allege they were molested by a former teacher’s assistant at a North Hollywood elementary school.

The plaintiffs are identified as Jane Does in the Los Angeles Superior Court cases that originally named as defendants the district and their alleged assailant, Lino Cabrera. He was dropped as a party on July 25. Read more…

A healthy, collaborative school culture is a springboard that propels students to academic excellence—and teachers to professional growth, said Andrew Farley, principal of Brookfield East High School, in Brookfield, Wisc.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals named Farley its 2024 Principal of the Year on Oct. 20, citing his efforts to close the achievement gap, elevate student voice, and promote student mental health. Read more…

Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2023

When Tropical Storm Hilary drenched the interior of a building rented by a charter school at Eastman Elementary — destroying books and computers — some 75 charter students moved into the auditorium and library of the main campus, straining resources and patience. 

“It’s just very unfair that the whole school basically has to accommodate the charter school,” said Los Angeles Board of Education member Rocio Rivas last week about the situation at the East L.A. campus.

The tensions and competing needs of L.A. schools — especially more than 100 serving academically struggling, low-income students — were at the heart of a resolution approved by the school board Tuesday that limits where charters can rent on-campus classroom space from the district. Read More…

Administrators took in more than $750,000 combined in extra pay over three years.

By Howard Blume

A small group of Los Angeles Unified School District employees collected more than $750,000 combined in extra pay over three years, much of it improperly approved, prompting investigations and leading to the demotions, reassignments or departuresof at least 10 employees, including four senior administrators, court documents and district records show.

Employees from the Westside region — including one top regional administrator and another who later served on then-Supt. Austin Beutner’s cabinet — became the focus of an internal investigation. Five people collected extra pay that totaled from $78,000 to $149,000 over a three-year span beginning in 2017. In one year alone, a mid-level administrator, whose regular salary was $127,509, received $55,569 in extra pay. Read More …

Jackie Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board, announced earlier this month that she will retire in December 2024 after completing her current term. 

Goldberg has worked in public service for more than four decades, starting as a teacher in the 1960s, and won her first LAUSD school board election in 1983. In 1994, she was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and she represented District 45 in the California Assembly from 2000 to 2006. She returned to the school board in 2019. Read More…

The August 22nd LAUSD Board of Education meeting opened with a march and protest that turned into an unlawful assembly, with several protestors detained. Parents from as far as San Diego joined Saticoy Elementary parents to protest the Board’s support for LGBTQIA+ students. A smaller group of counter protestors in support of LGBTQIA+ students quickly formed and the groups traded barbs. Read More …

Inside, Board members got an earful from pro-charter groups protesting a plan to shield some school campuses from co-location. Read More …

As a nation, we are confronting an alarming crisis in K-12 education that goes beyond the effects of a global pandemic.

Before the pandemic, roughly 1 in 10 students in Los Angeles County and across our state were chronically absent. Now, in many schools, almost half of our students are missing from our classrooms on a regular basis, with disproportionate rates of chronic absence among historically underserved students of color.

To address learning loss, we must first acknowledge a simple truth: We can’t help students learn if they’re not present. Read More …

Sebastian Mariscal strutted smiling onto the school bus that would take the 5-year-old from South L.A. to Brentwood for his first day of school. Then a moment later, he ran out crying into his father’s arms as the reality of the separation took hold.

So began one family’s experience as a new school year opened Monday in Los Angeles Unified — a day of anticipation, hope, joy and anxiety for students of all ages — and for those who work with them. 

L.A. Unified is among 46 county school systems to start a new school year this week; 16 others had already begun, and 20 more will go back in the coming weeks, county education officials said. Read more…

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