FCMAT » Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team:
For roughly six days, Grace Malson was a member of the Galt Joint Union Elementary School District board of trustees. For one hour on Wednesday, she wasn’t. But by the end of that hour, her position had been restored and not much had changed.
Fresno Unified will dip into its reserve funds to try to alleviate crowding in some classrooms by hiring additional teachers.
Starting what he called “an uncomfortable discussion,” Mayor Jerry Sanders helped launch a statewide conversation on mayoral involvement in schools Wednesday during the first in a series of California forums hosted by former Washington, D.C. education Chief Michelle Rhee.
Education officials across San Diego County are scrambling to keep school buses rolling after the governor’s announcement this week that the state will cut $248 million in school transportation funding beginning Jan. 1.
Los Angeles Unified faces a deficit of $532 million for the 2012-13 school year and may be unable to meet its financial obligations without an infusion of new revenue or cuts to some of its most popular programs, according to a preliminary estimate approved Tuesday.
Rocketship Education, the upstart charter operator that has posted impressive test scores for traditionally struggling students, won approval early Thursday morning to more than triple its charter network by opening 20 new schools in Santa Clara County -- the largest single charter-school approval in the state.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s announcement of a $248 million cut in school transportation funds has triggered a fierce response from some of the state’s largest urban school districts as well as smaller rural ones. What is far less clear is how many districts will actual terminate bus routes this year.
In a new labor agreement that embraces local school autonomy, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has jumped from one school reform horse to another.
State education leaders on Wednesday painted a bleak picture of the nearly $1 billion in funding cuts announced this week, including $248 million that they said would force schools to reduce bus service. Inland school officials didn’t welcome the cuts, but most said they had planned for them and did not anticipate immediate changes in bus service. However, the cuts mean there is less money for other programs.
Los Angeles Unified filed suit late Wednesday against Gov. Jerry Brown and other state officials, seeking to block budget cuts that would gut the district's transportation program for magnet and special-education students.
Californians like the shorthand explanation of the tax increase that Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing for November. Seventy percent in a recent poll said they’d favor the initiative if the money would go to K-12 schools. But this would be true only in a narrow, technical sense. Schools will likely get billions of dollars less.
