FCMAT » Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team:
After months of back and forth between Baldwin Park Unified and the California Department of Education (CDE), district officials are finally submitting to the state agency's requests to spend down money in its cafeteria account and pay back more than $1.4 million in allegedly misspent money intended to feed needy children.
Four high school coaches in the Capistrano Unified School District accused of receiving $15,850 in coaches' apparel via an elaborate kickback scheme involving an athletic supply company were formally disciplined and reinstated last year, according to newly released district documents.
Twin Rivers Unified School District Deputy Superintendent Ziggy Robeson was placed on paid administrative leave Friday as new allegations against the school district and its top leaders surfaced. Robeson's leave comes days after Sacramento Police Department officials copied files from the district-issued computer of Twin Rivers Superintendent Frank Porter, who announced earlier this month he will retire in June.
Not everyone is so enamored with Fortune School. The nondescript little charter in a shopping center on Stockton Boulevard has become the hot-button issue in a crowded race for four seats on the Sacramento County Board of Education.
After putting more than 75,600 netbooks into the hands of students, the San Diego Unified School District has switched its focus to Apple iPads and will buy devices to outfit 340 classrooms before the end of the school year.
Increasingly, the academic process goes hand-in-hand with requests for donations through PTAs, fundraisers and foundations.
Los Angeles Unified students will start their summer break three days early this June after an arbitrator ruled the cash-strapped school district can impose unpaid furloughs on teachers to save at least $60 million in payroll costs, officials said Friday.
The Age of Instagram is creating headaches for the state Department of Education and ETS, the contractor for the state’s standardized tests. At least 100 students from 34 school districts had posted images on social media of materials from various state tests they took this week, according to Paul Hefner, spokesman for Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torakson.
In choosing whether to cut education for children or grown-ups, L.A. Unified needs focus on the young, but sacrificing adults is tragically short-sighted.
To mitigate the impact of substantially cutting spending for K-12 schools, the Legislature agreed to temporarily let school districts decide how to spend money that had been earmarked for dozens of special programs, from adult education to teacher training. Now, as part of his plan to reform how education is funded, Gov. Brown is proposing to go a big step further and give local districts total and permanent flexibility over nearly all of the remaining categorical programs.
Despite decades struggling to educate the nation's largest population of non-native speaking students, the California Department of Education has only within the last few months benefitted from a new division dedicated to the needs of English learners.
