A line of students snaked out the door of the Canoga Park High School attendance office Monday morning, with scores of teens hoping to get a seat in Los Angeles Unified's smallest-ever summer school program. | See photo gallery.
It was the start of the four-week session, but any first-day cheer was tempered by the grim reality of 10,000 students scrambling for just 5,000 slots in the district's drastically scaled-back summer program.
"We're trying to squeeze in as many as we can," Assistant Superintendent Alvaro Cortes said. "Almost every