Howard Blume

With an upcoming $3.35 billion school-bond vote, L.A. Unified wants to project a new image -- sleek, professional, responsive, successful. But the photo taken at a recent parents’ meeting presents quite another image. In this picture, district parent leader Oscar Almaguer is being handcuffed and led away for the heinous......

Larry Levine has learned his lesson about schools and secession. These days, when he goes before a group of Valley residents to argue against breaking up the city of Los Angeles, he begins with a question: ”How many people here think that by voting for secession, you will be voting......

You’d have to forgive patrons of culture for waxing poetic about Governor Gray Davis -- a cautious, calculating politician who is generally less than inspiring. Art lovers had reason to love: Two years ago, Davis boosted funding for the California Arts Council by more than 60 percent, from $20.1 million......

Steve Melendrez knew there’d be tough days when he signed up two of his sons for a new program at Ivanhoe Elementary, one that promised to make them fluent and literate in both English and Spanish. Melendrez‘s language is English, despite his Latino surname, and when his sons needed help,......

A contract that was supposed to provide air conditioning for 150 schools has instead cost the school district $19.3 million without buying a single air conditioner, the Weekly has learned. The $19.3 million went to a consortium of contractors headed by Denver-based CH2M Hill, which was to have managed the......

In the end, Paul Kennedy -- a community force as a tap teacher and choreographer -- suffered the cruelest of fates for a hoofer: He lost his feet. That would be akin to taking the hands of Oscar Peterson, denying poetry to Shakespeare or stripping Martin Luther King Jr. of......

Questionable means to achieve questionable ends are the all-too-frequent shadowy traffic of government. But four members of the L.A. school board last week tried this game in broad sunlight. They ramrodded through a $6.3 million software contract, without competitive bidding, without any comparison of alternative products or strategies, and over......

A year ago, the half-finished and abandoned Belmont Learning Complex was as dead as dead gets: School-board President Caprice Young said she wouldn‘t send her child or anyone else’s to that school. Another board member said she was up to her hips in cement in opposition. The most anticipated Belmont-related......

Photos by Slobodan Dimitrov It was a telling moment for Richard Riordan, and it happened a year ago, well before his disastrous bid for governor ended this week. Riordan faced student leaders at the Marlton Charter School, touting his legacy as L.A.’s “education mayor.” Riordan used a translator to communicate......

When former Colorado Governor Roy Romer took the job of L.A. schools superintendent in July 2000, one issue looked like a no-brainer: It was time, he concluded, to finish the Belmont Learning Complex. After all, the school district needed about 20 new high schools, and nothing was likely to give......