Howard Blume

  If you’re a registered voter living in the Silver Lake-Echo Park area you probably got one in your mail box: a full-color political mailer that purports to unmask the true villain of the Belmont Learning Complex scandal … Jackie Goldberg. Jackie Goldberg? The City Council representative for Hollywood and......

Photos by Debra DiPaolo The race for district attorney is an intensely personal joust between incumbent Gil Garcetti and two opponents who’ve run afoul of him. The sin of challenger Steve Cooley is persistent disloyalty to his boss, both in this election and the last. The animosity between Garcetti and......

Photo by Michael PowersL.A. school officials have retreated from a bold school-conversion plan that was supposed to relieve a student-overcrowding crisis. Under the plan, the district would have converted middle schools to high schools, and elementary schools to middle schools. In four months, however, not one school has been firmly......

Scene of the goo: Cudahy Mayor Perez presses down a small bubble. How concerned would you be if your child‘s school was built atop a toxic landfill? And if you also knew that, at one point, a caustic sludge on the playground had forced the school to shut down for......

Photo by Debra DiPaoloStudent leaders at old, overcrowded Belmont High have had a civics lesson in action this month, but it has hardly been an uplifting one. They learned that their sheer will to get the new Belmont Learning Complex finished just won’t do the job. It didn’t matter how......

When school-board member David Tokofsky and others sought an internal investigation of the Belmont Learning Complex, they hoped for an exhaustive look at the misdeeds of their management team and consultants. This week‘s internal auditor’s report documents an assortment of conflicts of interest at Belmont, the high school that sits......

The Belmont Learning Complex, the nation‘s most expensive high school project, sits half-finished on an old downtown oil field, a stark symbol of incompetence in the country’s second-largest school system. But last week, even as the school board sacked the developer and geared up to decide the project‘s fate, a......

It was another big-news, bad-news week in the L.A. school district. On one front came word that school officials had just fired the contractor building the ill-starred Belmont Learning Complex -- the nation’s most expensive high school. From another quarter came notice that half of the district‘s students would flunk......

Photo by Kathleen Clark Environmentalists have ratcheted up their confrontation with the city’s highest-profile developer, requesting federal intervention in the fate of a historic but polluted site near the L.A. River. The activists want the 47-acre parcel, called the Cornfields, used for a school and a park with a lake......