Free Republic

I would like to start off with this startling fact. In 1994, the estimated costs of educating the children of exceeded 28.6 billion taxpayer dollars alone. Just multiplying that figure over a period of 20 years(adjusting for inflation). With schools cutting back on after school programs such as after school prograns, not purchasing up to date textbooks. Some states have even cut back the hiring of new teacgers and childcare prgrams. Other school districts(including the Los Angeles School District) have shortened the shool week from five days to four or shortened school hours, All of this can be diretly attributed...

Listen hereReporter Assaulted After Interview And Loses TapeWND Article The reporter is also scheduled to appear on O'Reilly tonight.

CBS) LOS ANGELES A local radio reporter was assaulted Thursday while leaving a Los Angeles charter school that his station has said imparts separatist ethics, a station official said. The reporter, Sandy Wells, was not hurt, according to station spokesman Steve Sheldon. Wells was leaving the campus of Academia Semillas Del Pueblo, 4736 Huntington Drive, after interviewing the principal when a car came around the corner, jumped the curb and the driver tried to run him down, Sheldon said. Wells managed to dodge the car, but the driver, a man who appeared to be in his mid-20s, got out and...

On Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka "If Brown was just about letting Black people into a White school, well we don’t care about that anymore. We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil...

LOS ANGELES – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday embraced Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school takeover plan, giving the mayor a highly visible ally in his drive to gain control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Mayor Villaraigosa has shown bold leadership,” the Republican governor told reporters in Sacramento. “This is exactly the kind of thing that ought to be done. “I am 100 percent behind him on this and if there's a bill that comes down here, I will sign that,” Schwarzenegger said. “We want to help him in that move, because we all know that it is inexcusable that...

GRANADA HILLS - State Sen. George Runner and Assemblyman Keith Richman announced legislation Monday that would break up the 727,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District into at least 15 smaller districts. The two lawmakers promised greater accountability would come from community-based school systems, calling the nation's second-largest district a "bureaucratic behemoth" that was failing students. Under identical bills proposed in the state Assembly and Senate, any California school district with more than half a million students - L.A. Unified is the only one large enough to qualify - must split into districts no larger than 50,000 students by 2010. A...

There is new evidence that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has misled voters as to the actual need for its gargantuan and highly expensive building program. The district's latest estimates show that enrollment in the nation's second largest school district is declining much more rapidly than previously revealed. The precipitous decline could result in some of the schools now being built with bond money sitting as empty and useless as Saddam Hussein's former palaces. The reaction of most citizens of Los Angeles to the mere mention of LAUSD is intense disgust. After all, this district has built a...

<p>Police herded students off an access road leading to the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro on Tuesday as demonstrations continued against possible immigration reforms. Student marches were also staged Tuesday morning in Bellflower and Compton.</p> <p>Despite rain and a lockdown in the Los Angeles Unified School District, a group of about 200 students massed near 223rd Street in the Harbor Gateway area in San Pedro and started walking south on Avalon Boulevard shortly after 8 a.m. A separate group of students in San Pedro tried to get onto the Vincent Thomas Bridge, but police stopped them and turned them around, detaining a few.</p>

tune in to Fox News to see the future of America shutting down freeways and streets.

AP) LOS ANGELES The marches against proposed immigration legislation are spreading in Los Angeles. Some 1,500 L.A. students who have walked out of class are gathered outside Los Angeles City Hall. L.A. school district officials said some 1,000 students from Los Angeles High School on the 4600 block of Olympic Avenue have walked out and are reportedly heading toward Hollywood High School on the 1500 block of North Highland Avenue. Hundreds of students have already left Huntington Park High School, some scaling fences that school officials locked to avoid a walkout. L.A. school district spokeswoman Monica Carazo said students have...

(Get ready for more Gay, Lesbian and Transgender High Schools in Los Angeles!) With Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Roy Romer nearing retirement, the game has begun to find his replacement, and the name bandied about town the loudest and most consistently: Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg. The former school board and City Council member remains coy on the topic, but sources say she has been campaigning hard for months - even before Romer announced his intended early departure - to head up the second-largest school district in the nation. "It's not something I really want to do. However, depending on who they're...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The head of the Los Angeles Unified School District has told the school board that he wants to leave before his contract expires. In a closed meeting several weeks ago, Superintendent Roy Romer told the Board of Education "that he would like them to find his replacement by September or October, but that he would certainly stay until an appropriate replacement is found," district spokesman Stephanie Brady said. He became head of the 727,000-student district in 2000. The district did not indicate why Romer, 77, wanted to leave before his contract expires in June 2007. However,...

Eighteen students were arrested today in the second consecutive day of fighting at South Area High School No. 1 in Los Angeles after two groups of students faced off and yelled challenges at each other, authorities said. The student body at the school, informally known as Santee High School, is more than 90 percent Latino while most of the rest are black. School officials deny that race is an issue at the school south of downtown, which opened this year to deal with the overcrowding at Jefferson High School. Sixteen students were arrested Wednesday and 10 were hospitalized after school...

SACRAMENTO - California will face a shortage of up to 100,000 teachers in the next decade as retirements crest even while schools cope with tougher federal requirements for student learning, according to a report released Wednesday. At the same time, enrollment has been dropping in teaching-preparation programs in the state - from 76,000 in 2002 to 67,500 in 2004, according to the report from the nonprofit Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, based in Santa Cruz. Center director Margaret Gaston said the 2005-06 school year could be one of the last in a long time when the supply...

Gearing up for a prolonged fight with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa over control of public schools, Los Angeles Unified officials say they'll launch a public relations offensive to cast the often maligned district in a more favorable light. So far, Superintendent Roy Romer and other top district officials have not reacted to Villaraigosa's stepped-up pledges to wrest control of the nation's second-largest district from the seven-member school board, which except for a brief period has been dominated by candidates backed by and closely linked to unions. But behind the scenes, board members have urged Romer to spin the district's achievements more...

When hundreds of Los Angeles high school students told administrators they planned to walk out of school to attend last week's protest by the liberal "World Can't Wait" group calling for President Bush's impeachment — the L.A. school district decided not to discipline them. Instead, the district provided school buses and a staff escort to transport some 800 students from 10 schools to the rally and back. School officials said students would attend the protest with or without their permission, and the district's chief operating officer told KNBC, "Our issue...was safety, and I think we fulfilled our mission." — FOX...

World Can't Wait -- an anti-Bush, anti-war group, recently staged nationwide protests. The organization coordinated rallies in Chicago, Seattle, New York, San Francisco -- and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Unified School District took things a step further. The district helpfully agreed to provide buses -- that's right, buses -- as well as "adult supervision" to the nearly 800 high school students who walked out of 10 high schools...

LOS ANGELES - A former education official was accused in a lawsuit of using his post to secretly buy almost 46,000 textbooks and other teaching aids he himself had written, bringing him nearly $1 million in royalties. The suit by the Los Angeles Unified School District also said Matthias Vheru illegally covered more than $3 million of the $4 million cost by using federal education funds that had been earmarked for programs that assist non-native English speakers. The district said Vheru, 55, skirted its purchase-approval process by making the orders when he was temporarily serving as the district's math curriculum...

Los Angeles Unified board members today will consider putting both a $3.85 billion construction bond and a $150-a-year parcel tax on the Nov. 8 special election ballot to pay for programs to boost the quality of instruction. While most board members said they support both measures, some question going to voters with two tax-hike requests at the same time. "I'm really torn," board member Jon Lauritzen said. "Most of the board members have serious reservations not so much about the need for the bond, but about the timing. It's going to be an interesting discussion." The construction bond -- which...

Because of inadequate documentation supplied by the LAUSD, an independent monitor said Monday that he cannot determine how much money the district has spent on court-ordered improvements to its special-education programs. Monitor Carl Cohn said he wants to meet with Los Angeles Unified School District officials to determine how much of the $67.5 million the district has pledged to spend has actually gone toward access ramps and other improvements. In a highly critical progress report released Friday, Cohn wrote he had "serious concerns about the reported expenditures" and wants district officials to explain what they've done to comply with the...