Free Republic

According to Fox News, Patsy Ramsey, mother of Jonbenet Ramsey has passed away from ovarian cancer.

Attorneys for a group of students who sued the state to suspend the high school exit exam have filed an emergency request with a state appeals court. They want the court to urgently hear their claims the test should be suspended for this year's graduating class. On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court stayed a lower court's injunction that had barred the exam from taking effect for the Class of 2006. It meant the exam would be a requirement for seniors to graduate. The students and their parents argued that the exam is discriminatory because all California students do not 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,...

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...

Days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his support for an effort to break up the LAUSD, Superintendent Roy Romer quietly created a nonprofit organization that has raised nearly $150,000 to tout the school district's accomplishments, the Daily News has learned. Despite having the district's nearly $1 million public-relations operation at his disposal, Romer founded Friends of L.A. Schools -- with himself as CEO -- to counter criticism by Schwarzenegger and then-mayoral challenger Bob Hertzberg that the Los Angeles Unified School District was too large and inefficient. "This began in February when there was a lot of criticism of the district,...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The nation's second-largest school district spent nearly $50 million on a computer reading program that failed to improve student literacy skills and sometimes hindered achievement because it wasn't used properly, a newspaper reported Monday. The Los Angeles Unified School District hoped the Waterford Early Reading Program would boost test scores at low-performing elementary schools when it purchased the system four years ago to supplement language arts instruction in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. Instead, the system had no affect on most students and a "negative impact" on some kindergartners whose teachers substituted it for primary reading lessons,...