It’s been dark for almost five hours, the city has slowed, and even the 101 Freeway is sparse and quiet. Steve Zimmer has just wrapped his last appointment, but rushing home seems foolish when a rare sit-down dinner is an option. Most days Zimmer hardly notices how alone he is, because he never stops working.
Much of the recent history of the Los Angeles Unified School District is also part of the past of Tamar Galatzan, who now sits on the governing board of that giant bureaucracy of a school district.
Dvora Weisberg doesn’t think she’s had any unfair advantages over her fellow rabbinical students graduating from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) this month. Well, maybe a few. “I do have a considerable number of years over most of the other students,” Weisberg, 51, admitted recently. That, and she’s also the director of HUC-JIR’s School of Rabbinical Studies.
More than half the students in Los Angeles Jewish day schools receive financial aid to pay tuition, which runs between $12,000 and $30,000 per year. And with both tuition and the number of students requiring aid expected to continue climbing, BJE: Builders of Jewish Education is partnering with local donors and national organizations both to alleviate the immediate crisis and work toward long-term solutions for lowering the cost of Jewish education.
Authors Thanassis Cambanis, Joel Chasnoff and Mordechai Dzikansky will present on-the-ground perspectives of terrorism in Israel and the Middle East when they appear together next week during a panel discussion, “Terrorism and the Middle East,” at American Jewish University.
Los Angeles public schools could be poised for revolution due to a controversial state law gaining momentum locally. The landmark “Parent Trigger” law, passed by the California government in January 2010, grants parents at failing schools the power to force their district to make sweeping changes in a bid to improve school performance. Petitions are now under way at several Southland schools, but the law remains little known among many Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) families who could benefit from it most, according to Los Angeles education reform advocate Larry Sand.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times on March 31, the failure of Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Sacramento to agree on a budget could mean cutting the spending on the state’s 112 community colleges by $800 million. In addition to an already-planned hike in student fees of nearly 40 percent, the additional cuts would mean eliminating courses from community college offerings, loading more students into the classes that remain and admitting fewer students.
Jewish day schools in the Los Angeles area have until April 1 to take part in a unique contest that will award grants of up to $25,000 for cutting-edge classroom technology and programs.
On March 15, the Saugus Union School District became the fourth Los Angeles-area school district to reject a Hebrew language charter school application in the past six months.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.