Responding to years of pressure by Los Angeles community and education advocates, LA Unified next month may commit to funding schools based on a new ranking that gives priority to those with the highest-need students.

Nearly $140 million in new funding is expected to flow to the district in the next two years as part of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to fully fund his Local Control Funding Formula. Advocates want to make sure those dollars get to the students who are furthest from meeting academic standards and live with the most challenges.

Young women are leading the March For Our Lives movement, and last Saturday brought hundreds of thousands of protestors out into the streets for rallies demanding gun control, and protesting gun violence in all communities.

Students from Inner City Struggle (ICS) marched in Los Angeles – bringing youth of color voices to this movement and mobilizing young people to #takebackthevote in California.

As a 16-year-old in high school and a student of history, Axel Ortega faces a tough choice on Wednesday morning: Does he walk out of class at Garfield to take a stand or stay put? And if he walks out, does he leave his East Los Angeles campus?

Axel's principal and other administrators also have been pondering what choices Axel and other students will make and how to respond.

Guests:

Raul Ruiz, former editor for several underground student newspapers in 1968

Mario Garcia, author of “Blowout: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice”

Maria Brenes, executive director of Inner City Struggle, a group working to empower families on LA’s east side

Source: https://soundcloud.com/taketwoshow/roundtable-discussion-the-legacy-of-the-east-la-walkouts

In Magdalena Ceja's classroom, mice scurry in and out. Electrical outlets in her wall, which power technology Ceja needs to teach, fail. Tiles fall from the ceiling, which leaks in places.

Crumbling facilities are the norm at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighborhood, a 96-year-old campus that made the history books in 1968 when students walked out to protest unequal conditions for Latinos in the L.A. Unified School District — including, ironically, inadequate facilities.

With this week’s approval of a $7.5 billion budget for LA Unified’s upcoming school year, advocates in Los Angeles for Latino education highlighted their priorities to best support Latino students’ success. Here are some of their top goals and how they fared in the budget:

• Community schools
• Safe schools, including restorative justice programs
• Title I funding for schools serving the lowest-income families
• Access to libraries and after-school programs

A new interactive map on how safe Los Angeles schools are shows a wide swath of red in predominantly Latino, poor and immigrant neighborhoods, indicating students and teachers report not feeling safe.

But one neighborhood with those same demographics stands out for its lack of red. Boyle Heights/East LA is an oasis of green and yellow, meaning that students at most of those schools feel safe or somewhat safe.

The area has been a focus of intense community activism among Latino advocates. They attribute the sense of safety in the schools to high parent involvement and a coalition of community organizations that have pushed for positive behavior intervention and student support policies, particularly in the Boyle Heights community.

InnerCity Struggle (ICS) is proud to have partnered with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission in order to resource our Media Justice Academy this past July. Every year, during the summer season, 50 ICS youth engage in a week-long institute where they study the definition and history of action-based media and how it is used to galvanize social movements. Students learn how to think critically about media portrayals of people of color and immigrants and how to create alternative visions that highlight the Eastside community’s cultural assets and strengths.

It was hard not to eavesdrop in the tiny Pico-Union studio where Maria Garcia grew up.

She was around 9 when her father came home one day from his low-wage job as a garment worker and told her mother about the immigration raid at his downtown L.A. factory.

She could hear their relief that her father hadn’t been found.

The Board of Supervisors took steps Tuesday to ensure Boyle Heights residents have a voice in shaping development around LAC+USC Medical Center.

Supervisor Hilda Solis recommended hiring a consultant to facilitate a partnership between the county, USC and local residents, hoping to generate a shared vision for the campus and community.

“It is important we make sure everyone gets a seat at the table,” Solis said.

Residents and community advocates told the board that they’ve been excluded from conversations about development of the campus for too long.