The Brief

Parents have consistently told LAist's education team that they feel confused and overwhelmed by L.A.'s school system — especially when selecting the type of school and navigating the application process.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are more than 400 elementary schools to choose from, including magnets, multilingual, multicultural or gifted and talented programs.

To help, K-12 reporter Mariana Dale and Senior Education Editor Ross Brenneman created the School Game Plan, a series of guides designed to help families navigate their child's educational journey.

From this series, the team produced a printed workbook based on the online guide "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," meant to help caregivers determine the best option for their child within LAUSD.

But producing the guide was only the first step — we needed to figure out how to get it into families' hands.

School Game Plan is available in print from your local library!

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Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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LAist has distributed print materials such as zines and guides before. However, this was the first time we tailored outreach specifically around a printed guide aimed at families raising children five and under.

Our efforts coincided with California's rollout of transitional kindergarten, a new grade level for 4-year-olds. That made it a timely opportunity to connect with parents of young children who may want more information about public schools in L.A.

That meant we had to think creatively and test new ways to reach families. Here's what we learned.

The goal

The goal was to distribute our printed workbook, "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," to parents and caregivers across L.A. from September to early November. With help from a grant, we printed 7,200 copies to give out.

How we did it

The guides were distributed in a variety of ways:

• Tabling at early childhood events 
• Partnering with groups to distribute on our behalf  
• Presenting at education-related meetings 
• Offering copies to organizations through a web and social callout 

Here's how we went about this outreach.

Events

We tabled at several events new to our team, from the L.A. Kids Book Festival — with an estimated attendance of thousands of families — to storytimes at local libraries drawing in about 20-30 caregivers at a time.

Ross Brenneman, LAist's Senior Editor of Education, is speaking with a mother about the team's workbook, "How to Choose a School in L.A.," at the L.A. Kids Book Festival.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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At the festival, we spoke to hundreds of parents. A large crowd hovered over our table for hours. The reason? Our glorious prize wheel. Who doesn't love free swag? Prizes included crayons, bubbles, and slime — and everyone got a guide. That day alone, we passed out over 300 of them.

The storytimes offered a more intimate setting. We attended three events at L.A. Public Library branches to reach families from varying geographical locations – Los Feliz, Reseda and the Westchester area.

LAPL recommended these particular branches since they had high attendance.

This was the format for each session:

• Introduction. The children's librarian introduced us to the group. 
• Explain. We briefly shared who we are and what the School Game Plan offers. 
• Engage. After storytime, while the kids played, caregivers would come over and talk to us.  

We handed out over 200 guides. Parents were overwhelmingly grateful for the workbook.

LAist's education attended the Los Feliz Branch Library's story time event and passed out workbooks.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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Presentations and meetings

The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) invited our team to present at a couple of meetings with early childhood educators and parents.

One focal meeting was LACOE's Head Start Policy Council, made up of parent representatives from all 16 of their delegate agencies serving about 7,000 children across L.A. County. Dale and I presented the School Game Plan, including the printed workbooks.

After the meeting, people stopped by our table where we gave out 600 guides. With LACOE's help, we also provided additional guides to schools and organizations within their network. This meeting led to the highest number of guides passed out in person.

In other cases, our presence at larger events opened up opportunities to have gatherings with smaller groups later on. The team met a preschool administrator at the L.A. Kids Book Festival who invited us to share our print workbook with parents of 4-year-olds. What started as a simple presentation turned into an intimate conversation where parents, a preschool administrator and I reviewed the workbook together. While that gathering was small, the conversation was incredibly invaluable.

Fountain Day Preschool invited parents of four-year-olds to explore LAist's workbook, "What Is a 'Good School' and How Do You Find One in Los Angeles?"

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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Taking the time to sit with parents surfaced so many questions — like how to apply, how long the application actually takes and more. Many of their questions were addressed in the workbook, while others weren't. It offered better insight into how the workbook can help caregivers, highlighting parents' needs, and showed where there's still work to do on our part based on questions that weren't addressed in our resource.

Partnerships

We also partnered directly with several early childhood organizations such as Partners for Children of South L.A., Children's Institute, and The Whole Child, which collectively distributed 900 guides throughout their programs.

Our largest partnership was with the Los Angeles Public Library, which dispersed 3,650 guides to 72 library branches across the city.

Digital

During distribution, Dale and Brenneman penned a story about the print workbook, including instructions on how organizations can request copies. (Once distribution ended, the instructions were removed from the article.)

We paired the story with a social post to promote the print workbook.

A variety of groups and individuals reached out to us for copies, which they picked up from our office. This included:

• The LA Kindergarten Class 
• Parent board of Cal-Tot 
• Sherman Oaks Presbyterian Nursery School 
• Eagle Rock Montessori 
• Board of the Friends of Hancock Park Elementary 

Through this approach, we passed out nearly 450 workbooks.

Impact

Reach

In total, we distributed the guides to:

• 72 libraries 
• 12 organizations and schools (that we know of) 
• 9 events across Los Angeles 

In the community

LACOE's Head Start and Early Learning Division (HSEL) passed out the guides on our behalf at the Taste of Soul Family Festival, one of the largest free food festivals in the state.

A family attending the Taste of Soul Family Festival.

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Sherrell Jackson

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Distributing workbooks across LAPL branches helped spread the work in parent communities. A parent shared in "The Atwater Village Moms' Group" on Facebook about how "awesome" the guide was after discovering it at a local library. This showed our engagement was spreading through word of mouth, which is a major way parents find support. The post provided organic reach to a parent group that has over 6,000 members.

Metrics

A member of Atwater Village Mom's Group on Facebook posted about LAist's workbook.

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Sabrina T. Sanchez / LAist

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Within the print workbook are QR codes directing readers to resources by LAist and elsewhere. During distribution, we tracked scans to LAist-linked QR codes to gauge whether outreach drove traffic.

In September, the QR codes in the workbook were scanned by 148 different people. The most scans occurred in early and late September and corresponded with our community events at library branches.

The numbers show that community events drove engagement with the print workbook's online resources.

What did we learn?

You can't do this work alone. Look for events or groups who see the value in the work and go there.

The education spaces we visited accounted for the largest in-person distribution. Educators and parents were highly engaged and interested in the guides. We learned that people want to print out the online guide, "How to choose a school in Los Angeles," but the reprints had issues. To troubleshoot the problem, we created a printable version of the workbook in both English and Spanish, which we added at the beginning of the article.

There's no one way to go about distribution. Conducting a multi-pronged outreach approach worked best – this included tabling events, presenting the workbook at educator meetings, sharing the guide online and through social media, and having organizations and groups distributing the workbook on our behalf. Each of these strategies played an essential role in our outreach efforts.

Here are some other takeaways:

• Parents really like to hear from other parents. That's part of why we included a ton of parent voices in the guide itself. We also saw this in practice at one event, where parents asked each other many questions about their school preferences. 
• Strategic partnerships amplify reach faster and more effectively than through direct outreach alone. 
• When outreach occurs in trusted, familiar spaces, families are more likely to engage. 
• Establishing partnerships and distributing guides takes real time and effort. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work — forming relationships, building trust, organizing the guides, driving across L.A. to drop off guides and hauling heavy boxes. 
• Social and web callouts fueled pick-ups! 
• Going forward, be clear on your purpose for showing up in person. Is it for connection, distribution, awareness, or all the above? 

What could we do better next time?

The education team created the workbook to help level the playing field for every child. We distributed the workbook across various communities in the Los Angeles Unified School District. However, next time we aim to expand our presence in more diverse communities by participating in additional cultural and community events.

That means we may need to offer more resources in multiple languages, depending on the need.

As we learned, it's helpful to identify and work in spaces where families are already showing up. Next time, we'll connect with more daycare and childcare providers — especially those who didn't engage during this cycle.

Several groups, including preschool and early childhood organizations, invited us to present the workbook directly to the parents they serve. Although we could only do this once, it went very well, and we're interested in participating in more gatherings like this, as well as possibly hosting larger events, such as "cram sessions," to help parents navigate the school process in L.A.

How can you help make sure there's a next time?

• Does your organization want to financially support work like the School Game Plan, which helps parents choose the right school for their child? Email: grants@scpr.org. 
• Community-focused reporting is made possible by generous supporters like you! Become an LAist member today at LAist.com/give.  

If your organization or group is doing similar work, I love chatting about all things engagement! Or, if you want to invite us to your next community event, here’s how to get in touch. Email: ssanchez@laist.com.

Today will be dry and warm. Expect temperatures in the mid-to-low 90s in some areas, as a heat advisory is in effect for much of L.A. County between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Wind speeds between 30 and 40 miles per hour can be expected in the valleys. In downtown L.A. and along the coasts, the gusts will be a bit weaker, between 15 and 20 miles per hour.

The increased temperatures are fueled by northeasterly winds originating in Nevada’s Great Basin that have pushed their way into Los Angeles, resulting in moderate Santa Ana winds.

Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, says to expect areas around downtown L.A. to hit at least 90 degrees.

“Pretty warm temperatures for this time of year, in general," he said. “Even all the way down to the coast, we're going to see some very warm temperatures, upper 80s to low 90s.”

Temperatures are expected to cool down for the next couple of days as the Santa Ana winds dissipate, but they’re likely to pick back up on Wednesday.

Higher temperatures — between 80 and 90 degrees — could last until Friday.

Across much of the United States and Canada, daylight saving time begins Sunday at 2:00 a.m. local time.

Most people will turn their clocks forward an hour, trading an hour of sunlight in the mornings for more daylight at the end of the day. When it ends, clocks will turn backward by an hour nearly eight months later to have more morning light in the darkest days of winter.

But British Columbia will switch their clocks for the last time — ushering in a new era of permanent daylight saving time. The switch was supported by "more than 90% of British Columbians," said David Eby, premier of British Columbia.

"The way that we live our lives now in the modern era, having an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day, whether it's the winter or the summer, makes a big difference for people," Eby told NPR's Adrian Ma on All Things Considered.

While the idea may be a popular one among British Columbia residents, experts in sleep medicine and public health are not fans of the time change.

"Daylight saving time has been shown to have a lot of negative effects," said Emily Manoogian, a senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute and an executive member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego. "And actually the United States tried permanent daylight savings in the '70s for one year. It was so awful that they reverted it almost immediately."

People went to work in the dark and children walked to school in the dark. And then, "there were a few fatal car accidents," she said, which led to the reversal.

Eby acknowledged health risks, but added that people in his province are used to waking up in the dark and taking their kids to school in the dark during the winter.

"We're on the very western edge of the time zone, and so we have dark mornings anyway," he said. "People really want that hour at the end of the day."

Why daylight saving is bad for our bodies

While our modern world and lifestyles may favor permanent daylight saving, our biology supports a permanent standard time. That's because our internal circadian clocks — which control not just our sleep-wake cycle, but also our cardiac and metabolic pathways — are synced to daylight, according to Manoogian.

"Light is the largest cue to coordinate behavior," she said. When we wake up and our eyes detect sunlight, they send a signal to the brain to tell the rest of the body to wake up and gear up for the day.

"So when you're not getting light in the morning, your body thinks it's not morning yet," she explained. "And it's very hard to just force your body to wake up without that light."

Similarly, in the evenings, when it's bright outside, our bodies find it harder to go to sleep. And it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of later bedtimes and a tougher time waking up in the mornings. That cycle can affect our cognitive functioning during the day and our metabolism all day long. This has widespread public health impacts, said Manoogian. It can also lead to more car accidents, heart attacks and strokes in the week following the start of daylight saving time.

"We know that sleeping, eating, getting light at the wrong time is a huge risk for cardiometabolic disease," said Manoogian. "Every medical and scientific society would argue we should never go to daylight saving time. It was originally created to try to save energy, [but] evidence has shown it does not save energy."

A study by Stanford researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2025 found that switching our clocks twice a year takes a massive public health toll, primarily by driving up the number of strokes and cases of obesity per year. It also found that switching permanently to standard time would result in 300,000 fewer people having strokes and more than 2 million fewer cases of obesity.

"When we can realign better to our environment, we get better sleep," said Manoogian. "We have lower risks of almost any chronic disease you can imagine — cardiometabolic, cancer, even depression, bipolar disorder."

The Stanford researchers also found that permanent daylight saving reduced the number of strokes and obesity, but less so than permanent standard time. In other words, as Manoogian puts it, "the health benefits of standard time are pretty great."

Soften the blow of time change on your body

If you're concerned about how daylight saving time might affect your and your family's health, Manoogian has some tips to soften the transition on your body.

• Get enough light in the mornings: If the sun is out when you wake up, make sure you get enough light, said Manoogian. If it's dark when you wake up, at least turn on as many lights in your home as possible. 
• Prioritize getting enough sleep: Seven to nine hours of sleep is considered ideal for adults, with some people needing closer to seven and others needing closer to nine hours. You know what your body needs, so make sure you get that. "Consistency is also key," said Manoogian. So try to get the same amount of sleep every night. 
• Have consistent meal times: "Keeping a consistent eating pattern to the part of the day when you're active and best able to process food can have dramatic health benefits," she said. That might mean waiting an hour or two after you wake up to eat breakfast and keeping all meals to within an eight-to-10-hour window. "It can decrease Hb1C, which is kind of the gold standard for measuring blood glucose," she says. "It also is shown to decrease cholesterol in animal studies. It's shown to increase health span and even lifespan." 
• Ease kids into the time shift: "Usually what we do for our family is we try to shift like 20 minutes a day over like three days," said Manoogian, who has two children. "That can go a long way" toward helping kids' bodies to adjust to the shift forward.

Copyright 2026 NPR

When Tina Trahan first stepped into the Studio City house made famous by The Brady Bunch, she thought, “I have to have it.”

The art collector grew up watching the classic family sitcom and was struck by a rush of familiarity in the mid-century, split-level house used in the sitcom’s exterior shots.

The Brady Bunch house in North Hollywood, CA on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025.

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Myung J. Chun

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Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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“It feels like you walked into your childhood home when you were 10 years old,” Trahan said. “I thought, ‘No one can get this feeling anywhere else.’”

Her 2023 purchase has led to something more: The Brady Bunch house is now officially a Los Angeles landmark, putting it in the same league as the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Bowl.

The City Council last Wednesday granted the house at 11222 Dilling St. historic-cultural monument status — the culmination of a two-year campaign Trahan embarked on to preserve the house for future generations of fans.

Tina Trahan painstakingly recreated the sets of the Brady Bunch.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“People are really, really connected to the whole TV show,” Trahan said. “It just made me realize, what if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? Is there anything I can do to preserve this?”

Now, as a historic-cultural monument, the house can’t undergo demolition or major changes by any future owners without city review.

The Zillow listing

The Brady Bunch, which debuted in 1969, isn’t even Trahan’s favorite sitcom. That honor is reserved for Three’s Company.

The living room has been recreated to look like the TV show’s iconic set, with the open staircase and mid-century décor.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles Conservancy

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But growing up in front of the TV as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, she came to know The Brady Bunch episodes by heart from years of syndicated reruns.

Decades later, when she was on the hunt for a new house, she caught sight of the Brady Bunch house while scrolling through Zillow.

She stopped at a photo of an open floating staircase that looked just like the one the Brady kids barreled down on their way to the next family misadventure, always neatly wrapped up by episode’s end.

HGTV had put the house up for sale, after previously gutting the interior for a reality series with the original cast and rebuilding it to match the show’s sets.

Not everyone approved of the $3.2 million purchase, including Chris Albrecht, Trahan’s husband and the former HBO chief who oversaw shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Owner Tina Trahan had three elephant stuffed animals made for the girls' room until she settled on the right size.

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Tina Trahan

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“He said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” Trahan said. “He was under the impression that I wanted to move into it.”

But Trahan said she cares too much about preserving the house to ever live in it.

“What if someone drops a meatball on the sofa, or something?” she said. “I would have a nervous breakdown.”

Over the last couple of years, she’s added some 400 items to the rooms, easter eggs nodding to different episodes — like the flashlight that oldest brother Greg used to fake a UFO sighting and the stuffed giraffe in the room shared by the three girls. Trahan had three different giraffes made until she settled on the right size.

Fan destination

Trahan has also opened up the house for tours, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities like No Kid Hungry, the John Ritter Foundation and Wags and Walks, from where she’s adopted elderly and disabled dogs.

She said the actors who portrayed the Brady kids — including Christopher Knight, who played Peter, and Maureen McCormick, who was Marcia — gamely take part in the fundraisers at the house.

The Brady Bunch cast members continue to support the show's legacy and appear at fundraisers.

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Getty Images North America

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“They could not have found six people to better represent that show,” she said.

In the time that she’s owned the house, Trahan said she’s come to realize that Brady Bunch fans aren’t fading away, but continuing to grow in number.

The show has essentially been in nonstop reruns on various channels since its original run ended in 1974, and is also available to stream. Every day, fans of all ages make the pilgrimage to Studio City to take selfies in front of the house.

Tina Trahan sits on a Plymouth Satellite wagon she bought for the house. It's,like the ones the Bradys drove on the show.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“I just don't want that taken away from people who it means so much to,” Trahan said.

So Trahan set her sights on landmark status, and brought in legal and preservation experts to help make the case. Among them was Heather Goers, an architectural historian who also worked on getting Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood home designated as a historic-cultural monument in 2024.

Protecting a pop culture icon 

Trahan thought the team had an uphill battle, given the fact that the house was not very old (having been built in 1959) and that only the exterior was filmed for the show.

“I'm sure there are people that are like ‘But wait, that's not historical,'” Trahan said.

But then the nomination was approved by the Cultural Heritage Commission, which Trahan said surprised her by extending the historic-cultural designation to the interior, even though it had been thoroughly remodeled.

Then came approvals by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee of the City Council and finally the full council.

Tina Trahan's eye for detail extended to the backyard of the Brady House.

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Courtesy of Tina Trahan

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“It was a relief because it’s been two years I’ve been working on this,” Trahan said. “It’s been a long, long road.”

So how does it feel to own a landmark? Trahan says not much has changed — except she now needs a new homeowner’s insurance policy.

Her insurer canceled coverage last week after news broke that the house had gained landmark status.

Historic homes are seen as pricier and trickier to insure — but a small tradeoff she's willing to accept to protect a piece of TV history.

Happy Daylight Saving, when time is bent so mere mortals can have more time to play in the sunshine.

It's a reminder of how much we treat the sun as an inalienable right here in L.A., as we emerge from months of long nights when darkness descends at the inconvenient hour of, say, 4:30 p.m.

For artists, filmmakers, writers, the light of Los Angeles has been a source of inspiration.

The late David Lynch was an avowed fan. He wrote about its transformative quality in his 2006 book of musings and reflections, "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity."

"The light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places," Lynch recounted.

That same L.A. glow was memorialized in the New Yorker three decades ago by writer Lawrence Weschler, who chopped it up with a constellation of notable names in the arts, sciences and beyond — including the great Vin Scully — about the light that the writer "pined for every day" since leaving Southern California.

Actually, it's pollution

All this sweet talk rankles  Paul Wennberg, who teaches air pollution chemistry at Caltech. He and his research team have worked to reduce pollution in cities across Asia, Mexico and the U.S.

 "They're waxing poetic about the L.A. glow," he said. "A lot of it is caused by smog."

L.A. glow

Wennberg is not talking about the glorious magic hour sunsets, but the gentle sunlight we've come to associate with Los Angeles.

The kind of light that doesn't produce harsh, defined shadows. And why not? Because of the many tiny particles of smog in the air that are perfectly sized to ricochet light in all conceivable directions.

"It's all the pollution in the air that is scattering, as we say, redirecting the light from the sun," he said.

That process, Wennberg said, makes the air "glow, literally."

Lynch’s "bright and smooth."

"This is why artists say they like Los Angeles — it's because the light comes at us from all directions," he said.

And on really polluted days, Wennberg continued, the sky looks overcast. "It keeps us from having shadows."

That means we're actually getting less sunlight, says Suzanne Paulson, director of the Center for Clean Air and a professor at UCLA.

" It varies obviously from day to day, but it can be easily half the sunlight that is actually not reaching the ground because of the pollution," Paulson said.

The drastic difference on a non-polluted day — with its full direct sun casting hard shadows — can be seen on clear days, like during the Santa Anas.

Those winds can be “so strong that they come and basically scour out the whole basin and push all the smog off the coast," Paulson said. "And sometimes you can see this smog layer out over the ocean."

Even as the L.A. light continues its glow, both Wennberg and Paulson said the bad air we experience here in 2026 is nothing like what it was in decades past — thanks to the pioneering work done by the state and the city.

'L.A. smog'

The first major Los Angeles smog event happened July 26, 1943, and caused panic among the populace who feared the ominous dark haze was a Japanese chemical attack.

In essence, that was the birth of photochemical smog, often known as L.A. smog, distinct from other serious episodes that had happened in the winter elsewhere.

But how it was different chemically wasn't known until the early 1950s, when Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit discovered that certain tailpipe pollutants along with industrial emissions get baked by intense sunlight — and result in L.A. smog.

By then, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District was formed, the first in the nation. It was merged with similar entities in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to create the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 1977.

"The air quality was horrendous," Paulson said.

But through hundreds of laws, from those regulating consumer products like lighter fluid or oil paint, to requiring reformulated gasoline and catalytic converters for cars, the air has become dramatically healthier.

"Over the years in California, we have really led the world and made what has been a crowning achievement," she said. " The air is 70, 80% cleaner than it was."

So much has been done, she said, that regulations have just about reached their limits.

"We've done all the easy things, and it's just really hard to find additional things that we can regulate to improve the air quality," she said.

Bigger changes — for example, electrifying more vehicles and appliances, and burning less fossil fuel — will be needed to curb pollution further. Because even at reduced levels, pollutants are still harmful, leading to not just respiratory illnesses but cardiovascular issues and environmental degradation.

Are we special?

So is the L.A. light unique?

Los Angeles's geological features — our mountains that trap heat, deserts that produce hot winds and coasts that create cool sea breezes — all contribute to pollution being held close to ground in a process known as inversion, Paulson and Wennberg noted.

And the stuff just sits there, stubbornly shrouding the city until the winds come to chase it away.

But no, the glow in L.A. isn't special, said Wennberg at Caltech, but our romanticization of it is. And if you are ever curious if pollution is around, he said just look at the ground.

" You'll see a shadow, but it'll be much less sharp," he said.  "When I see the really bad pollution here, it still makes me very sad. I think we need to, you know, make shadows great again."