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.

Spectators in L.A. this summer for the World Cup could pay up to $209,000 for a private suite for just one match, but union workers at SoFi Stadium are worried they'll miss out on the action.

Bartenders, cooks, dishwashers and servers represented by Unite Here Local 11 have staffed the events held at the stadium since it opened, from the 2022 Super Bowl and NFL games every fall to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concerts. That includes positions in suites, where fans can pay top dollar for private rooms, food and drink.

But FIFA has brought in another entity entirely to run its luxury program for World Cup fans. The company, called On Location, is FIFA's official "hospitality partner," offering those that can afford it exclusive seating, special gifts and meals. Their packages can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.

Luxury suites for fans attending the World Cup at SoFi Stadium cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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FIFA

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https://fifaworldcup26.suites.fifa.com/

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Workers at SoFi say they're worried that FIFA's relationship with On Location means jobs that would typically go to union workers — and the wages and tips that go with them — will instead go to subcontractors without union protections. It's one reason they're threatening to strike when the World Cup comes to town.

 "We have so many wonderful workers who've been here season after season," said Kay Blake, a bartender from Inglewood who works at SoFi Stadium. "I don't see why they would partner with someone else to bring an experience that we can bring ourselves."

Workers also want to be paid a higher rate that reflects the sky-high ticket prices for the eight World Cup matches at SoFi Stadium. They're asking for double pay for major events including the tournament — an arrangement that the food service workers at Dodger Stadium have for the World Series, according to Unite Here.

"We're trying to ensure that there is no disparity between the profits of the company as opposed to our labor," Blake said. "We don't want to be exploited."

How does the World Cup affect labor negotiations?

Unite Here Local 11 represents around 2,000 workers at SoFi, and they're currently negotiating a new contract with Legends Global, the company that runs the stadium's bars and food services. Their old contract expired last year.

The union is leveraging its role in the coming World Cup to push for higher wages, especially at mega-events. Its workers also want protections from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, after the agency's head said that ICE will play a key role in security for the tournament. Unite Here filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, saying ICE's planned presence at the World Cup threatened the union's ability to collectively bargain.

But the battle over subcontracting could also lead workers to the picket line. The union says the use of subcontractors will determine who will benefit from the riches that FIFA brings to Inglewood.

"Subcontracting is supposed to be rare," Unite Here Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen told LAist. "So in this contract, we're saying no more. It needs to end and especially needs to end at the World Cup because we want those jobs to be good jobs."

How common is subcontracting?

Petersen said the World Cup isn't the only event where jobs have been threatened. He said that union members lost out on more than 100,000 hours of work in 2025 that was instead given to subcontracted workers.

Kay Blake, the bartender, offered LAist an example: an external company paying to operate a suite or two for an event at SoFi.

"If you bring in a subcontractor, they're going to want to bring in their people," she said. "Let's say that this subcontractor usually buys one to two suites… We have a group of people called suite attendants, and so now there's one to two suites less from their workload."

Blake said that she and her co-workers are scheduled by seniority, and fewer suites could mean people work fewer hours. She also said more short-term workers at the stadium for the World Cup could dilute tips for the workers who are at SoFi year-round.

A spokesperson for Legends Global declined to comment on ongoing negotiations with Unite Here Local 11. A representative for Hollywood Park, the site of SoFi Stadium owned by Stanley Kroenke, deferred to Legends Global. FIFA also did not respond to emails requesting comment on the ongoing negotiations.

Luxury packages are the new normal

The dispute between SoFi workers and their employer comes as high ticket prices for the World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games face scrutiny and mega-event organizers emphasize luxury experiences for the very wealthy.

On Location is also the hospitality partner for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The company supplied the same service in Paris in 2024 — the first time the Olympics had such an official luxury service, according to the New York Times.

"The higher end can run well into the tens of thousands of euros: bespoke multiday all-inclusive packages that might include stays in five-star hotels, meals cooked by Michelin-starred chefs, seamless car service between venues and the best seats at the most in-demand events," a Times reporter described in the summer of 2024.

LAist reached out to On Location via email, requesting an interview on the services they provide and their workforce. The company didn't respond.

Isaac Martinez, a cook at SoFi Stadium who lives in Inglewood, said he's still waiting to learn what his schedule will be for the World Cup and he's worried about his hours.

Martinez told LAist that since World Cup prices are so high, he and his co-workers should get a slice of the pie.

"The people that are able to afford those tickets and those suites, they're not people like us," Martinez said through an interpreter. "They're not the people that are gonna make the food or make the experience."

The World Cup kicks off in Los Angeles on June 12 with the first U.S. men's match against Paraguay. If there's no resolution to negotiations, attendees could arrive to a picket line.

State regulators voted Thursday to stop Southern California Gas Co. from charging customers to help pay for planning miles of pipelines that would bring hydrogen gas to the L.A. Basin.

The company says the project would reduce the region’s reliance on methane gas.

Southern California Gas estimates it would cost about $266 million to study and plan the project — called Angeles Link — and asked the state Public Utilities Commission to allow it to recover those costs through customer rates. The company had proposed a monthly increase of $0.35 on the average residential customer bill over the course of three years.

The commission unanimously rejected the request, saying the company had not proved any direct benefit to customers. The decision effectively halts the project for now, and comes amid a stall in federal funding for hydrogen projects under the Trump administration.

Local environmental groups involved in the community advisory process had also grown frustrated by negotiations that they said, in a letter to state regulators, “does not prioritize genuine community engagement.”

As global pollution levels continue to climb, the commission’s decision also highlights the growing challenge of transitioning to a cleaner energy supply amid rising utility bills and open questions about the safety and true environmental cost of largely untested technology.

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a colorless gas that is considered "clean" because it doesn’t involve carbon, which — when burned to create energy — becomes carbon dioxide, a major planet-heating gas.

But it takes energy to produce hydrogen, and most hydrogen these days is created by burning fossil fuels. “Green” hydrogen is created by using clean energy sources like solar and wind to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

SoCal Gas said the Angeles Link project would prioritize green hydrogen.

Most experts see green hydrogen as an important clean-burning fuel for hard-to-electrify industries, such as long-haul trucking and gas-fired power generation. The city of Los Angeles, for example, wants to retrofit its Scattergood Power Plant near El Segundo to burn hydrogen instead of methane gas to generate electricity.

There are many open questions about how safe the highly-combustible gas is for proposed uses and how much water it will require to make. At the same time, extracting and burning fossil fuels for electricity and fuel also takes water — a growing problem as climate change drives longer and hotter droughts.

Experts say, if done right, hydrogen can reduce that water intake and not have a major impact on water supplies.

Also, burning hydrogen could actually worsen local, lung-damaging nitrogen-oxide air pollution, at least with the technology as it currently stands, according to energy researchers.

Reactions to the decision

SoCal Gas will now have to turn to shareholders or other sources of funding if the company wants to proceed. The company did not directly answer LAist’s questions about whether it would.

“We continue to believe that hydrogen—including clean renewable hydrogen—can help advance California’s energy and climate goals while supporting the long‑term affordability, security and reliability of energy service for customers,” SoCal Gas spokesperson Brian Haas wrote in an email to LAist.

Environmental groups celebrated the vote, while emphasizing they see green hydrogen playing a role in the state’s future.

“Residential customers should not subsidize speculative infrastructure for large industrial users,” said Michael Colvin, director of the California Energy Program at Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement.

“We look forward to working with regulators, utilities and large customers to build a credible, cost-effective strategy to cut climate pollution from sectors that are hardest to electrify,” the statement read.

Global events like the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics are sure to draw thousands of new visitors wanting to get to know Los Angeles.

L.A. has a lot to offer, including its vast and varied portfolio of public art. It’s even been referred to as the mural capital of the world. So if you want to explore some of the city’s art, here are a few murals you won’t want to miss.

Sports 

“LA Rising” at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo celebrates the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, depicting him in his two roles — hitter and pitcher.
- Where to find it: 328 First St., Los Angeles

“Blue Heaven on Earth” is a love letter to the Dodgers, depicting both Shohei Ohtani and the late Fernando Venezuela.
- Where to find it: 1647 Blake Ave., Los Angeles

A mural honoring Winter Olympics Gold Medalist Alysa Liu in Gardena.

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Jay L Clendenin

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Getty Images

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California native and Olympian Alysa Liu captured the world’s attention with her figure skating in the Winter Olympics. This mural in Gardena celebrates her win.
- Where to find it: 15532 Crenshaw Blvd., Gardena

A mural of L.A. Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna can be found outside Hardcore Fitness L.A.

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Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

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Los Angeles Times

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“City of Angels!” pays tribute to Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gigi.
- Where to find it: 400 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles

Music

Whitney Houston, Rihanna, Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse and Selena are memorialized on this Hollywood mural.
- Where to find it: 7677 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 

“Jazz on the field” is an ode to Wrigley Field and the Dunbar Hotel in South L.A. and depicts jazz icons Louis Armstrong and Etta James, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.
- Where to find it: 43rd St. and Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When Kendrick Lamar featured Tam’s Burgers in his “Not Like Us” music video, the burger spot in Compton commissioned a mural highlighting the rapper’s unforgettable single.
- Where to find it: 1201 Rosecrans Ave, Compton

Historic to LA

A section of the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, designed by muralist Judy Baca, that showcases pivotal moments in Los Angeles History.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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“The Great Wall of Los Angeles” is one of the largest murals in the world, and it’s supposed to get bigger. The half-mile art piece depicts California’s rich history.
- Where to find it: Along the L.A. River in the San Fernando Valley, on Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street. 

“The Blessing of the Animals” at La Placita Olvera depicts the Catholic tradition of blessing one’s animals.
- Where to find it: 115 Paseo De La Plaza, Los Angeles

“El Grito” depicts a scene that sparked Mexican independence from Spanish rule.
- Where to find it: Placita de Dolores at 831 N. Alameda St., Los Angeles

When you take a bite of the lomo saltado burrito from Merka Saltao, a fast-casual Peruvian restaurant in Culver City, one of the first things you'll notice is the sauce.

The wok-fried chunks of steak, dressed in a soy-and-oyster sauce reduction spiked with vinegar, saturate the rice inside the tortilla, highlighting the sweet heat of ají amarillo mixed with the velvety texture of pinto beans.

It's a beautiful confluence of flavors. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a creative act of evolution or a betrayal of Peruvian culinary heritage.

Standing on business

The lomo saltado burrito at Merka Saltao wasn't exactly a calculated move. Lifelong friends Alonso Franco and Ignacio Barrios — who met in high school in Lima — came to Los Angeles to bring Peruvian food to the masses, first through a ghost kitchen concept they ran from 2021 to 2023. The burrito happened almost by accident: a member of their kitchen team brought in a tortilla one day, someone suggested wrapping the lomo saltado in it, they ate it, and within three days, it was on the menu.

Merka Saltao co-founders Ignacio Barrios, left, and Alonso Franco, right, inside their Culver City restaurant. The two lifelong friends from Lima opened the fast-casual brick-and-mortar location for their Peruvian concept in August 2025.

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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The data from the ghost kitchen made the case for keeping it there. Franco and Barrios had launched with around 140 dishes — lomo saltado, ceviche, chicken dishes, the works. But the numbers kept pointing to the same thing: wherever lomo saltado appeared on the menu, in whatever form, burrito, bowl, salad, it was the winner.

(Ceviche, for all its cultural cachet, is raw fish with raw onion — a harder sell for a weekday lunch. Lomo saltado, Franco noted, is steak and fries — basically a hamburger.)

The backlash

The two friends made the leap to brick-and-mortar in August 2025, opening Merka Saltao in downtown Culver City. It's one of the more competitive dining corridors in L.A., the kind of block that can support a $16 wellness bowl and a craft beer bar in the same stretch, populated by Amazon employees on lunch breaks, families on weekend outings, and food-literate regulars who will absolutely have opinions about what goes in a burrito.

Those opinions arrived faster than Franco expected. Within the first week of opening, an influencer came in and posted about the restaurant — but instead of showing the full menu, the bowls, the chicha morada, the flexibility of the concept, they showed the burrito. Just the burrito.

Franco working the wok at Merka Saltao. The high-heat wok technique at the heart of lomo saltado traces its roots to Chinese immigrants in Peru

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Christopher Mortenson

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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The comments turned quickly. "No! Peruvians don't eat burritos. ¿Qué car—o es eso?" — roughly, "what the hell is this?" — wrote one commenter. Another said "Burritos? We don't eat burritos in 🇵🇪”. Franco describes sitting at his computer reading the pile-on, feeling something between anger and devastation. "There was a moment where I probably even cried," he said, "thinking, I've made a mistake." But then he looked at the numbers. 30,000 had seen the post…. And half the comments were in his defense.

He took the conversation to Reddit, posting to r/FoodLosAngeles asking the community directly: am I wrong for this? The response was overwhelming — hundreds of comments, almost entirely in his favor, and a surge of new customers walking through the door shortly after.

Fusion by default

This is Los Angeles, where many of the dishes that define the Southern California diet were born precisely from cultures colliding. Roy Choi built an empire on Korean tacos. Al pastor traces its technique to Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit. The California roll, invented by Japanese chefs in Los Angeles in the 1960s, introduced an entire country to sushi. None of these dishes destroyed the traditions they borrowed from. If anything, they expanded their audience. And the lomo saltado burrito isn't exactly a novel concept in Southern California to begin with — everyone from Pablitos Tacos in North Hollywood to Le Hut in Santa Ana, run by 2025 James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Castillo, has featured their own version. Even Disney's California Adventure got in on it, serving a lomo saltado burrito out of the Studio Catering Co. food truck as recently as last year.

The lomo saltado bowl and burrito at Merka Saltao in Culver City — two versions of the same dish that sparked an unlikely online debate about Peruvian culinary identity.

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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Franco would also point out that lomo saltado itself — the dish the purists are so eager to protect — is a product of Chinese immigrants bringing the wok and soy sauce to Peru roughly 300 years ago. "Peruvian is by default fusion," he told me. "So we have all the right to wrap it up in a burrito." What the online critics were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was defending a dish that was itself once considered inauthentic — and doing so in the name of authenticity.

Where things stand

Since the backlash, Franco says business has been mostly steady — breaking even, which for a concept that requires high volume at a low price point, he considers a good sign. The controversy changed things in ways he didn't expect: people started coming in specifically because of the story, not just the food. He began putting himself front and center in the brand, regularly making videos on social media about what it's like to run the business, occasionally poking fun at himself and the whole debate. When we visited during the weekday lunch rush, there was a steady line of people waiting to order, many stopping to talk with Franco directly.

In a way, he's answered the authenticity question not with an argument but with a presence — showing up, telling the story, letting the food speak. "Honoring my food, if that requires pairing lomo saltado with a salad or wrapping it in a tortilla, I have no problem," he said. "I'm not being less authentic. We are evolving in Peru anytime. I have to be authentic on the individual flavor and then be flexible to reach more people to discover our flavors."

The burrito, it turns out, was never the point. It was just the door.