A look at the various school options in SoCal, today's focus: public schools, the president heads to Cuba, an analysis of Marvel's superhero: Black Panther.
8 things to know about enrolling your child in LA's public schools
For many parents trying to decide where to send their kids to school, the process can be overwhelming.
There are traditional public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, dual language options and private schools.
Sending your child to your neighborhood public school is the simplest option but even that choice can be complicated. How do you find out which school is yours? What if it's full? What if you live in one neighborhood but work in another?
Amy Walia-Fazio, Executive Director of the Parents Education League of Los Angeles, joined Take Two to answer parents' most frequently asked questions.
1. If you live within LAUSD, how do you find your local neighborhood school?
The easiest way to find out is by going to LAUSD.net and looking under the Resident School Identifier. You enter your address and it pulls up every school that is your resident school. You might have more than one choice depending on where you live.
2. What does "resident" school mean?
Some people say neighborhood school, home school or resident school. The most correct term is resident school. It is the school zoned for the zip code you live in.
3. When and how do you enroll in your resident school?
When you want to sign up for the school you're assigned to, you can fill out their paperwork on-site at the school. A lot of times it's available online too. Usually the forms are available in the Spring (around March/April) prior to the start of school in Fall.
It's as simple as filling out the forms, unless your school has a special designation to it, for example, if your school is a charter school and could possibly have some preference to it. If your school has a charter designation or is an affiliated charter, they'll usually have a residential preference. In case they don't, that's something you want to know. That's easy to find out by calling or visiting the school and asking about their application process.
4. What if your school is full?
That does happen. If you get a late start on the process or don't get your paperwork in on time, you may find that your resident school has met its enrollment cap for the year. If all of their resident spots are full and they just don't have space, you'll be assigned a neighboring school. That may or may not be your best fitting school, but you will have another option.
You may also get put on a wait list for your resident school if they've already met their enrollment cap. Often times a lottery is used to rank the wait list and they do sometimes go to the wait list depending on how many spaces become available once the school year begins. The best advice is to get your paperwork in early.
5. If you live in one neighborhood and work in another one, is it possible to send your child to the school in the neighborhood where you work?
It is possible with what's called an intra-district permit. There's several criteria that can allow you to move to another school within LAUSD that's not your resident school. The most popular way is the parent employment or "work permit" criteria. The caveats are that the parent has to be physically employed full-time within the attendance boundaries of the requested LAUSD school.
Another way is through a specialized program like, for example, the Schools for Advanced Studies. If your resident school does not have an SAS program, and there is a nearby school that does have/is designated an SAS school, it’s one way to apply for an intra-district permit.
The other way that may fit for some families is the childcare criteria. If both parents, or the caregivers, are employed full-time, and the person who's going to be picking up and dropping off the child (i.e. a grandparent) is located within the attendance boundary of a school, that's the third way to get an intra-district permit.
One thing to remember is that you'll need both schools (your resident school and the school that's not your resident school) to sign off on an intra-district transfer. The good thing is that if you have multiple children, once one child is in the requested school it's easier to get your other children in as well.
6. What are the other school districts in the region and do they operate the same as LAUSD?
There are a number of other school districts: Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, Beverly Hills Unified, Culver City Unified, just to name a few. Every school system will operate slightly differently.
7. What if you want to go from one school district to another?
If you live outside of the LAUSD boundaries and you want to go to a school within the LAUSD boundaries, it requires what's called an inter-district permit. The criteria for that permit are similar to the intra-district permit.
If you live within LAUSD and you want to go to a neighboring public school district, the big way is the parental employment criteria. It's hard to switch districts because of programming because what you're saying is that nowhere in LAUSD is this particular program offered. That's difficult to claim because LAUSD is very large and has such a wide variety of options that there is almost a program for everybody.
8. What's the best advice for figuring out whether the resident school is the right option for your family and a "good" choice?
We use the term "fit" all the time. What's the right fit? What's the best fitting school? It's something that you can hone in on with criteria. What are your top three criteria when you look at a school? Is it diversity? Is it program? Is it class size? Teacher tenure? What are the criteria that you want for your child's educational experience.
It's a good idea to talk to friends, family, and other parents you meet at the park. Gather a list of schools you've been hearing about and then check them out. School-ratings.com is a helpful site that can paint a little bit of a picture of a school. The best way to learn about a school is to be on-site. Take a tour and really feel the school out.
Finally, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all school. No school is going to be the right fit for every child, every child is different. What might be the right fit for your best friend's child may not be the right fit for yours.
Series: Good Schools
As part of its Good Schools series, Take Two looks at the education landscape in the Los Angeles area. That includes its public schools, magnets, charters, private institutions and dual-language programs. You’ll hear from parents, academics, teachers, kids and even a couple of TV show producers.
Read more in this series and let us know your thoughts on Facebook, or tweet us
and
with the hashtag #goodschools.
Obama faces tough balance on historic trip to Cuba
President Obama faces a tough balancing act in Cuba, as he marks the first visit from a sitting U.S. President in nearly 9 decades. His message is about hope and the future, but there are still deep concerns about human rights and the treatment of dissident voices in the country.
"Looking back on it, people will compare it to President Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1972 that really marked a fundamental shift in U.S. attitudes towards China," said William LeoGrande, professor of Government at American University in Washington DC and co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. "President Obama is undertaking exactly the same kind of fundamental shift in our relationship with Cuba."
That shift could present new opportunities for US-based businesses. And in California, that could mean a chance for the tech center to find a new market, said LeoGrande.
"The Cubans are hoping to become an information technology center themselves," he said. "[They] see it as a way to take advantage of the high level of education of the Cuban population."
After meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro today, President Obama is scheduled to meet with human rights activists Tuesday and attend a baseball game with the Tampa Bay Rays going up against Cuba's national team.
Obama's trip may also be particularly poignant for Afro-Cubans. About 10 percent of the country's residents identify as black. For many of them, the president's presence isn't just a political victory – it's social triumph as well.
Cuban culture is diverse and complex, said Odette Casamayor, associate professor of Latin American Culture at the University of Connecticut.
How much more of an impact will El Niño have on our lives?
Remember back in the fall when we were planning for the mother of all rainy winters?
Phones were ringing off the hooks at roofing companies and everybody was researching the best pair of rubber boots... but things didn't go as expected. This February was one of the hottest on record and we didn't get the great Southern California deluge most predicted, but up north, the snow pack is thick and the reservoirs are filling back up.
So, what can we expect going forward?
Brian Kahn is a Senior Science Writer at Climate Central and he joins A Martinez to talk about our warm future.
The grapes of drought: Lessons from French wineries
Vineyards throughout California are keeping track of the weather - particularly in relation to climate change.
According to a recent study in the journal Nature, vintners are having trouble predicting how their wines are going to taste, because old weather patterns have gone out the window.
Take Two's A. Martinez spoke with Benjamin Cook, climate scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies about his study.
Marvel's Black Panther: out of the shadows and into the limelight
2016 will be a big year for the Marvel super hero Black Panther.
One of the last times that the character was in the limelight in recent years was the 2010 animated series.
Since then things have been sparse, with group appearances in the comic books and sporadic showings on the TV shows.
Now, not only will he be a part of hashtag Team Iron Man in upcoming film Captain America: Civil War, but he'll also be getting a brand new comic book series written by author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It's exciting not just because the character hasn't gotten much attention lately, but also because he's one of Marvel's premier heroes who is also Black.
Whether it's behind the scenes or as characters, Black representation in comics has never been a given.
So a character like Black Panther getting this much ink could be seen as a positive step.
Take Two's A Martinez spoke with Frances Gateward, an Associate Professor at Cal State Northridge.
Her anthology is entitled, "The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue play button above.
California farm industry adds 30,000 jobs amid drought
We've heard plenty of stories in recent years of farmers struggling to cope with our ongoing drought.
So - it came as a bit of a surprise to some to learn that last year the California farming industry added thirty-thousand jobs to its workforce.
Phillip Reese with the Sacramento Bee spoke with Take Two's Alex Cohen for the answers.
To hear the full conversation click the blue player above
LA's unique place in the global poetry scene
Today is World Poetry Day, a commemoration that the United Nations says is intended to recognize "the unique ability of poetry to capture the creative spirit of the human mind."
To mark the occasion, we thought there would be no other better guest than our very own poet laureate of Los Angeles, Luis Rodriguez. He talked to us about how L.A. connects to the rest of the world through poetry and previewed a new book about LA poets, which he wrote the introduction for, Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles.
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.