1933 Hillhurst Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027

My daughter attended fourth grade at Franklin this year. Ultimately, she withdrew because the principal and teacher refused to open a window and consistently run air filters in the classroom, even when there were covid cases in the classroom and in the school. We REALLY wanted her to attend, as it is our home school, the kids are nice, and our daughter is a social butterfly. We went back and forth with the principal, teacher, and LAUSD admin, all of whom insisted that the LAUSD policy was that windows could not be opened, even though there are many schools that do have windows open. It came down to the teacher, who didn't want to open a window; and the principal, who backed whatever the teacher wanted. So, we got unlucky with the assigned teacher, but the principal wouldn't consider transferring her to another classroom, either, where another teacher might have been amenable to opening a window. It was all very frustrating trying to get them to open one fricking window so that our daughter could attend school. We thought that since she is highly gifted, the school might budge, but it didn't help one bit. So we homeschooled, and in the fall, our child will have to travel 45 minutes each way on a school bus to a magnet school that serves highly gifted children and has no problem opening a window or running air filters consistently. Even though we'd rather have her attend the local neighborhood school that is a 5-minute walk from our house, there are other significant concerns: 1. Construction on a new school building will be ongoing until 2027, creating an active construction zone with lots of air and noise pollution during the school day and decreasing the playground space by more than half. 2. The main school building is not earthquake-safe. It has been on the AB 300 list, identifying school buildings needing earthquake retrofits, since 1999, and NOTHING has been done to address this so far. Why are they building a NEW classroom building instead of fixing the old one, when the new one is NOT slated to replace the old one? 3. The gifted programs (GATE and SAS) exist, but pretty nominally. My daughter was identified as highly gifted, but there was no differentiated instruction or special programming for her. The most her teacher did was she seated her with three other gifted kids, but they didn't get differentiated instruction or assignments. Some positives: nice kids; nice parents; diversity; talented and encouraging art and music teachers.

parent of a 7th grader here. The curriculum for the 6th/7th GAT program is a mixed bag. Here are our grades for the 4 core classes:ELA: A. class and teacher were solid, well taught, good mix of topics (debate, critical thinking), independent reading, and literature and analyzed by the entire class. The students did not learn any advanced vocabulary however =(.History: A-/B+. Standard course on world cultures, teacher stuck to the textbook. Some puzzling assignments, such as a 'key terms' where the students had to provide images for ~20+ terms pertaining to a certain historical period or culture. Kids just used Gemini and Grok to make pictures for terms like 'patriarchal' and 'heriditary'. Yeah, pretty dumb.Math: B. Teacher moves fast, tests designed to test how quickly you can solve, not necessarily whether the student learned the key concepts.Science/Health: D. Teacher clocked out years ago and is mailing it in. No labs for chemistry or biology, just 3rd grade-level busywork crafting projects, liek the 'food truck' project, where the students were asked to build a paper food truck from scratch, using a 33point grading critera, including functionality on the interior cabinets, whether or not the truck has side mirrors. Ugh-- just soo bad. No educational value.Zoopalooza class: F. Another poorly designed, laughable busywork class, consisting of teams of 4 students assigned to do summer camp-level crafting (a diorama, a stuffed animal) of a random animal they are assigned at the beginning of the year. My kiddo's team never found time to meet, they almost failed the class but yeah it's so ridiculously dumb.Field Trips: F. Yeah they went to the zoo.Campus: Uninspired public school campus, feels straight out of 1979.Other fun parts: grades for tests and assignments are not posted regularly to Schoology, so you' be checking every day for weeks, nothing changes, then all of a suddent 23 different grades are posted, and your kid is getting a C becuase the teacher gave a 0/20 for an assignment that was due the day your kid was travelling or at a dentist appointment. Good luck fixing it!

My son began 9th grade at John Marshall last year, initially, things went well, but then he was bullied, and the school knew but didn't inform us. This year, he's still being bullied by the same family, and the school hasn't acted. The staff is overwhelmed, and my son's education is suffering. He's struggling because he has to worry about self-protection and can't focus in an unhealthy social environment. Recently, a student's mother even had to intervene in the courtyard.