#lausd

[onlytiktoks]

[gwydionmisha]

Trump/Immigration Round Up: Published 8/4/25 AM

Judge blocks Trump from fast-tracking deportations of immigrants paro…

'He'll smash it!': ICE agents breaking through vehicle windows to detain drivers, report finds

A major new report from ProPublica investigates the use of force by immigration authorities, including a dramatic increase in agents smashin

Teachers demand LAUSD do more to protect students, families from ICE

The teachers challenged LAUSD to do more to keep students and their families safe when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Inside the neighborhood patrols watching for Ice: ‘They thought they could scare us – but this is LA’

Volunteers with Union del Barrio look for immigration officers and post videos and alerts, warning people to seek shelter

Here are some ways to help Immigrants and the anti-ICE Protesters:

Immigrant Defenders: https://give.immdef.org/give/545119/#!/donation/checkout The Bail Project: https://bailproject.org/ National Bail Fund Network: https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/en/nbfn-directory Amnesty International: protect asylum-seekers: https://donate.amnestyusa.org/page/113080/donate/1 The Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights: https://www.theyoungcenter.org/ CHIRLA: https://www.chirla.org/ AL Otro Lado: https://alotrolado.networkforgood.com/projects/63833-al-otro-lado-fund Mid-South Immigration Advocates: https://miamemphis.org/ "Know Your Rights:" https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Protest at LAUSD: Teachers refuse to be silenced on Palestine

“Free Palestine!” and “Stop the genocide!” chants rang out from the steps of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) headquarters on

By Maggie Vascassenno

“Free Palestine!” and “Stop the genocide!” chants rang out from the steps of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) headquarters on Aug. 8. LAUSD employees, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Human Rights Committee, Association of Raza Educators, Teachers for Justice in Palestine, Unión del Barrio, the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, and other community-based organizations demanded an end to the harassment, intimidation and doxxing of teachers who teach their students about Palestine and the ongoing U.S.-funded Israeli genocide.

[feminist-space]

"Just weeks before the implosion of AllHere, an education technology company that had been showered with cash from venture capitalists and featured in glowing profiles by the business press, America’s second-largest school district was warned about problems with AllHere’s product.

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles.

Those emails were sent shortly before The 74 first reported last week that AllHere, with $12 million in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job.

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April.

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told The 74.

...

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including Welligent, an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the Whole Child Integrated Data stored on Snowflake, a cloud storage company. Launched in 2019, the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data designed to streamline data analysis to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction.

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada.

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules.

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with The 74 outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information.

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.”

...

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web.

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told The 74. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.”

Read the full article here:

https://www.the74million.org/article/whistleblower-l-a-schools-chatbot-misused-student-data-as-tech-co-crumbled/

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Co. Crumbled

AllHere, ed tech startup hired to build LAUSD’s lauded AI chatbot ‘Ed’, played fast and loose with sensitive records, ex-software engineer a

[the-fabulous-killjoy]

Ranting about LAUSD

OK, so LAUSD finally canceled all schools for January 9th, but, unlike EVERY OTHER SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE AREA AFFECTED BY THE FIRES (ie Pasadena, Arcadia, Burbank to name a few), LAUSD didn’t cancel school today (January 8th). The air quality was terrible; I was wearing a KN95 mask due to the smoke. So why, you ask, did LAUSD schools (except for like 4 elementary schools) stay open today? Money. The school district gets money for each person who shows up, so they kept schools open. The superintendent stated that it was because “people might not have anywhere else to go” (loose quotation) but like, it wasn’t necessarily safe for people to travel to school, what with the wind, downed trees and power lines, and the smoke. Multiple teachers weren’t at school because they had to evacuate their homes. But they still kept schools open because they want money.

[impermanent-art]

Freshly updated work by Beau Stanton in Koreatown. Originally painted in 2016 for the RFK Mural, new look incorporates elements sourced by students and community members.

[zebraradar]

#ZineWorkshop with #LAUSD! (at Los Angeles, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca5469fp3YQ/?utm_medium=tumblr

[sassystrawberryk]

As the Wordpress article Fork Your Consideration by Sami Malek was published September 2011, he has now been teaching for 17 yrs. I truly hope he has the same love of teaching and passion for calling out unfairness & recognition of the impacts that decisions of his state & board make.

I would love the chance to talk to a past or present student of his to find out what the enjoyed and even disliked about one of our beloved teachers.