City council presses LAUSD for formal school‑siting collaboration after capacity briefing

Valerie Miller, chief operating officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, told the Los Angeles City Council that the district is facing rapid enrollment growth and a looming shortage of high‑school seats, and she urged a new approach that would use smaller "primary centers," conversions of existing campuses and intensified use of district‑owned land.

Miller said, "We have in the school district today 710,000 students. We're the second largest district in the United States after New York," and described recent enrollment increases of more than 14,000 students in a single year and 75,000 over five years. She said those trends had pushed the district to run 214 schools on year‑round, multitrack schedules and to bus roughly 15,000 students as long as 90 minutes each way at a cost of about $25,000,000 a year.

The district outlined an alternative to the traditional large‑site high school model that it said is costly and slow to deliver. Under the plan, LAUSD…