Burbank Unified School District is a

school district A school district is a special-purpose district that operates local public primary and secondary schools in various nations. North America United States In the U.S, most K–12 public schools function as units of local school districts, whic ...

headquartered in

Burbank, California Burbank is a city in the southeastern end of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located northwest of downtown Los Angeles, Burbank has a population of 107,337. The city was named after David Burbank, who ...

, United States.

History

Originally students attended Burbank schools until the high school level, when they moved on to Glendale Union High School District. The Burbank school district established its first high school, Burbank High School, in 1908, and therefore withdrew from the Glendale High School district.Brief History of Burbank High School

. Burbank High School. Retrieved on January 18, 2016. The district passed a general obligation bond in the 1950s.History

Archive
. Burbank Unified School District. Retrieved on January 18, 2016. In 1992 the Brighton Community School, a school for students with disciplinary programs, moved to a site adjacent to the BUSD headquarters, on a property. In 1998 BUSD sold the property to the city government for $8 million. The city planned to build a park and a library branch on this land. The district planned to move the Burbank school on the same site as Monterey High School, a school for students with academic problems, but by August 1998 the district withdrew these plans due to a negative response from area residents. In March 1993 the district board voted 5–0 to approve random metal detector searches of middle and high school students. In April 1994 the district failed to pass a $100-million bond. Superintendent Arthur Pierce resigned in May of that year. The district successfully passed a $112 million bond in 1997, the first-such bond passed since the 1950s. In August 2015 Matt Hill, previously a chief strategy officer at the

Los Angeles Unified School District Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is a public school district in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the largest public school system in California in terms of number of students and the 2nd largest public school district ...

, became the district superintendent of BUSD. In November 2015 the district approved board starting the following school year during the third week of August. In April 2019, the district board voted unanimously to rename the David Starr Jordan Middle School due to

David Starr Jordan David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851 – September 19, 1931) was the founding president of Stanford University, serving from 1891 to 1913. He was an ichthyologist during his research career. Prior to serving as president of Stanford Univers ...

's involvement with the

eugenics movement Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or ...

. The middle school kept Jordan's name for the next two years while the school district searched for a replacement name that everyone could agree with. In March 2021, the district board finally decided to rename their middle school in honor of labor leader and civil rights activist

Dolores Huerta Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta (born April 10, 1930) is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organi ...

. On September 9, 2020, the school district removed Harper Lee's

To Kill a Mockingbird ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' has become a ...

, Mark Twain's

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' or as it is known in more recent editions, ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'', is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United St ...

, John Steinbeck's

Of Mice and Men ''Of Mice and Men'' is a novella written by John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it narrates the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job ...

, Theodore Taylor's The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry from middle school and high school whole class instruction after complaints were received from four parents of students. The decision gained the attention of anti-censorship organizations such as

PEN America PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of liter ...

and the

National Coalition Against Censorship The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), founded in 1974, is an alliance of 50 American non-profit organizations, including literary, artistic, religious, educational, professional, labor, and civil liberties groups. NCAC is a New York-bas ...

who object the banning of these books from the classroom.

Governing Board

Burbank Unified School District's Governing Board is composed of five members, elected to a four-year term. Elections were held at the same time as the Burbank City Council elections with the primary in late February and the runoff in mid-April of odd-numbered years. The school board voted to eliminate the primary/runoff format and replace with a plurality election and moved its Governing Board elections to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November effective with the 2020 election to coincide with the California general election. Board members whose terms expire in April 2019, will extend to December 2020 and members whose terms expire in April 2021 will extend to December 2022.

Schools

High schools

* Burbank High School * John Burroughs High School * Monterey High School (

Continuation In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computat ...

)

Middle schools

* John Muir Middle School * Luther Burbank Middle School * Dolores Huerta Middle School

Elementary schools

* Walt Disney Elementary School * Thomas Edison Elementary School * Ralph Emerson Elementary School * Bret Harte Elementary School * Thomas Jefferson Elementary School * William McKinley Elementary School * Joaquin Miller Elementary School * Providencia Elementary School * Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School * R.L. Stevenson Elementary School * George Washington Elementary School

Other schools

*Burbank Adult School *Community Day School *Magnolia Park School *Horace Mann Children's Center

Former schools

* Abraham Lincoln Elementary School * Henry M. Mingay Elementary School (Now Burbank Adult School) * Monterey Elementary School (Now Monterey Continuation High School) * Benjamin Franklin Elementary School *Horace Mann Elementary School (Now Horace Mann Children's Center) * John Quincy Adams Middle School (Now Thomas Edison Elementary School)

References

External links

Burbank Unified School District
*Articles about
Burbank Unified School District
at the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' {{Education in Los Angeles County, California