The Orange County District Attorney’s Office said Tuesday that it was seeking to hold an arson suspect without bail after investigators found a number of emails allegedly spelling out the suspect's plans to harm students and staff members at University High School.

IUSD’s Information Technology team has been hard at work over the summer making a number of changes to the district’s email system. Some of the more technical stuff made our eyes glaze over, but we’re told the improvements will save money, increase email storage capacity for employees and make usernames and email addresses more intuitive.

Well, that was fast. Today marked the first day of classes for IUSD students attending the district’s four year-round schools. Those would be Plaza Vista School, Vista Verde School, Westpark Elementary and Woodbury Elementary.

Vehicle shade structures outfitted with energy-producing solar panels will be added to the parking lots of nine campuses, saving the district an additional $305,000 a year, following a vote this month by the IUSD Board of Education.

At its final meeting before the start of a new fiscal year, the IUSD Board of Education this week voted unanimously to adopt a spending plan for 2012-13.

At the direction of its Board of Education, the Irvine Unified School District has mailed out thousands of fliers encouraging local residents to weigh in on a proposal to add vehicle shade structures outfitted with energy-generating solar panels to a dozen Irvine campuses.

In the fall of 1971, Richard Nixon was in his first term as president, Disney was getting ready to open a new theme park in Florida, Led Zeppelin was putting the finishing touches on its fourth album, and Karen Reaves was a rookie teacher at the old El Toro Marine School.

As we noted previously, IUSD is in the final stages of updating its Strategic Initiatives, and district officials are hoping you’ll

Woodbridge High School’s athletic boosters have announced the 2012 recipients of a scholarship honoring the late Kent “K.J.” Bentley.