Year-Round Schools Pit Outrage Against Class Overcrowding

Since the Los Angeles Unified School District unveiled plans for more year-round schools last month, outraged parents have lined up at public meetings to hurl invective at the seven school board members, arguing that the change would spell calamity for family unity, child-care arrangements and children’s health.

They have threatened to boot some board members out of office if the year-round expansion goes through. And many have warned that, like forced busing of the late 1970s and early 1980s, mandatory year-round school will cause a mass exodus of middle-class, Anglo parents from district schools.

“Those parents who can afford to will put their children in private schools,” said an angry Chatsworth parent, who ended his blast at the school board with a call for San Fernando Valley schools to secede from the district.

Emotional Protests

The parents’ emotional protests are virtually a replay of school board meetings in 1985 and last fall when, after a series of overwhelmingly negative public hearings, the board backed away from the apparently unpopular alternative.

So far, the board has declined to create additional year-round schools even though one-fourth of the district’s 600,000 pupils already attend year-round campuses.

Meanwhile, district officials complain that they cannot build classrooms fast enough to serve the burgeoning school population. Since the fall of 1985, more than 20,000 new students entered district schools, and 14,000 new students a year are expected through 1996, when the total enrollment is projected to reach 707,000.

To keep pace, officials calculated that the district would have to build nine elementary schools, one junior high and one senior high every year, at an annual cost of $170 million.

Overcrowding Problem

Actual construction will be far off that pace, with only four new elementary schools scheduled to open over the next two years. Plans are in the works for other new campuses and expansion of existing schools, but those projects will not be completed fast enough to solve the overcrowding problem.

Meanwhile, the district is relying on portable bungalows and is busing more than 30,000 students from crowded campuses to schools with more space.

The greatest growth is occurring in predominantly Latino and Asian neighborhoods along the Wilshire Corridor, in the central city, the East San Fernando Valley and in the southeast cities of South Gate, Bell, Cudahy and Maywood.

On Monday at 2 p.m., the board will tackle the year-round issue once again, this time considering proposals that would also affect largely Anglo neighborhoods on the Westside and in the West San Fernando Valley, where overcrowding is not a problem.

It is uncertain what action, if any, the board will take. Some members say that enrollment is not climbing at the predicted pace. Until the figures are in, they say they cannot justify supporting a solution as radical as year-round schools.

‘Don’t Understand It’

“Public support of this is just about nil,” said East San Fernando Valley board representative Roberta Weintraub, a staunch opponent of year-round plans. “People just don’t understand it, and I don’t blame them. If a school has got six empty classrooms, it’s hard to say to them, ‘Your school has to go year-round because some other school is packed to the rafters.’ ”

Consider, for example, the case of two Valley schools.

Only nine miles separate Sharp Avenue School in Pacoima and Germain Street School in Chatsworth. But the two elementary campuses might as well be on different planets, for they represent opposite sides of the complex debate over how best to deal with the district’s mounting enrollment.

Computer Lab Sacrificed

Sharp, located in an area that attracts a large number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, has 1,200 kindergarten through sixth-grade students--and not a seat to spare. Portable classrooms already occupy half of the playground, and this year, a computer lab was sacrificed to make room for more students. Forty-six neighborhood children who belong at Sharp must ride a bus an hour each day to attend a less crowded school in Canoga Park.

On a year-round schedule, those 46 youngsters could return to Sharp. A total of 200 to 300 extra spaces would be created at the school, which Principal Richard Sosapavon said he would have no problem filling, judging by the recent rapid growth in the neighborhood.

But Germain, in a middle-class, Anglo neighborhood, has a shrinking student body of 700 students. The school’s principal said she expects to lose a few of her teachers before the end of the year because there are not enough students for them to teach. Diminishing enrollment is common in this part of the West San Fernando Valley, where the district closed several campuses in recent years.

Empty Seats

Nonetheless, Germain is on the list of potential year-round sites because its empty seats could be used by students from overcrowded schools that would also go year-round, according to district officials.

Although the district is considering the year-round option chiefly as a solution to the classroom shortage in certain areas, year-round school advocates say that the system offers educational advantages. One benefit, they say, is better retention of knowledge. Teachers often complain that students forget much of what they learn over the three-month summer holiday and then have to spend too much time during the first weeks of the fall semester reviewing what was lost. But year-round school pupils have shorter breaks interspersed throughout the year and, therefore, are less likely to forget their lessons, proponents of the system say.

Outmoded Calendar Argued

They also argue that the traditional calendar, designed to accommodate an agrarian society, is outmoded. “We’re not harvesting wheat over the summer any more,” said board member Warren Furutani, who opposes the year-round plans but finds the concept appealing.

The calendar under consideration by the board is called the “60/20” plan because it provides for rotating terms of roughly 60 days in school and 20 days on vacation. On this calendar, students would begin school on July 5 instead of in September. They would have the same amount of school and vacation time as their counterparts in a traditional school, but with shorter vacation blocks scheduled throughout the year instead of concentrated in the summer months.

To get the maximum use of campus facilities on this calendar, district officials proposed dividing a school’s student body into four groups or tracks, only three of which would be attending school at any one time. All students, however, would have some common vacation time--one week during the winter and one week in the summer. Some students would attend school during the summer.

33% More Students

By converting to this “multitrack” calendar, a traditional June-to-September school could have room for 33% more students, district officials said.

According to the district plans, only certain schools would use the multi-track calendar, however. These would include severely overcrowded campuses in addition to nearby schools that have empty seats to accommodate the overflow from the other schools.

The rest of the district’s elementary schools would use the 60/20 calendar, but everyone in the school would be on the same track.

Called the “single track” approach, this system does not offer the advantage of creating additional seats, district officials said. But it would enable those schools to stay in sync with the other year-round schools and bring conformity to a district where six different calendars are now being used--the traditional calendar plus five variations on the year-round schedule.

Conflicting Schedules

Many families in overcrowded areas have children in elementary, junior and senior high school that each follow a different calendar, causing the parents to try to juggle conflicting schedules. This problem would be solved if every school in the district were on the same schedule, officials said.

The parents who testified at several recent board meetings were not impressed with that argument, however.

“Any child going to school in the summer is missing some vital opportunities,” said Janedora Howell, a parent of a student at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, a Westside magnet school. She said she was referring to such things as camp, travel and other special enrichment programs.

Another parent, Janice Nishida of Westwood School, said “it is almost impossible to find quality day care” now, and a year-round schedule with several short vacation blocks will make child-care arrangements even more difficult. Several parents said the result will be more latchkey children.

Children in ‘Sweatboxes’

Others said the lack of adequate classroom air-conditioning would essentially condemn the children to “sweatboxes” during the summer months. Hortensia Lopez said her grandchild, who attends a year-round school in northeast Los Angeles, frequently complains of headaches, stomach aches and fatigue.

District officials say they are close to completely air-conditioning classrooms in existing year-round schools, but it has taken nearly seven years.

“I have to be guaranteed that these schools (proposed for year-round operation) will be air conditioned,” said board member Julie Korenstein, whose West Valley region often endures temperatures over 100 degrees in the summer.

Parents accustomed to the year-round system say that most of these problems get worked out eventually, and that some of the issues turn out not to be problems after all.

In Favor of Plan

“We still do have time off together as a family,” said Sherryl Schull, the parent of a child at Buchanan Street School in Highland Park, which converted to a year-round calendar six years ago. “In fact, we have more opportunities for vacation because (my daughter) has time off all year round.”

Isabel Justin, a parent at Aldama School in Eagle Rock, said she is convinced that the year-round system is educationally superior. “My boy can retain more knowledge than if he had three months off in the summer,” she said.

Analysts for the state Department of Education found mixed results recently when they examined the academic records of year-round schools. The researchers found that the test scores of students who attended single-track, year-round campuses were equal to or better than those of their counterparts in September-to-June schools. But students in multi-track, year-round schools performed “below predicted levels,” the researchers wrote.

Poor and Minority Students

The report suggested that the lower achievement levels found in year-round schools were not related to the calendar, however, but to the type of students who typically attend such schools. The majority of the 277 year-round facilities in California serve predominantly poor and minority students, who tend to live in overcrowded neighborhoods. Year-round schools also are twice as likely to serve students who speak little or no English, the report said. Thus, the researchers attributed the poorer test scores to “the special needs of the communities in which year-round schools have been placed.”

Even parents who like year-round school, however, concede that child care, particularly for working parents, remains a serious problem. In the Highland Park-Eagle Rock area, most schools are on the traditional calendar. Therefore, parks and recreation facilities, day-care centers and organizations such as the Boy Scouts offer their services with the traditional school schedule in mind.

Switch Entire District

But the pro-year-round parents believe that the best solution would be to switch the entire district to the system.

Said Jane Moore, the mother of a first grader at Buchanan Street School: “There is no incentive now for the ‘Y’ or Boy Scouts or parks and recreation or child-care agencies to take care of children on a more sporadic basis. But if all the schools were year-round, there would be a financial incentive for them do this.”

Moore, who was one of a tiny handful of people to speak in favor of year-round schooling at a recent public hearing, said the year-round approach has not hurt the quality of the academic program at her school. Furthermore, she said she understands the need for it because the families in her areas tend to have many children.

“I think the community as a whole needs to be educated as to the benefits of year-round school,” she said, adding that the prevailing attitude of “it’s not my school, so it’s not my problem” troubles her. “It’s natural for people to not want to get involved if they don’t have the problem, but they need to see that schools don’t exist autonomously.”

Reopen Closed Schools

Several board members, however, say they cannot ignore the protests. Korenstein, for instance, said she would rather see the district reopen some of the 23 schools it closed several years ago and perhaps offer year-round school as an option to parents who want to try it.

Furutani said that he cannot support mandatory year-round operation in a school that is not crowded. “The guiding principle for me is going to be based on need,” he said.

But some board members contend that approach does not address the issue of equity.

Year-round schools yield more state dollars. This is true because state aid is based on average daily attendance and year-round schools usually can accommodate more students than schools on a traditional calendar.

Board member Jackie Goldberg, whose Hollywood-Wilshire Corridor area includes some of the most jammed campuses in the city, said that year-round facilities essentially subsidize the schools on traditional schedules.

‘Forgotten Corner of World’

“The question in my mind,” she said, “is how to get this to be one district and not two. The people whose children already go to year-round schools feel they are in a forgotten corner of the world. They have all the problems all these other parents are arguing about. . . . But no one (among the parents complaining to the board) has recognized that they have any responsibility at all to them. All I’m hoping for is that people will use reason as well as emotion” to help find a solution.