Year-Round Term at 6 High Schools Being Considered

Because of the growing number of high school students in the San Fernando Valley, administrators are considering holding year-round classes in six Valley schools, with students assigned to vacation breaks in all seasons.

The staff of the Los Angeles Board of Education has been discussing the possibility of converting 10 more high schools, including the six in the Valley, to year-round programs as early as next summer, school district spokesman Bill Rivera said Monday.

“We’re virtually out of room in Valley senior high schools now,” Rivera said.

The year-round plan “is still only in the talking stage,” he said, but went before a Board of Education committee last week.

$100,000 Cost Study

The board’s three-member building committee heard a request from Byron Kimball, the district’s director of school building and facility services, for $100,000 to study the cost of installing air conditioning in the 10 high schools that were not originally designed for summer use.

The list included six Valley high schools--Taft, Birmingham, Chatsworth, Granada Hills, Reseda and Verdugo Hills.

The building committee took no action, Rivera said, but decided to wait until Supt. of Schools Harry Handler presents the board with his recommendations on a year-round school program. The report is expected in late September, he said.

Handler told a meeting of school principals last week that if all of the senior high schools in the district were converted to year-round schedules, “it would be equivalent to building 10 new high schools at a cost of $50 million per school.”

Four-Quarter System

Under the 12-month program, the school year is divided into four quarters, and the student body is divided into four “tracks.” Each quarter of the year, one track of students is on vacation.

The system thus schedules only three-quarters of a school’s students to be present at any time, increasing the school’s capacity. But only one-fourth of the students are able to take the traditional summer vacation.

There are now 94 year-round schools in the district, mostly crowded elementary schools in neighborhoods with large numbers of ethnic minorities. Fifteen of the elementary schools are in the Valley.

There are four year-round senior high schools, but none in the Valley.

Rivera said causes behind the overcrowding in Valley high schools include a change in configuration of West Valley senior and junior high schools, and the number of children bused in from crowded schools elsewhere in Los Angeles.

The number of students bused to Valley senior high schools from other areas last year was between 7,000 and 8,000 and will increase this year, he said.

Senior high schools west of Sepulveda Boulevard last fall converted to four-year programs by adding the ninth grade, which previously had been the final year of junior high school. The junior high schools in that area, in turn, added the sixth grade.

At some Valley schools, enrollments from the surrounding neighborhoods increased after that change, Rivera said. Administrators said they suspect that the increase was because the schedule change brought West Valley public schools into conformity with the practice at private and parochial schools.

Private and parochial schools usually have eight grades in elementary schools, followed by a four-year high school. Parents of children graduating from eighth grade in private and parochial schools found it easier to enroll them at public high schools “because now the natural break falls in the same place,” Rivera said.

“This was an effect we hadn’t anticipated,” he said.

Ironically, the re-configuration in the West Valley was designed to deal with under-enrollment. The declining number of students in preceding years left senior high schools without enough students to justify full curriculums, including art, business and vocational courses, Rivera said.