Not Enough Pupils : Las Virgenes Year-Round Plan Shelved

The Las Virgenes Board of Education has shelved a plan to start an experimental year-round schedule at Lupin Hill Elementary School in Calabasas this summer because not enough students signed up for the program.

The board’s Tuesday night decision does not mean the year-round issue is dead in the western Los Angeles County school district. Board members, with some community members agreeing, said they want to explore several year-round alternatives that could be put into place in 1988.

From now on, however, any talk about a 12-month school schedule in the Las Virgenes district will have nothing to do with finding remedies for crowding at some of the district’s 12 schools, district Supt. Albert D. Marley said. When current year-round proposals were introduced last October, they were tied to finding ways of reducing the number of students on some campuses.

Highly Charged Issues

Year-round schedules and relief from crowding are both highly emotional issues, Marley said Wednesday. When the issues are discussed together, emotions run so high that it is “beyond what can be handled,” he said.

“We will not use year-round as a means of reducing overcrowding,” Marley said. “We can mitigate overcrowding without using a year-round schedule.”

Marley said that, to reduce campus crowding, at least one elementary school will be built in the Calabasas area by the 1990s. In addition, A. E. Wright Middle School in Calabasas and Calabasas High School will be expanded to accommodate more secondary students.

When Willow Elementary School in Agoura moves to its permanent campus in 1988, some students who now attend Yerba Buena Elementary School in Agoura may be transferred to Willow, he said. This would help reduce the number of students on the campus shared by Yerba Buena and Lindero Canyon Middle School.

Proposed 2 Schedules

At the Tuesday night meeting, the board decided not to go ahead with plans to initiate a year-round program at Lupin Hill Elementary School. Under the proposal, Lupin Hill would have offered the year-round schedule in addition to the traditional September-to-June school year.

Parents of all the elementary-age children in the district were invited to enroll their children in the year-round program. Officials said they needed at least 180 students to start the program.

But only 97 students applied for the 12-month schedule, leading district staff members to recommend that the board halt plans for the experiment.

“All of the board felt very strongly that, unless we had . . . community support for the program, we shouldn’t go ahead with it,” board member Betty Noling said.

Some parents attending the meeting told the board they did not find the year-round concept objectionable, but that they were angry that the concept was presented so close to the end of school.

The parents said many families already had made plans to send children to camp or scheduled vacations that made a July 1 starting date for the Lupin Hill experiment unattractive. They also said many families might have been more inclined to enroll their children in a year-round program if they had learned about it earlier, if the entire school was converted to a 12-month schedule and if the district provided free bus transportation to the school.

These comments from the audience amounted to one of the warmest receptions to year-round education since it emerged as an issue in the district last year. It prompted Marley and board members to announce their support for establishing some kind of 12-month schedule in the district.

Some board members said they would like to see a new schedule for elementary schools only, and others called for including middle schools and high schools. But most of the members appeared to be in agreement that some kind of new schedule could be started in 1988.