Teacher Encounters Room Full of Skeptics in Defending Schedule

The vote at the Delevan Drive Elementary School in Eagle Rock was overwhelming, if highly informal.

Twenty-seven of the 28 people in a sixth-grade classroom vigorously raised their hands Tuesday in a vote to keep their traditional school calendar with summers off. Only the teacher, Coralie Whitcomb, voted for a switch to a year-round calendar.

The children said the year-round schedule they face in 1989 would ruin vacations, spoil friendships, increase their homework burden, ruin their sleeping habits and just plain confuse things. The youngsters were articulate and opinionated on the topic and seemed exasperated that the Los Angeles school board didn’t see the wisdom of their views.

Students have survived year-round schedules at other Los Angeles schools and some of these youngsters interviewed Tuesday spoke favorably of the cycle of intermittent vacations. But try to tell that to the students at Delevan Drive.

“It will be too much stress,” Mari-Anna Bergeron told a visiting reporter. “We’ll have homework, homework, homework. We won’t relax.”

Andy Gonzales, 11, said that he usually spends most of the summer visiting his grandmother at a beach town in New Jersey. The switch will mean he will have a month at most for the trip and he worries that his family may think that will be too short a time. “They may not want to pay for the air fare,” he said.

Salvador Alvarado’s was the voice of a veteran. The 11-year-old attended a year-round school two years ago and said the schedule there made it difficult to see friends who were on a different vacation “track.” “They split you up,” he said. “It’s no good. You come in and they go out.”

Several students worried about whether they could switch several times a year from their vacation life style--staying up late and sleeping in late during the week--to the regimen of homework and early risings. “It will be like changing batteries all the time,” Dan Lam said.

Their teacher gently reminded them that some had complained that summer was too long and that they had missed their friends and their air-conditioned classroom. That elicited a few listless nods. Then, Whitcomb told them that it might be fun to take vacations in the winter or spring, when the weather is cooler and vacation crowds are smaller.

“You know when you go to Disneyland and there are thousands of other children in line? Wouldn’t it be nicer to see just hundreds, not thousands?” she asked. A few more appeared to waver.

But Whitcomb, veteran of 15 years in the classroom and an apparent advocate of well-reasoned thought, presented what she saw as the other side of the argument. Her room is immaculate and the walls are covered with bright drawings and paper cutouts to celebrate Halloween and aid the lesson plan. In a year-round calendar, another teacher and her class would use the room while Whitcomb and her students would be on vacation. The room might not look so nice with other classes rotating through it, she said.

Then another vote was taken. Once again, the teacher was a minority of one.

However, youthful opinions were different across town at San Pedro Street Elementary School in a heavily industrial neighborhood near the Santa Monica Freeway on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. There, a year-round schedule has been in place for five years and most of the children seemed to like that very much, according to a schoolyard survey.

Most of the youngsters at that school--many are children of Latino immigrants--live in overcrowded apartments with no yards. So the school and its playground are a happy haven even if the recently installed air conditioning is not working right now. Half-day school sessions are even offered during two weeks of the three-week vacation periods and are well-attended, Principal Rita Cazares said.

‘A Great Plan’

“It’s a great plan for teachers. They don’t burn out and they do look forward to having three weeks off after nine weeks on. And I see them coming back from vacation refreshed. In a traditional school, it gets to be a pretty long year by the end of May,” Cazares said. She said that the shorter vacations mean children remember more of their lessons than they do over a regular summer break.

Second-grade teacher Sandra Wintersmith said: “Our children don’t necessarily have the advantages of going away on vacations. So this is a better alternative to sitting in front of the television for three months.”

“I get bored in my house,” sixth-grader Maria Navarro said. “I have to clean or take care of my sister. I rather come to school. It’s better. We can study more.”

Her classmate, Hector Gil, agreed. “When we come to school more, we learn more,” he said.

Dissent was voiced by Dante Woods, who complained that his schedule made it difficult to hook up for vacations and swimming days with his cousins and friends in other schools. “It ruins our plans,” he pronounced. Dante added that it was too hot to go to a school in July without air conditioning. “At least at home you can sit inside and have a fan on or put ice cubes on your head,” he said.

Not Pleased

In the San Fernando Valley, where there has been much vigorous opposition to the year-round proposal, students interviewed were not pleased with the idea.

At William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, the lack of air conditioning in some of the buildings was the main reason why sophomore Tameka Washington said she opposed the switch to a year-round calendar. “It’s too hot out here in this Valley,” the 15-year-old said. “We’ll die.”

Older students said they didn’t like the prospect of the change but could not get too upset about it since they will, they hope, be graduated by 1989. “We’ll be out,” senior Mary Trinh said.

Times staff writer Steve Padilla in the San Fernando Valley contributed to this story.