Veterans of Year-Round School Rate It ‘Track A’

Tacked up on kitchen walls all over South Gate are funny looking long cards with red, blue and green lines resembling miniature railroad tracks. From a distance, they look like strange Christmas cards, but to South Gate residents they symbolize a way of life.

The cards, in fact, are calendars for the year-round school schedule that this closely knit working-class city about 10 miles southeast of Los Angeles embraced nearly a decade ago. While the mere mention of year-round schooling these days sends many students, parents and teachers throughout Los Angeles into a state of hysteria, residents of this city are wondering, “What’s the big deal?”

In this predominantly Latino community of nearly 80,000, where every school has operated on a year-round system since 1980, they have seen the future--and most of them like it.

Winter, Spring Vacations

For as long as Bret Linton can remember, school has started in July and ended in June, and vacations come in the winter and spring. The South Gate Junior High School sixth-grader who likes science and playing the guitar thinks year-round school is “neat.” He has friends on other schedules but, with a maturity beyond his years, he notes that “there is always the telephone” to keep in contact, he says.

The Lintons, like most people in South Gate, are accustomed to school in August and vacation in November. Youngsters have learned to cope with sweltering summertime classrooms without air conditioning, while the local Burger King adeptly schedules teen-age workers for short-term stints behind the grill.

Local educators say they never want to return to the old system, which most now regard as a relic of a bygone agrarian society.

“Here in South Gate, we say it’s about time the rest of the district catches up to us. This is where it’s at,” said South Gate Junior High Assistant Principal Joseph L. Caldera. “Year-round is the wave of the future.”

In an Uproar

If year-round school is the future, however, thousands of parents and students in other parts of the Los Angeles school district would prefer the past. They have been in an uproar since the school board announced plans last month to place the entire district on a year-round calendar.

Their protests appear to have paid off. Last week the board narrowly approved a proposal that would place all of the district’s 618 schools on a year-round calendar by July, 1989. But at least one board member, Warren Furutani, has had second thoughts about the action. On Monday the board will reconsider the decision.

For years, educators and parents have been visiting South Gate to observe year-round schooling firsthand. Although nearly all South Gate residents recently interviewed by The Times spoke glowingly of the year-round system, there were some exceptions.

Back-to-School Sales

Maria Cristina Garcia, for one, mother of three school-age children, complains that she can’t take advantage of September’s back-to-school sales because she buys clothes and notebooks in July. Then there is the problem of arranging day care for the intermittent vacation periods, which leads to some children being home alone while others hang out for hours at public libraries.

Meanwhile, students who want to participate in summer enrichment programs at local colleges can be stymied by their schedules. Police complain that it’s hard to know which youngsters are truant and which ones are simply enjoying their vacation. (Schools provide students with identification cards that indicate the track they are on, but students are not required to carry them.) And school janitors say they don’t have enough time to do really big floor-waxing and other cleaning jobs usually done in the summer.

If Bret’s mother, Shareen Linton, had a choice, she would prefer the traditional school calendar, when she could pack in swimming, gymnastics and other extra classes for Bret and his sister, Marcie, 14, during the summer. “Now, it works, but it’s tight,” she said.

Firmly Entrenched

Parents and students in South Gate admit they did not go gently into the new program. But now year-round school is as firmly entrenched in their lives as the traditional calendar used to be. And if the district should ever try to take it away from them, most say they wouldn’t stand for it.

“It seems like we’ve always had year-round,” said Mary Browning, who has six children in year-round schools. “We like our calendar.”

One third of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 93 year-round campuses are concentrated in South Gate and the four neighboring southeast cities of Bell, Maywood, Huntington Park and Cudahy, where a mushrooming school population forced schools to abandon the traditional September-to-June calendar several years ago.

In this area, year-round schooling has led to a language understood only by veterans of the system. Semesters are “mesters” because they are shorter than in traditional school, and the word for summer school is “intersession,” which denotes the short breaks between terms.

Year-Round Jargon

The jargon even extends to the way students identify themselves--they belong to “Track A,” “Track B” or “Track C.” Even the local businessmen have the vocabulary down pat. “The kids say Track A is best because they get both Christmas and part of the summer off,” said Ali Ahmadzadeh, the manager of four Burger King outlets in South Gate who relies heavily on local high school students to man the counters and tend the griddles.

In this community, the school year is divided into rotating terms of 16 weeks in class and eight weeks out. The student body is split into three groups, or tracks, with staggered schedules that allow only two of the groups to be on campus at a time. Everyone gets two eight-week vacations--in summer and winter, or fall and spring, or winter and spring. This rotational system makes room for up to 50% more students, the chief advantage South Gate parents recognized years ago when the only other alternative was to bus increasing numbers of neighborhood children to more spacious campuses far from home.

On the surface, a year-round school looks no different than a traditional September-to-June school. But there are differences, teachers and principals say.

Everything Done Twice

For instance, in a year-round school everything is done at least twice in order to reach all the students. This includes school fund-raisers such as candy sales, school-wide skills tests, school pictures, even activities as mundane as assigning and turning in books. But “we don’t even think about it anymore. It’s just the way things are. . . . It’s automatic,” said Howard Lappin, the assistant principal at South Gate High School, where 3,000 students share 133 teachers and 60 classrooms.

From the teacher’s standpoint, year-round means a faster pace that keeps them on their toes. With two extended vacation breaks instead of one, teachers are starting up and winding down a term more frequently than their counterparts in the traditional system. It can be inconvenient, particularly if a teacher has to pack up his or her materials at the end of a term to make space for a colleague who will be using the classroom next.

On Friday, when Track C ends and Track B returns, it will look like moving day at schools throughout South Gate, as teachers cart boxes of books and materials into classrooms or to storage cabinets and car trunks.

South Gate High English teacher Rena Patton, however, said she found the proverbial silver lining in an otherwise difficult situation. Tired of moving more than a dozen boxes every time she went off track, she decided to transfer lesson notes, work sheets and short stories she frequently uses to a computer disk. Now, when she wants to find an essay question on “The Catcher in the Rye” or a vocabulary work sheet on a particular theme, such as the environment or movies, she inserts the disk into the school’s computer and prints out a hard copy, which she then photocopies.

Teachers Stay Fresh

Year-round scheduling “forced me to do something I should have done years ago,” Patton said. “I actually have better access to my material now.”

Many instructors also said the shorter breaks have resulted in teachers staying fresh longer rather than burning out by April or May.

South Gate High, Lappin said, has a waiting list of 50 teachers from traditional schools who want to transfer in.

Academically, teachers and principals say the year-round system has not hurt students and may actually help in certain circumstances.

Scores on the California Assessment Program test of basic mathematics, reading and writing skills have steadily risen at South Gate schools since the year-round program began. For the most part, those scores linger at or below the 50th percentile, but school officials say that less-than-stellar ranking is no reflection on the type of calendar used. They attribute the average scores to the type of students who make up the majority of their enrollments--predominantly Latino youngsters from lower-income homes where English is not the primary language.

No Damage From System

“I would love to say our test scores are up because of the (year-round) calendar,” said Lappin, “but that wouldn’t be true.” The strongest argument he can make, he said, is that the system “hasn’t done any damage.”

But Lappin and other educators in South Gate say the year-round approach does offers a few clear advantages. Students who fail a class, for instance, have two shots instead of just one at improving their grade because the schedule provides two “intersessions,” the breaks between terms, when remedial classes are held.

Conversely, students who want to get ahead of their peers can take enrichment courses during those periods. Bridgette Eaves, a senior at South Gate High, took a government class during her vacation last January, so she won’t have to take the required course this year. That leaves her with a little more time to fit volleyball, basketball and track into her schedule, she said.

Bridgette, who maintains a B average, offers herself as proof that year-round school doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice extracurricular activities--a worry voiced by many students and parents unfamiliar with the calendar.

“It’s really easy, but you have to be very organized,” she said.

Vacation Practice

Francisco Rendon, a junior at South Gate High who plays defensive back on the football team, said year-round school actually makes it easier to participate in his sport. Like most of his teammates, he is on the B track, which has a vacation that began in August and runs through much of the football season. So instead of trying to juggle games and practice with studying, he can concentrate on playing well. “Now I just go home, eat and relax after practice,” he said recently. “It’s much easier this way.”

But Francisco notes that his schedule differs from the one his three brothers are on. “When they’re on vacation, my mother still has to get up for me,” he said. “She doesn’t get no rest and sometimes she gets mad at me.”

Bret Linton, the South Gate junior high student, said he hasn’t had to give up anything, either. He belongs to the Boy Scouts and has taken swimming, tumbling and karate at the local park, while his sister Marcie still manages to play flute and piccolo in the high school band.

Many city services have been expanded to accommodate the year-round schedule. For example, although it took a few years to make the adjustments, activities at South Gate Park are in full swing throughout the year. Youngsters can join baseball teams in winter, or compete in basketball games in summer. For the first time, low-cost child care will be offered beginning in January, a parks department official said.

Employers Like Schedule

Teen-agers seeking jobs during their vacation breaks apparently are not handicapped by the system. In fact, students and employers say the year-round schedule is mutually beneficial.

Ahmadzadeh, the Burger King manager, said 50% of the employees in the chain’s four South Gate stores are students. Many return to work during their next vacation period, giving him a steady and trained work force.

“This system works great for us,” he said.

And Albert Rivas, a South Gate High senior who works at a hardware store, said he has only one gripe about the year-round system. “You can’t go to Palm Springs during spring break,” he said.

Times staff writer Lee Harris in South Gate contributed to this story.