Year-Round Schools--a Selling Job

The Los Angeles Unified School District has abandoned attempts to place all city schools on a year-round schedule by July, 1989. School administrators withdrew the plan last week because they were one vote shy of winning school board support. That must change someday. Keeping schools open all year is not a popular idea, but it is far better than the alternative--keeping students in overcrowded classrooms.

Los Angeles cannot build schools or set up portable classrooms fast enough to accommodate the 70,000 additional students whom it expects by the fall of 1991. Schools are already overcrowded in many Latino and Asian neighborhoods--the Wilshire corridor, the fringes of downtown, the East San Fernando Valley and the southeast areas of the school district. When schools have too many students, teachers cannot devote enough time to each of them--especially to those who may not speak English well.

At a year-round school that is overcrowded, students are divided into several groups, and one group of students is always on vacation. This means that about 25% more students can comfortably attend that school. If the entire district had been shifted to a year-round schedule, students at schools that aren’t overcrowded would have all gone to school at the same time. But they would have had classes during part of the summer, with longer vacations at other times in the year.

Ninety of the district’s 618 schools now operate year round. Another 40 or 50 schools are so overcrowded that they should be on that schedule. In many cases the parents have said no, that they’d rather have enrollment capped and transport the excess students by bus to other schools.

School officials wanted to put the whole system on a year-round basis to give the system more flexibility. In the hodgepodge arrangement that exists now, families in one area may have some children on a year-round schedule and others not. In other cases children in an overcrowded school that is on a year-round schedule may be bused to a school on a regular calendar.

Opponents of the plan have a point when they say that school authorities need to settle on one year-round calendar. It currently has five. A task force is working on that problem.

There won’t be a school board majority in favor of year-round schools until more parents are persuaded of the wisdom of the program. The school administration must do a better selling job--an uphill task for a board that has never been able to persuade parents that they live in one school district and that what is a problem for one area and its students is a problem for all areas and all students. That is due partly to the school board’s not being persuaded of the concept itself.