Gradual Changeover Builds Year-Round School Support

In Los Angeles, the prospect of year-round education has caused an anguished public outcry. Sixty miles up the coast in Oxnard, year-round schooling is as controversial as Bambi.

A booming agricultural community of 125,000, where strawberries tremble in the ocean breeze and real estate values are soaring along with the sea gulls, Oxnard has had year-round classes for a dozen years. Other school districts, including, ironically, Los Angeles Unified, had year-round schools earlier. But few districts have abandoned universal summer vacations with so little controversy.

In January, 1987, when Oxnard’s school board made it the only fully year-round school district in the nation, the result was not a riot but a gratifying silence.

“There was not a word of protest,” recalled Supt. Norman R. Brekke, who singles out that moment as the proudest in his 15-year administration.

Oxnard accepted year-round schools with such equanimity that Brekke has become a guru of year-round education, frequently asked to meet with educators and the media to reveal just what Oxnard did right. Brekke, who has come to believe in both the educational and economic benefits of year-round schools, is happy to do so.

Gradual Phase-In

“We were able to phase it in gradually,” Brekke said when asked to enumerate some of Oxnard’s guidelines for success. “That phasing in was gentle, and we were able to build parental and staff support over time.

“We kept the fifth track as long as possible,” Brekke said, referring to the traditional calendar. “We figured if the program was any good, it would sell itself and, fortunately for us, it did.”

Oxnard began studying year-round education in 1974 when the district realized it would soon have more students than classrooms and little money to build more schools.

Over the last decade, the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade district has grown from 9,780 to 11,821 students, with the biggest bulge at the kindergarten end. Sixty-eight percent of Oxnard’s students are Latino. About one-third of the district’s students speak limited English.

In the view of Brekke and the school board, the traditional responses to crowding--temporary classrooms, double sessions, more students per class--all had demonstrable defects. Temporary classrooms, for instance, give a school more seats, but don’t stretch its library, cafeteria and other support facilities, which often become overtaxed. The school board suggested that the district look into a relatively new concept: year-round schools.

1976 Experiment

After sending a committee of educators, parents and community representatives to study existing year-round schools in Los Angeles, San Diego and elsewhere, Oxnard launched its own experiment in July, 1976. Two elementary schools, predominantly Anglo Marina West and Rose Avenue, a barrio school, were the first to keep their doors open all summer.

Oxnard’s year-round system has four tracks, lettered A, B, C and D (some year-round schools, which are not crowded, feature a single track). Students on each track attend school for three three-month blocks per year. Each block is followed by a one-month vacation. At any given time, three tracks are in school and one is on vacation. All children and their teachers have a two-week winter break.

The district tries to assign children to the track requested by their parents.

Proponents of year-round education sometimes dismiss opposition as nothing more than the inertia of tradition. But Oxnard administrators realized that, whatever it is called and however much it is needed, change can be painful. From the beginning, Brekke said, the district knew that the faculty was crucial to the acceptance of the unfamiliar idea.

“We didn’t want to start the program with any staff opposition,” Brekke said.

Auditorium of Angry Teachers

Not that every teacher instantly embraced the concept. “That first year, I filled the auditorium of a school with angry teachers,” Brekke recalled of a board meeting to which the staff was invited to learn more about the new year-round system. Despite the tumult and trepidation, not one teacher quit.

A major faculty concern, Brekke said, “was that they wouldn’t be able to keep their summer jobs.” The administration encouraged faculty members to consider working for the district as substitute teachers during their vacations. Oxnard teachers who fill in for their colleagues are paid more than other substitutes ($85 a day, instead of $60). As a result, Brekke said, “the district had the most competent substitutes that could be found, and the teachers had the option of choosing when and where they wanted to work.”

During the early years, participation in the year-round program was voluntary, for teachers as well as for parents and students. Brekke said this was crucial to its success. The district’s first year-round teachers made up a small, self-selected group who became credible advocates for the new approach.

Charlene Scudder, a 20-year classroom veteran who teaches third grade, was one of Marina West’s initial cadre of year-round teachers. “The district gave us a lot of latitude,” Scudder said, recalling how she and her fellow pioneers were encouraged to deal creatively with each new exigency the evolving system brought.

“We knew that one of the hardest things for our kids was going to be getting through that first summer,” Scudder said.

Watermelon Solution

To keep the children in school from becoming terminally envious of the vacationing majority outside on their bikes, Scudder and her colleagues devised the Watermelon Solution.

As Scudder explained, the year-round teachers scheduled festive activities for their classes every few weeks. On one occasion, every class brought in watermelons, which they noisily consumed outside. “All the kids in the neighborhood were drooling,” she recalled.

The classes also made their own ice cream, now a summer tradition in the Oxnard schools. “It worked,” Scudder said. “In fact, we had kids from the neighborhood standing in our doors, asking if they could come in.”

On those rare days when the rooms became uncomfortably hot, classes were held outside under the trees.

The year-round teachers resorted to flattery as well as bribery. “We would tell our kids, ‘You’re learning more,’ ” Scudder said. “They liked that. They would sit a little taller in their seats.”

Teachers Must Be Flexible

Scudder said she knew from the start that year-round education would fly. “One of the reasons I knew it would work well was because I was working hard to make it work well,” she said. Good year-round teachers have certain attributes, she said. They must be flexible and work well with other teachers.

They must also be willing to share, Scudder said. No Oxnard teacher has her own classroom in the traditional sense. Classrooms are always filled. When students on one track go on vacation, students on another track who are coming back from vacation move into the classroom that has just been vacated.

Switching classrooms is the thing Scudder likes least about the system. (It is also a major concern of parents new to the system, according to school office staff, who say they get calls from parents who fear that a new room means a new teacher.)

“Year-round would be ideal if we didn’t have to move from place to place,” Scudder said.

Over the years, however, teachers have found ways to minimize the inevitable disruption.

Central Storage Room

Built in the ‘60s, Marina West is made up of groups of classrooms clustered around a central storage room. All the teachers in Scudder’s building (or mod, for module) are able to store materials in the central area, no matter which classroom they are teaching in at the time. The district’s maintenance department also designed special movable storage units for the teachers’ supplies and teaching aids.

Instead of trying to get everything done on one frantic moving day, the teachers have learned to make the transition over a less hectic “moving week,” Scudder said.

On the last day, the children empty their desks and tie their crayons and personal items inside a plastic supermarket bag, which is labeled and stashed for them until they return from vacation. Rediscovering their things is a pleasant part of the first day back, she said. The outgoing teacher also leaves an attractive display on the bulletin board for the incoming teacher.

The first year the year-round calendar was offered, about 40% of eligible Oxnard parents opted for it. The percentage grew each year. From the beginning, Scudder said, the program was perceived as a quality one. Many parents viewed it “as a little private school within a public school,” she said. “Parents talk. The message traveled real fast: ‘Get your children into year-round.’ ”

Today, year-round education tends to be viewed as a local oddity to which parents soon adjust.

‘Not Overriding Consideration’

“Parents are suspicious of it,” said George King, who manages the Oxnard office of the real estate firm of Coldwell Banker and often fields questions from prospective residents about the district’s year-round schools. “It’s not what they are used to. But it tends not to be an overriding consideration. What seems to matter more to parents is the overall quality of the schools.”

Oxnard resident Heidi Jackson was concerned about the schools until daughter Jennifer, 7, began attending them (Jennifer is a first-grader at Marina West).

“I didn’t like it at first,” said Jackson, who went to traditional schools in Santa Monica. Now she thinks the year-round calendar is probably enhancing her child’s education. “You have that break every three months, and it’s just about right,” she said. “They don’t forget their education.”

According to Brekke, the system has allowed the district to absorb about 1,600 students more than could be accommodated traditionally. The system has saved Oxnard the cost of building two more elementary schools, about $12.2 million, he estimated. Costs related to vandalism, including cleaning up graffiti, have also dipped from about $70,000 annually to less than $10,000 last year. “A school that’s occupied is not going to be an attractive target,” he said.

The district also receives a modest incentive of up to $150 per student from the state for operating year-round. That adds up to $1.1 million for the current school year.

‘Impact on Learning’

But in Brekke’s view, the real benefit is the academic one. “We were in the program for five years before we became sensitive to the impact year-round was having on learning,” the superintendent said.

Teachers were the first to notice that students seemed to learn more--or at least forget less--when they had more frequent but shorter vacations. On the traditional calendar, Scudder noted, she would spend the first six weeks of school each fall reviewing what the children had forgotten over the last three months.

Brekke pointed to Oxnard’s rising scores on the California Assessment Program tests as evidence that students are learning more than they did before the district switched calendars. Some educational researchers say disadvantaged students forget more over long summer vacations than their more privileged classmates.

Brekke speculates that Oxnard’s migrant and limited-English-speaking children have gained the most from year-round schools. He noted that the CAP scores of Oxnard students have improved at a much faster pace than those of California students as a whole as more of the district has gone year-round.

However, Oxnard’s numbers still trail state averages in reading, written language, mathematics, history-social science and science. In 1986-87, for example, third-graders lagged 6 points behind the state average in reading, sixth-graders 24 points behind, eighth-graders 17 points behind.

Attendance Improving

Absenteeism has dropped with implementation of the new calendar, which may be one reason Oxnard students are closing the CAP gap. Many teachers, including Scudder, say the system also facilitates remediation. Students who haven’t mastered, say, long division live with the problem a maximum of three months before catching up during remedial “intersession school,” instead of stumbling along for up to nine months before traditional summer school begins.

Although converts insist that year-round school simply means off-peak plane fares and shorter lines at Disneyland, many opponents see the loss of a three-month summer vacation as a genuine threat to family life. Brekke does not denigrate those values, even if he sees them as somewhat anachronistic, a throwback to the days when American farm children spent their summers working in the fields.

“We don’t deny a family a common vacation,” he said. Instead, the district will allow a child who is traveling with his or her family to do an independent study project in lieu of class work. Scudder noted that some families intentionally enroll their children in different tracks so the parents can lavish attention on one child at a time during his or her vacation.

Even Brekke admits year-round isn’t perfect. It seems to work less well for high school students than for younger students such as Oxnard’s, in part because certain advanced courses are not easily repeated to accommodate students on each track. Additionally, high school extracurricular schedules may be incompatible with multitrack year-round calendars. The football coach and the band leader may not be thrilled with the prospect of one-fourth of their squads being on vacation in November.

Slow-Growing Idea

For all the heated talk about year-round education, it is still not a widespread phenomenon. Since the first modern multitrack year-round school was opened in Illinois in 1970, the idea has grown slowly. According to Charles Ballinger, head of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education, there are only about 400 year-round schools in the country, enrolling about 363,000 students. Not surprisingly, more than 100 of those schools are in California, where one season is often much like another.

Even though the numbers are still small, Ballinger says year-round schooling is inevitable, in part because it is cost-effective, in part because it makes educational sense. “The question is not whether or if,” Ballinger said. “The question is when.”

Brekke agrees. “This is the future,” he said. “No question about it.”