Task Force Proposes ‘90/30’ Year-Round City School Calendar

Concluding five months of exhaustive study, a special task force recommended Thursday that all 590,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District go to school on a “90/30” year-round calendar in order to end confusion over multiple school schedules and help the district cope with overcrowding.

But district officials said there is no certainty that the school board, which is sharply divided over year-round schooling, will ultimately agree that any one calendar can serve the district’s diverse needs. Supt. Leonard Britton said Thursday he will study the task force proposal and make his own recommendation to the board in the fall about what type of school calendar would be best.

“I don’t know if this (calendar) will be the one, but (it) will certainly be at the top of the list,” Britton said in accepting the findings of the 17-member advisory panel.

The 90/30 calendar has the same number of school days--180--as the traditional calendar but divides the year differently. It features two 90-day academic terms and two 30-day vacations. All students would have the same two-week winter break, and many would attend classes during the summer.

Began Work in February

The board formed the task force in February to study various calendars and recommend one that could be used districtwide. The board last year approved and then after parents protested shelved a plan to implement year-round schedules in all schools. It has been unable to agree on an equitable solution to school crowding, a politically thorny problem because it affects largely minority areas of the district.

Because of overcrowding, about 90 of the district’s more than 600 schools begin school in July and operate on a year-round basis. But those schools follow one of five year-round schedules and consequently start and end academic terms at different times, which has been a problem for many families with children in different schools. The majority of district schools are not crowded and use the traditional September-to-June schedule.

Task force chairman Charles E. Dickerson III said he is hopeful that the study, which was based on surveys of thousands of district parents, employers and youth service agencies, will help parents who oppose the year-round concept understand how it works and why it is needed.

The 90/30 calendar was not the unanimous choice of the task force. Four members cited a number of concerns, including the difficulty of finding quality child care during an eight-week winter break and potential problems for high school students who take college entrance or advanced placement tests.

One of the dissenting members, San Fernando Valley physician Barry Pollack, wrote in a minority report that the task force made its decision hastily and “could find no evidence whatsoever” to prove that any calendar was superior to the traditional calendar.

According to a majority of the panel, however, the 90/30 calendar would help streamline the operation of the district, would give it the flexibility to cope with crowding and would pose the fewest adjustment problems compared to other calendars.

Task force members said the 90/30 calendar can be modified for uncrowded schools to have some of the same features of the traditional schedule. Students could have all of July and half of August off, as well as a seven-week stretch from late December to early February.

If used in an overcrowded school, a more complicated version of the calendar would be used. Students would be divided into four groups or “tracks” with only three tracks in school at the same time. This would allow a school to hold up to 33% more students than it could accommodate under traditional scheduling.

The panel concluded that the 90/30 schedule would meet the instructional requirements of both elementary and secondary grades and would not cause insurmountable problems for student or staff support services or for public safety agencies. Youth employers surveyed by the task force said the year-round calendar would not hurt and might enhance job opportunities for teen-agers.