Report Critical of Multi-Track School Schedule

The problems created by converting 18 San Diego city elementary schools to multi-track, year-round schedules during the past two years are greater than previously indicated, the Board of Education concluded Tuesday from a major report on the system’s implementation.

The board’s more negative conclusion about the system--a program designed to relieve crowding in which three groups of students attend at any one time while the fourth has vacation--was delivered, even though some members say the report was watered down.

According to those board members, criticism in the report would have been stronger, but administrators muted the most severe comments by the way they chose parents and teachers for interviews.

Trustees asked for additional study and data before they are faced early next year with a decision on whether to expand multi-track to even more crowded campuses, as now contemplated under a long-range master plan. But they left no doubt that multi-track will be viewed with much less enthusiasm than before, even though the system will probably remain inevitable for some schools.

Under multi-track, a crowded school divides its student population into four tracks. Each track attends school for nine weeks, followed by three weeks of vacation, on a rotating schedule that reduces the number of students on campus by about one-fourth.

About 27% of the district’s 67,000 elementary students now attend multi-track schools, almost all of them at predominantly non-white schools south of Interstate 8, where most of the student-age population growth has taken place.

The report said that the views of teachers, secretaries and parents are mixed. A majority support the academic benefits from the switch but are critical of the duplication involved in planning double assemblies, producing more newsletters and conducting other administrative tasks.

But trustees Shirley Weber and Jim Roache pointed out that the academic benefits are those that result from simply a year-round schedule, not a multi-track overlay.

“That’s a crucial difference” in judging the level of support for multi-track, said Roache, who has been unpopular with some residents in his North City district for supporting the system in overcrowded Mira Mesa schools.

Roache also zeroed in on preliminary cost figures from the report, which indicate that running a multi-track school may be more expensive than building portable classrooms. And several trustees expressed irritation with the problem of “flex teachers,” those at each multi-track school who do not have their own classrooms under the system but must move every nine weeks and use those of teachers on vacation. Several schools have made teachers with the least seniority “flex,” lowering morale and causing dissension.

Members have also expressed irritation that school principals picked teachers and parents for the report’s interviews, since, in the words of Kay Davis: “They are team players and are thinking about promotions.”

Supt. Tom Payzant conceded that the problems with multi-track may be more vexing than originally thought, and he promised more information for the board.

But Payzant said “multi-track will not go away” because the district has too many crowded schools with no room for more portables and no money to build new permanent facilities.

“It is not going to be all yes or all no . . . and we have to make it work as well as it can.”