2 More Palmdale Schools May Go Year-Round by 1991

The Palmdale School District, which opened the first year-round school in the Antelope Valley this fall, hopes to switch at least two more schools to the new calendar by mid-1991, the district’s Board of Trustees said Tuesday.

Faced with spiraling enrollments and little money for building new schools, the district’s board voted 5-0 to adopt a staff report endorsing the expanded year-round program. The report recommended that it be patterned after the one begun at the district’s Cactus Elementary School in August.

Dist. Supt. Forrest McElroy said the board still must act before any school would go to the year-round schedule. However, McElroy called year-round schools “an alternative whose time as come.”

The Palmdale district, with about 11,500 students, already is the largest elementary and middle school district in the Antelope Valley. District officials expect enrollments to continue climbing, but they say prospects for sufficient school construction funds are uncertain.

The district’s favored year-round schedule increases school capacity by about 20%, officials said. The schedule includes three 60-day periods of instruction separated by three 15-day breaks, and a common month of vacation for all students, typically July.

The schedule allows school officials to fit more students into the same size school by dividing them into five so-called tracks or groups, with one group always on break.

A panel of district administrators that studied the concept concluded it “is instructionally sound, cost-effective, and saves space.” The district was required by state law to consider going year-round, or face a cutoff of state school construction funds.

District officials said they have yet to decide which of Palmdale’s 18 current schools, apart from Cactus, will be added to the program.

District officials also were uncertain of how much extra the new schedule might cost, although they received a three-year, $180,000 subsidy from the state to fund the Cactus program. Among the costs of going to the new schedule would be installing air-conditioning in the district’s pre-1987 classrooms.

Parent response to the year-round plan in the district has been mixed. Parents at Cactus School in west Palmdale applauded the change this fall. But in a June survey of more than 3,300 parents districtwide, only 32% favored expanding the year-round program and 37% opposed the idea.

In an informal survey conducted by the district in October, 79% of those responding said they favored extending year-round education to several Palmdale schools. And 74% said they would consider enrolling their children if the school in their neighborhood went year-round.