Parents Upset by School District’s Year-Round Plan

In a scene that may be replayed in coming weeks at auditoriums throughout the San Fernando Valley, parents meeting at a Northridge elementary school Thursday night expressed shock and anger over proposals to abolish the traditional school calendar to make room for new students in the rapidly filling Los Angeles school district.

More than 40 parents of students at Dearborn Street Elementary School questioned West Valley school board member Julie Korenstein for nearly two hours over proposals to relieve classroom crowding.

Whatever the board ultimately decides when it votes on the proposals next month, Dearborn parent Rick Schenkel told Korenstein, “There’s going to be an uproar.”

Los Angeles Unified School District officials last month unveiled a plan to increase the number of classroom seats throughout the fast-growing district by 23%. Under the proposal, more than 100 Los Angeles elementary schools would be required to choose either larger class sizes or year-round and double-session schedules by April.

Forty-five of those schools are in the San Fernando Valley, which already has 15 year-round schools. The changes would begin this summer.

A public hearing on the proposal is scheduled today before the school board.

Officials predict the district will run out of seats in elementary schools before summer unless some changes are made to relieve crowding. Seats at the district’s junior high schools will be filled by 1993, officials said.

The school district has been growing so fast that it would have needed to add an average 272 new classrooms a year since 1981 to keep pace, officials said. This year, enrollment went up more than 15,000 students, pushing the total number of students in the district past 610,000. Officials predict even larger increases through the 1990s.

School construction will provide seats for about 2,800 new elementary school students beginning in 1991, district officials said. Construction projects for another 10,000 students are planned but have yet to receive state funding, district officials said.

But that is far short of the number needed to keep pace with enrollment growth in the district, the country’s second largest. Seats for an estimated 60,000 more elementary school students are needed by fall, 1992, officials said.

In the past, the overflow of students in crowded inner-city areas has been bused to relatively uncrowded schools in the Valley and West Side. But now, many of those schools are full, forcing the district to find new ways to expand capacity, officials said.

The Dearborn parents were particularly upset after Korenstein told them that the district could not predict how long it would take to install air-conditioning in Valley schools, even though the state has agreed to pay for the equipment at schools that choose a year-round calendar.

“How realistic is it to expect any education going on when it gets to be 100 degrees in the Valley?” asked Stu Waterstone, whose daughter is in the third grade.

Korenstein told parents that in evaluating the district’s proposals, “You have to decide what you can live with.”

Barbara Romey, who lost to Korenstein in last spring’s board election, said at the meeting that parents throughout the Valley are starting to realize that the choices “are like getting to pick death by stoning or firing squad.”