Schedules for Year-Round Schools to Be Worked Out : Education: A schedule to ease overcrowding in Hawthorne schools is set to begin in July. But some parents have distributed a petition seeking a delay.

The Hawthorne School District will consider Monday how to schedule a year-round program that will start this July to help ease overcrowding.

District officials say year-round schooling is the only way to deal with the surge in attendance in recent years, which has forced them to place 39 portable classrooms in playgrounds throughout the district.

The district, which employs about 260 teachers, has seven elementary schools and two intermediate schools.

In November, the district approved the year-round session, but it did not decide how the new school year would be structured. Officials said last week that the district’s Board of Trustees will most likely favor a plan in which schools are in session for 60 days and out for 20 days.

However, opposition is expected.

A committee of 14 parents who say they were not given enough warning circulated a petition; it requested that the district delay the schedule change to give parents time to study the proposal.

To the surprise of school officials, enrollment in the district began rising significantly two years ago. In September, 1988, enrollment jumped 6% to 5,280, district officials said. It increased an additional 8% the following September, to 5,700. By this January, enrollment was up an additional 10% to 6,270.

Kathy Amato, vice president of the Ramona Elementary School PTA and leader of the parents committee, said her group is asking that the district delay the year-round schedule for one year.

She said the petition has between 800 and 1,000 signatures. Amato said the parents who have signed it are also upset because the district did not ask parents to help study alternatives to alleviate overcrowding.

“We’re outraged because we were not made part of this decision,” she said.

Laura Uribe, president of the Hawthorne Intermediate School PTA, said she signed the petition because “we should have been informed a lot sooner.”

She said she thinks the decision to implement year-round schooling has caught many parents by surprise.

Although parents were not brought in to help decide how to address the overcrowding problem, Ida Alba, director of personnel, said the district notified parents that it was considering a year-round schedule in the July, 1988, newsletter mailed to parents.

She said the district has since published other newsletters and has held meetings on the issue with PTAs during the intervening 18 months. “We really have tried” to inform parents, she said.

Enrollment is increasing so fast that the district cannot afford to delay the schedule change much longer, said Pamela Fees, director of business services.

Fees said the 60/20 calendar would reduce by 25% the number of students in attendance at one time. She said the calendar has the same number of school days--180--and would not disrupt most regular holiday vacations, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Presidents Day.

If approved, the 60/20 calendar would place students in one of four separate schedule tracks, three of which are in session while one is on vacation. Parents would be asked to choose the track they prefer, she said.

Fees said the district has studied other alternatives and has tried other ways of alleviating the overcrowding, such as realigning school boundaries. But she said the district has determined that the year-round school is the only workable alternative.

Amato said many parents did not receive the earlier newsletters. She said she learned in May, 1989--not 1988--that the district was considering year-round schooling. If the district does not delay the schedule change, she said her committee will consider seeking a legal injunction.

If all else fails, she said her group will try to recall the entire Board of Trustees.

“I believe there was effort to cover this up until it was too late to do anything,” she said.

Hawthorne Parks and Recreation Director Robert Klein said it is unclear how well the city’s recreational programs will fit in with the proposed schedule. City park and recreation officials have met once with school officials to discuss the year-round schedule, but Klein said specific details about how to accommodate the two programs will be discussed when the district settles on a year-round schedule.

Klein said that it is “pretty difficult to reschedule after you have been established.” Uribe said she thinks most parents are not opposed to year-round schooling but simply want more time to study the plan. “I knew it was coming, but I had expected us to be more informed,” she said.

Board member Rosemarie Caldwell said the district has made every effort to contact parents. She said she is not sure why some parents have signed the petition.

“I mean, what can you do . . . you can never make 100% of the people happy,” she said.

Mark Steffen, president of the 220-member Hawthorne Elementary Teachers Assn., said the association has not officially endorsed the year-round plan, but he said he thinks a majority of the teachers have accepted it.

Steffen said most teachers believe the district has worked hard to study the year-round schooling plan, as well as other ways to handle to the enrollment increase.

Ken Jacobson, principal of Ramona Elementary School, said he has received a few phone calls in the last two weeks from parents who were concerned about the year-round school plan. But he said that after he explained how the schedule works most parents seemed to accept the plan.

“When I present the facts, (some parents said) ‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ ” he said.