Resistance to Year-Round Schools--a Replay

When a handful of black parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District wanted their children to attend integrated schools 20 years ago, the white parents at Warner Avenue Elementary School in Westwood welcomed the children with open arms, and the school became a catalyst for the district’s first integration program.

When the district began its voluntary busing-for-integration program a few years later, Warner signed on to receive more minority students. And when overcrowding forced inner-city children to be bused to suburban schools, Warner filled its empty seats with more than 100 of them.

Now, however, parents from Warner and other Westside and San Fernando Valley schools say the district is asking them to do too much.

Warner is one of about 100 schools that would have to go year-round or hold classes in double sessions, beginning this summer, under the district’s plan to create enough space to accommodate surging enrollment that has some schools bursting at the seams.

“We have given up a lot,” said Carol Ambrose, whose daughter is in second grade at Warner. “Now they’re telling us we have to go multi-track, year-round . . . we have no choices. These parents aren’t going to accept that.”

In a replay of public protests that forced the school board to scuttle a similar plan two years ago, parents from the Westside and the Valley have shown up en masse at board hearings, calling the plan to convert the district to year-round--among other things--a violation “of every middle-class American ideal.”

Board members are under heavy pressure from the district to do something this year to relieve the overcrowding that causes 24,000 of the district’s 610,000 students to be bused away from their neighborhood schools.

But some parents are trying to exert just as much pressure on the board to abandon the proposed calendar change, which they say would disrupt families, deprive children of educational opportunities, force students to suffer through summers in classrooms that are not air-conditioned, and lead to “white flight” from a district that is already more than 85% minority.

Under the plan, scheduled for a vote by the school board on Feb. 5, every elementary school would be required to adopt measures allowing it to operate at 123% of capacity, creating about 62,000 seats by 1993. Schools would be phased in during the next three years.

The district grew by more than 11,000 elementary students last year, and school officials expect that kind of growth to continue for the next several years.

The plan allows schools to choose from a variety of options to increase space, but they would have to include either double sessions or year-round operation. And for some schools, those choices would be limited by circumstance.

“We’ve already given up every bit of space we have to accommodate the (bused-in) students,” said Warner’s Ambrose. “They say we have choices, but our point is we don’t have several choices--we only have one choice (multi-track year-round), one that has no bonus to our community.”

Under a year-round program, the traditional school calendar is reorganized into instruction blocks of several weeks, with summer vacations distributed throughout the year, instead of concentrated in one three-month summer vacation.

At multi-track year-round schools, students are divided into several groups and at least one group is on vacation at all times, allowing a school to accommodate more students than under a traditional calendar. At single-track schools, all students attend on the same calendar, which does not create more space. Those schools would have to add other options, such as increasing class sizes or installing portable classrooms.

A group of Westside parents has mounted a campaign to persuade the board to group schools according to the high schools they serve and allow those groups to devise their own plans to increase capacity. School board member Mark Slavkin, who represents the Westside, said he supports the proposition and plans to lobby for it among board members.

“It’s my hope that we can formally invite (the groups) to present plans to us to maximize their space,” he said. “They may involve reconfiguration, may involve consolidating under-utilized schools, could involve a common calendar . . . but the idea of local decision-making is one I support very much.”

But the board is clearly divided on how much autonomy to give individual schools in remedying what is a districtwide problem.

“I think we can provide local options, but limited options,” said Warren Furutani, who represents the Southeast area, where many schools are already year-round. “The point is, everybody’s got to participate, to do something to increase their (schools’) capacity.”

Rita Walters, whose South-Central Los Angeles district also includes many year-round schools, said that as a matter of fairness she opposes the notion that individual schools should have a say in whether they go year-round.

“Many of my schools had to go year-round at a time when parents had no choice in the matter, when there was no air conditiioning, and they had to wait years and years (for it),” she said. “Now parents are coming down (to the board hearings) saying, ‘If you give us air conditioning first, if you do this and this, then maybe we’ll consider it.’ It galls me.”

But Ambrose and others argue that parents in overcrowded neighborhoods had an incentive to support year-round schools that Westside and Valley parents lack.

“They gained something, they got to keep their kids off the buses (because year-round creates more space),” she said. “A community like that looks at it differently than a community like ours that has nothing to gain.”

Some teachers and parents have testified at board hearings that year-round education does offer some educational benefits--including better retention of information because of shorter vacations. They also have said that community services, such as after-school and child-care programs, adapt when all neighborhood schools are on a year-round schedule.

“Come down and visit our schools and see,” said Willene Cooper, a parent representative of year-round schools in the district’s southeast area. “To make it work, you simply have to do things right.”

And other speakers have shown, if not enthusiasm for year-round schools, at least a recognition that some sort of drastic change is inevitable, given the district’s enrollment crisis.

“If you’re going to do it, do it for everybody equally,” said Elysian Heights Elementary parent Douglas Konecky at last week’s board hearing. To solve the crowding problem, he said, “everybody will have to suffer a little bit.”

That attitude represents a change from the last go-round on the year-round issue, when the board’s vote to convert the entire district to year-round led to widespread outrage, threats of recall and prompted Furutani--the board’s newest member--to reverse his vote for the plan and send district staff back to the drawing board.

“I think the issue is not as emotional this time out there,” Furutani said, judging from the reaction at several meetings he has attended this month in the Harbor area he represents. “Since we’ve been talking about year-round for quite a few years now, people are more familiar with it.

Board member Leticia Quezada, who represents the area east of downtown, where many year-round schools are located, said she is also heartened by what she perceives as a softening of the rhetoric from those opposed to year-round.

“It’s a new attitude, expressed by a set of parents that two years ago were saying, ‘No way, no how,’ ” Quezada said. “Now they say, ‘If this is where we’re going, let’s set the direction now, and do it throughout the district,’ and they say it with much conviction. That’s surprising.”

But some parents say that such sentiment underestimates the strength of their resolve to fight year-round.

“I think parents want to participate in these kinds of decisions, and if we are not allowed to, you’re going to see . . . a revolt (among parents) that’s going to force the district to change, to be more imaginative,” said Laura Ziskin, whose daughter is in first grade at Canyon Elementary School in Santa Monica.

Protests notwithstanding, the district’s push for year-round schools was given a boost recently by Gov. George Deukmejian, who touted the fiscal wisdom of operating schools year around in his State of the State speech earlier this month, and proposed that year-round districts receive financial incentives and get first claim on state school construction money.

Last fall, the state ran out of money to allocate to districts to build schools, but a bond measure to provide more funds is expected to be on the June ballot, said Robert Niccum, the Los Angeles district’s director of real estate.

But, because it takes about five years to build a school, and land in the district’s most crowded areas is difficult to find, construction alone will not solve the district’s overcrowding crisis, Niccum said.

Building projects currently under way will add about 3,000 seats in elementary schools by next year, but that will only make a tiny dent in a district that will literally be out of seats by September.