Year-Round School Vote Prompts Renewed Effort to Break Up District

San Fernando Valley parents angry over the school board’s decision to operate schools year-round said Tuesday they will support efforts by state Assemblywoman Marian La Follette (R-Northridge) to break up the Los Angeles school district, and others said they will try to overturn the year-round decision.

“We’re looking at it so the community can have more local control over their children’s education,” said Judy Diamond, a parent at Dearborn Avenue School in Northridge. “I’m planning on volunteering to help.”

La Follette aide Rob Wilcox said the assemblywoman in the past two weeks has collected the names and phone numbers of hundreds of Valley and Westside parents who have expressed an interest in the idea of breaking up the 700-square-mile, 610,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District into eight or more smaller districts.

“Year-round might be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Wilcox said. “Parents and educators we’ve talked to are outraged about it.”

The school board Monday voted to convert all schools in the district to some form of year-round schedule by summer, 1991. On a motion offered by West Valley board member Julie Korenstein, the board stopped short of requiring 109 elementary schools--including 45 in the Valley--to change their schedules starting this summer.

The board required those 109 schools, however, to increase their capacity 23% beginning this summer by scheduling classes year-round, adding portable classrooms or increasing class size.

Sylmar Elementary School Principal Yvonne Chan said Korenstein’s motion to delay mandatory implementation of year-round schedules will only help the least-crowded Valley schools. At Valley schools already filled to capacity, such as Sylmar, there is no more playground space to put portable classrooms.

Those schools will have to pick between year-round scheduling and larger class sizes, “which nobody wants, so you are back to year-round,” Chan said.

Barbara Romey, twice a candidate for the board and a longtime opponent of year-round schools, said the year’s delay “gives people time to go shopping for private schools” and “to break up the school district.”

Romey predicted that anger over the year-round issue will breathe new life into efforts by La Follette, who has failed in several attempts to interest the Legislature in dividing the Los Angeles district.

This time, instead of trying to force the issue through the Legislature, La Follette is hoping that the state Board of Education and the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization will draft a plan to put before the 1.5 million registered voters who live within the boundaries of the Los Angeles school district. The committee has seven members, elected by the county’s school districts.

La Follette last fall sponsored a series of public hearings before a commission she created to look into breaking up the district. The commission’s recommendations, expected next month, will go to the state Board of Education, which can recommend that the county committee come up with a redistricting plan.

In a separate effort, Noel W. Weiss, a Northridge parent and attorney, said Tuesday he will begin a signature drive to collect the approximately 375,000 signatures needed to put the school board’s year-round decision before voters.

Weiss said he and other parents will begin a drive this week to collect the signatures of 25% of the registered voters living in the Los Angeles school district, the percentage required for a vote on the issue. The state Education Code allows for voters living in a school district to overturn a board decision to operate schools year-round.

“The bottom line is that we in the Valley and the Westside are not going to allow” year-round schools, Weiss said. A vote overturning the board decision will force decision makers to find other ways of accommodating students in the burgeoning district, he said.

Not everyone was angry over some of the other changes--all aimed at coping with overcrowding--that will go along with the year-round plan.

Gary Turner, principal of Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga, said he and parents in the area are delighted at the school board’s decision to allow neighborhood ninth-grade students to attend the school, beginning this fall.

The change will relieve crowding at Tujunga Elementary Schools because it will also allow for sixth-graders to be moved to Mt. Gleason Junior High School, which will in turn transfer its ninth-grade classes to Verdugo Hills.

“The PTA, Booster Club--everybody has been pushing for this for five years,” Turner said.

The change will increase enrollment at the school from about 1,800 to close to its capacity of 2,500, Turner said. The 500 to 700 local ninth-grade students expected to attend Verdugo Hills next year will join approximately 300 ninth-graders who are now bused to the high school from other parts of the city.

“We’ll continue to pick up the bused-in kids and mix them in with our own kids,” Turner said.

Verdugo Hills High School will become the seventh high school in the Valley to enroll ninth- through 12th-grade students.

Parent Jeanette Fawcett, a parent and member of the high school’s school council, said she was happy about the decision, even though the board included it along with measures to eventually convert the school to a year-round schedule.

“It doesn’t bother me, I have to work here year-round anyway,” said Fawcett, who works as a school clerk.