Multi-Track Schools Make Fiscal Sense

In the same week that the Board of Education in Los Angeles took a major step toward multi-track, year-round schools as a way to cope with overcrowding, the San Diego city school board started moving away from the controversial system.

Why? In part because the crowding in Los Angeles schools is much worse than here. San Diego still has some options that L.A. has virtually exhausted: squeezing more portable classrooms onto some campuses and busing students to under-used schools.

In addition, some of the six San Diego schools spared from multi-track either had seen their enrollments level off or were having significant troubles making the system work.

But the San Diego school board was also sending a clear signal that it considers multi-track, year-round schools a last resort.

It’s a retreat the school district may come to regret. Although the option is inconvenient and unpopular with many teachers, parents and administrators, it makes considerable long-term financial sense.

By staggering schedules, a school can accommodate about 25% more students, without having more students in attendance at any one time. That saves on school construction costs--which can be about $13 million for an elementary school, including the cost of the land--and allows school districts to deal with growth quickly.

This system should not be confused with the generally popular single-track, year-round schedule. In both systems, vacations are spread throughout the year, which many educators say helps students retain what they learned. But in the single-track system, all students in a school are on the same schedule, so there is no increased capacity.

A multi-track system does have problems. Maintaining desegregation and specialized educational programs is more difficult with the added scheduling complications. Communication among teachers and administrators is hampered, because 25% of the teachers are on vacation at any one time, and teachers and students must frequently switch classrooms.

The ideal solution to overcrowding is to build more schools. Even if schools can work out the administrative bugs in multi-track systems--and some schools have--more classrooms must be built if class size is to be reduced or the school year lengthened, as educational reformers suggest.

But realistically, population growth and spiraling land costs will financially limit that solution. And portables and busing have drawbacks, including the fact that they drain money from longer-term solutions.

Rather than retreating from multi-track schools, educators here should be looking for ways to use them creatively.

For instance, in Oxnard, where all schools are multi-track, new schools are designed with offices for teachers to mitigate some of the class-switching problems. Perhaps some of the savings from multi-track might eventually make it more feasible to reduce class size.

It might also prove easier to persuade voters to approve tax increases for multi-track schools. The San Diego Unified School District used that argument in its successful 1988 tax measure. And in Oxnard, a bond measure passed with a 71% majority. The superintendent there says the multi-track system helped persuade parents that the school district had done all it could to stretch resources.

Los Angeles made the decision to put all schools on the same year-round calendar and to require each school to increase its capacity by 23%. For many, this will mean a multi-track system. The decision will help spread the overcrowding burden and allow for growth in some areas. It will also eliminate much scheduling confusion.

The L.A. plan makes sense. But it did not happen until the system was bursting at the seams. San Diego has the luxury of more time. It should be careful that its short-term decisions on multi-track don’t sabotage long-term planning.

Accommodating the 20,000 or so additional students expected by the year 2000 will require maximum efficiency in the use of resources.