Clarke Backs Year-Round School System

The school district’s new superintendent, taking a position that promises to put her at odds with protesting parents, said she favors year-round schools to help relieve overcrowding.

Supt. Audrey Clarke said she will attempt to persuade the school board to approve some type of year-round program as early as July, 1991.

“Providing adequate facilities for our students is my No. 1 goal,” Clarke said in a recent interview.

The board, responding to a series of parent protests, recently postponed for at least another year an experimental plan to convert the district’s three largest elementary schools to year-round programs. Participation in the experimental plan would have been voluntary.

Hundreds of parents had marched at school board headquarters and had packed a community meeting to protest the experimental year-round program.

Protesting parents have expressed concern that a year-round system would interfere with family vacations and create additional child-care costs. Parents have vowed to continue opposing similar plans in the future.

But Clarke said some form of year-round schooling is necessary to provide space for the nearly 15,000 students in the district. She said she plans to set up a committee of administrators, board members and others, including representatives of the protesting parents, to study a year-round system.

During the last five years, the district enrollment has increased by 400 to 600 students each year, officials said, and the district will need an estimated 19 additional classrooms to house the growing student population for next school year. The district will have to bring in portable trailers to house the students for the new school year next September, Clarke said.