A Shorter Ride to School : Education: Crowded South Bay elementary schools will go on year-round schedules. Fewer Latino students will have to be bused to other schools, some lacking bilingual programs.

As a result of pending year-round school schedules, hundreds of Latino students in Wilmington who now ride the bus to schools without adequate bilingual education are expected soon to attend neighborhood schools with major bilingual programs, educators and parents say.

And at less crowded South Bay schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the new schedules and other measures to make room for burgeoning enrollment should mean that fewer students are bused and that those who are bused will have shorter rides, according to school board member Warren Furutani.

Added school board President Jacki Goldberg: “Kids who were on the bus last year may get to stay home. . . . We are trying to reduce travel times. They have gotten out of hand.”

The expected changes in student access to bilingual programs and travel time result from school board plans announced earlier this week to handle increased school enrollment. As part of those plans, 64 schools are to switch to year-round schedules with multiple tracks this summer, and almost 40 more schools intend to move portable classrooms onto their campuses.

In the South Bay, the schools pegged to go on a multitrack, year-round calendar in July are Fries Avenue, Gardena, Gulf Avenue, Hawaiian Avenue, Lomita Magnet, Meyler Street and Normont elementary schools.

Adding portable classrooms will be 135th Street, Crestwood Street and South Shore Magnet elementary schools.

The number of students per class will be increased at 135th Street, and 232nd Street Elementary will go on a single-track, year-round schedule in July.

At Fries Avenue Elementary in Wilmington, which has 1,110 students, Principal Helen Friedman said the school sends 260 pupils to other schools because of overcrowding.

Although some pupils may choose to stay where they have been sent, Friedman said, “I am anticipating to bring back 200 children. . . . For the most part, the ones we bus out are Spanish-speaking, and we have the bilingual teachers here.”

At Hawaiian Avenue Elementary, which has 1,183 pupils and buses 185, Principal Tommye Keenan made the same point.

“We know that many of the schools where we are sending pupils don’t have the bilingual teachers that we have,” she said. “I don’t think (those students) get the bilingual support they are entitled to.”

Wilmington community activist Sophie Carrillo collected 500 signatures backing a year-round schedule to permit increased enrollment at Fries Avenue Elementary. She said the availability of bilingual education at Fries and other Wilmington schools is a major factor in support for the new schedules.

“Children are coming from out of the country,” she said. “Sometimes they are bused to schools without a bilingual program. The schools in (Wilmington) have a bilingual program.”

Although principals at the overcrowded Wilmington schools were reluctant to name schools lacking a fully developed bilingual program, the principal of Crestwood Street Elementary, which receives students from Wilmington, agreed that her school does not have enough bilingual staff.

Principal Thelma Ortega said Crestwood, which is in San Pedro near Rancho Palos Verdes, gets one quarter of its enrollment of 535 pupils from other areas, including 70 who would have gone to Hawaiian Avenue if there had been room.

During the last two years, Ortega said, the students getting off the bus have been increasingly Latino. The shift has occurred faster than she could hire bilingual teachers and aides.

Of the 64 schools planning year-round, multitrack schedules, 59 were ordered to do so by the district because there was no room for portable classrooms and class size was already at a maximum. The other five schools, based on a vote by parents and staff, chose the year-round schedule from among several options for increasing capacity.

Among South Bay schools in the Los Angeles school system, only Normont Elementary in Harbor City volunteered for a year-round schedule with multiple tracks.

Normont Principal Rosalie Cochran said the vote--166 for the year-round schedule, 104 for more portable classrooms--was a surprise.

“I thought the parents would choose the portables,” she said. “They decided for the multitrack, year-round (schedule) because they felt the children would get better services.”

The new schedule means that Normont, with an enrollment of about 600, will be able to reabsorb the 100 students that it now sends to other schools, Cochran said.

Gulf Elementary was one of the schools directed to adopt a year-round, multitrack calendar.

The other options to make room for more students just wouldn’t work, according to Principal Delores Buettgenbach. The school has an enrollment of 1,260, buses 150 and was supposed to make room for another 290.

In 1984, the school added two bungalows. “There is no more place for bungalows,” Buettgenbach said. “The state ruling on playground space is two acres per 1,000 students. We had 1.8 acres and over 1,000 students.”

The other option was to increase class size, but with grades one through six at 27 children per class and kindergarten at between 30 and 31, state law and the teachers union contract prevented any expansion.

While there was no choice about a year-round school schedule at Gulf, parents and staff were permitted to decide what the schedule would be.

In common with other South Bay schools in similar situations, Gulf chose a schedule in which students go to school for 90 days and then are off for 30. This is the schedule that is planned to go into effect throughout the entire school system beginning in the 1991-1992 school year.

Although Crestwood did not choose a year-round schedule, it and other schools still on the traditional schedule nevertheless will be affected. When students who are now being bused start attending neighborhood schools, that will open up space in the schools they used to attend. A new group of students will be sent in.

“I have no idea where the new students will be from,” Ortega said.

Furutani said the school district intends to take advantage of the expanded capacity created by the new schedules and additional portable classrooms to rearrange busing patterns to reduce long rides.

He said the school board hopes to keep busing elementary and junior high students within the geographic boundaries for high schools. “We are looking at the high school complex as the natural unit for busing,” he said.

In the meantime, principals at the schools going on multitrack schedules are busy with preliminary plans for the lists of students on each track, attempting to balance neighborhood identity, housing density, language ability, ethnicity, economic level and grade level.

Said Cochran: “We will be very busy between now and July 2, when the new school year begins.”