Summer Scholars : Students Forgo Beach Days With Barely a Whimper

While many South Bay children were basking on the beach, the 30 third- and fourth-grade students of LaShelle Edmerson were trying hard to put a good final flourish on their cursive AAAAAs this week.

“Remember to kick that tail up much higher,” Edmerson advised her charges as she scrutinized their handwriting efforts.

Edmerson’s students at Hawaiian Avenue Elementary School in Wilmington are among 4,000 pupils in six Los Angeles Unified School District elementary schools in the South Bay attending the first full week of year-round school.

In addition to Hawaiian Avenue, the other Los Angeles schools that began year-round schedules this month are Fries Avenue, Gardena, Gulf Avenue, Meyler Street and Normont. In neighboring districts, Hawthorne has four elementary schools with year-round schedules, whereas Lennox has six and Inglewood has five.

The program in Los Angeles enables schools to increase their enrollments by 25% by keeping schools open year-round and rotating vacations among four tracks of students. It also has eliminated the need for busing at the six schools, at least in the short term, according to school administration officials. Schools that had been forced to turn students away and bus them to less crowded schools are, for the time being, able to enroll all the students living nearby.

So far, problems have been minimal, according to two dozen interviews with students, teachers and administration officials.

A positive effect can be observed at Hawaiian Avenue, which last year had 1,150 students attending school. With three student tracks in class and one on vacation, only 875 students are at the school this summer. Under the old system, there used to be so many students at Hawaiian Avenue that some didn’t get a chance to play during recess.

But now, said Principal Tommye Keenan, “It is wonderful to see how much room there is on the yard. There is so much more room that they actually get to play before the end of their recess period.”

Sixth-grader Fernando Castanera, who was kicking a soccer ball around a sparsely populated concrete yard during a recent recess, agreed. “We can play any area. It’s better when there are not a lot of people.”

Fran Buzzell, the Hawaiian Avenue representative of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, said teachers report a welcome change. “There are not as many kids on the yard, so the kids are calmer in the classroom,” she said.

In Sandy McNeil’s sixth grade, a group of 20 students was working on brief autobiographies. Keenan said McNeil’s class will eventually increase to perhaps 23 students, but even that is far smaller than before the switch-over.

“Last September, it was 35 to 40 children,” the principal said. “It’s been ideal. We know it can’t last, but it’s wonderful.”

There are other changes for teachers, as well.

McNeil said the year-round schedule will mean a shift in her teaching. Because there are fewer sixth-grade classes and teachers within a track, she has had to add reading to her previous specialties of oral and written expression. The short period between sessions gave her little time to get ready for the new duties.

“I still don’t quite have things unpacked yet,” she said.

Buzzell said that despite the brief time between the end of the traditional school year on June 21 and the beginning of the new schedule July 5, teachers are enjoying themselves. Although some feared burnout would be a problem with the new schedule, many teachers are experiencing the burst of energy that comes with the beginning of every school year, she said.

“Time will tell” if burnout becomes a major problem, she said. “You need to come back around October.”

Martha Guerra, president of the Hawaiian Avenue PTA, said parents are more or less evenly split about the new schedule, although only a tiny fraction expressed strong feelings.

Keenan said about 20 parents had sought to switch their children to a track that has vacation during summer.

For many families with two wage-earners or a single parent, changing the traditional calendar with its nearly three-month vacation “is a major benefit,” Guerra said. The new system has vacations that are 30 days long, alternated with three months of classes. Guerra said some parents found day care easier to arrange during the shorter vacations.

Many of the parents who objected to the change had already planned and paid for vacations, she said.

Keenan and the other principals said enrollment has climbed day by day this week as stragglers come in to register.

That is apparently because some parents were unaware that school was in session, or because they extended the between-session vacation.

“A lot of people didn’t realize that we were going to start in July,” Guerra said.

School missed the recent heat wave. In any event, most South Bay schools on the year-round schedule are close enough to the ocean to avoid the soaring temperatures more common in the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the school district.

Keenan and other principals have opened windows and stocked classrooms with fans. Normont even has a portable swimming pool.

“It’s our turn to receive one of the district portable swimming pools,” Principal Rosalie Cochran said. “The students are ecstatic.”

Under the new schedule, schools that were forced to turn students away and bus them to less crowded schools are, for the time being, able to enroll all the students living nearby, according to Vickie Montez, administrative consultant in the school district’s Office of Priority Housing, which oversees space allocation.

For Sina Solomona, 11, a sixth-grader, that means she now can walk the block from her home in Wilmington to Hawaiian Avenue school. In June, she said, she had to take the bus to Leland Street school in San Pedro.

But school officials warn that busing may be reimposed if burgeoning enrollment fills up the extra room created by the new schedule.

The most likely candidate for renewed busing is Fries, according to Montez.

“Our school is filling up very rapidly,” said Maureen Melvold, assistant principal at Fries. “I am telling new enrollees they might be bused.”

Montez said, “Any little space they have left (at Fries) will be filled by the end of summer and any additional kids they get during the traditional calendar may have to be bused out.”

There will not be busing at the other five schools, Montez said, unless “enrollment continues to increase 15,000 like last year.”

On the yard at Hawaiian Avenue, children bounded after balls and lined up for games without visible signs that they were suffering because of the loss of the regular summer vacation.

Angie Cervantes, 11, a sixth-grader, said she found summer vacation got boring and that two weeks of vacation is enough.

Angelina Zumbrana Ramirez, 8, a third-grader, said she doesn’t mind school in the summer even though she used to go to the beach a lot.

“Mom says she is going to take me Saturday,” she said.