Year-Round Schools Getting Mixed Reviews in County

Zachariah Cano, 10, is among more than 4,000 Ventura County students who are testing an educational theory that children retain more of what they learn if they don’t have three long months of summer vacation.

Cano, a fifth-grade student at Sespe Elementary School in Fillmore, began his school year last Monday, a full month earlier than last year. But educational theory was far from his mind.

“I like it because the summer was getting kind of boring,” Zachariah said. “But I don’t like it because I can’t sleep in any more.”

All of the Fillmore Unified School District’s 3,000 students hit the books on the new, year-round schedule. Students at three Ventura Unified School District schools also started an all-year calendar Monday.

The elementary school district in Oxnard began phasing in a year-round schedule 17 years ago and converted all its schools to the year-round system four years ago.

Both the Los Angeles Unified School District and Oxnard adopted the schedule because of overcrowding. But overcrowding was not the issue in Fillmore and Ventura, where school officials say they believe students will benefit from shorter, more frequent breaks from the classroom.

“We went to this calendar because we thought it would do more for us instructionally,” Fillmore Supt. Marlene Davis said.

Sespe Principal Lynn R. Edmonds headed a committee of parents, teachers, administrators and students who studied the year-round issue. “Kids don’t forget as much,” Edmonds said. “Over a long summer it’s very common for kids to drop an entire year in reading.”

The three-month summer vacation schedule is an outdated remnant of an agrarian period when children were needed to help with summer harvests, Edmonds said.

Norm Kirschenbaum of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education said several studies have supported the theory that a year-round schedule helps children retain what they learn. One of those studies was based on two groups of Oxnard elementary school children, one on a traditional calendar and the other on a year-round calendar.

The year-round group scored higher on assessment tests, said Kirschenbaum, who also is assistant superintendent of Los Angeles County’s Montebello Unified School District, where seven of 23 elementary and middle schools are year-round.

In Fillmore, a year-round program has been in place at Piru Elementary School for four years. The school board voted last year to try the program districtwide for two years. Teachers, administrators, parents and staff members will meet in the spring of 1992 to evaluate the schedule and decide whether to make it permanent.

In Ventura, the year-round calendar at Mound, E.P. Foster and Sheriday Way elementary schools is permanent.

This year, a committee at Ventura’s De Anza Middle School will study whether to start a year-round calendar there, said Joseph Spirito, Ventura’s assistant superintendent. The district also is doing a demographic study to determine where other year-round schools might be feasible, he said.

In Fillmore and Ventura, classes will meet for nine or 10 weeks at a time, with two weeks off in the fall, three weeks at Christmas, a three-week spring break and about six weeks for summer vacation. The school year will be 180 days long, as with the traditional school calendar.

District officials refer to the year-round schedule as a “custom calendar,” to distinguish it from districts, such as Oxnard Elementary, which use it to ease overcrowding. In overcrowded districts, various starting times and vacation breaks are used to get more students into the same number of schools. At least one-quarter of students are off at a given time.

In Ventura and Fillmore, all students will have vacations and breaks at the same time.

As the new schedule began last week, what seemed uppermost in the minds of students was that it is still summer and they are still in school.

Early reviews were mixed.

“I think we have to suffer now,” said junior Frank Audouy, 16, on the first day of classes at Fillmore High. “But things will look a lot better when we’re on break in October.”

Campus supervisor Linda Alba, a Fillmore High alumna whose three sons also graduated from the school, predicted that the new schedule would be less stressful. “I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to love it,” Alba said.

Fillmore High is the only high school in the county on a year-round calendar. Some students said they had to cut short summer jobs to attend school.

Senior Eloy Florez, 16, who resigned early from his summer job on a ranch, said he was worried about making payments on his new car. “I have a money shortage all of a sudden,” he said.

Junior Annette Chavez, 15, said the summer ended too soon. “We really didn’t have much time for summer,” Chavez said.

School officials in both districts said the year got off to a smooth start.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh, we’re back to school already!’ ” Edmonds said. “But we say that every year. . . . It was just like a regular first day back.”

Some officials said they had fears that some students would forget the early start date.

“Quite frankly, I thought we would have kids not showing up,” said Marsha Porter, principal of Sespe Elementary School. But most students reported as scheduled, she said.

Many concerns about vacation conflicts and day-care provisions seem to have been resolved. At Fillmore High, Principal Jaime Castellanos said his wife teaches at a Ventura school that is not a on a year-round calendar.

“Our vacations won’t coincide, except for some overlap at Christmas and spring break,” Castellanos said.

In Ventura, day care “has not been a big issue at all,” Assistant Supt. Spirito said. The district has privately run day-care programs at 13 of its 17 elementary schools, he said. Fillmore has no on-campus day-care programs.

Some Fillmore parents are still not completely sold on the concept, but seem willing to give it a try and to change their day-care arrangements since it is a two-year experimental program, said Cherie Goodenough, who was Fillmore PTA president when the schedule was approved.

Many Fillmore parents are encouraged because they think the program has worked well academically at Piru Elementary, she said.

Edmonds, former principal at Piru, said the school has no measure of whether students’ performance has improved because school boundaries were changed four years in a row, and officials did not have a stable student population to monitor.

Goodenough, who has three children in Fillmore schools, said she is not convinced that students will retain more. “It sounds good, but they have to start up more often,” she said.

Laura McDowell, president of the Piru PTA, said her two sons seem to remember more and have an easier time making the transition from vacation to the classroom. McDowell, a Fillmore resident, said she believes so strongly in the year-round calendar that she requested that both her sons be transferred from Fillmore schools to the Piru school.

At the high school level, principals said the schedule created difficulties for athletic programs, particularly football teams, because of lost practice days in the fall.

Castellanos said the team will try to make up for lost time during physical education classes and at after-school practice sessions.

The question, officials said, is whether students really will forget less of what they learn.

“People are waiting to see how it’s going to come out--this is a radical change,” Castellanos said. “But our philosophy is, it’ll be better for the kids.”