SANTA ANA : Parents Don’t Want Year-Round Schools

A proposal to place four more elementary schools on a year-round calendar in the overcrowded Santa Ana Unified School District was met with resistance this week from hundreds of parents whose children would be affected by the change.

More than 200 parents attended a special public hearing at McFadden Intermediate School to express their concerns to the Board of Education, which is expected to make a final decision on the matter Jan. 8.

A switch to a year-round calendar would ease overcrowding at Adams, Garfield, Hoover and Washington elementary schools, district officials said.

Students would attend school for 45-day periods with 15-day vacations throughout the year.

Many parents said this would create problems in providing child care for their children.

“Who’s going to take care of the children?” asked Carolina Vallejo, whose son is a third-grader at Adams.

“I believe it’s probably a very good idea to lessen the impact of more students, but we will have a lot more problems trying to pay some of our very low wages to baby-sitters,” added parent Jose Gonzales.

Lewis Wood, a parent with two children at Hoover, said he is concerned about how a year-round schedule will affect the schools.

“Facilities at the schools are overused and it seems that staffs spend more time on the management of the different cycles than on the day-to-day things,” Wood said. “Kids just don’t get the same consistency.”

School board President Audrey Yamagata-Noji said some schools have become so crowded that the district is running out of options.

“I certainly understand the hardships for families and there are no easy answers,” she said.

Yamagata-Noji said the city needs to provide more daylong recreation programs to give students who are out of school a place to go. There are only three facilities in the city offering full-time recreation programs.

“From research, we know that (a year-round schedule) works educationally. But socially, we don’t have adequate facilities in Santa Ana. The city needs to share some responsibility for this,” Yamagata-Noji said.

If the four schools do change to year-round schedules, the district might implement more programs such as the one at Jackson Elementary School where students on break are allowed to participate in classes such as art, cooking and physical education for part of the day.

To accommodate a student population that has reached an all-time high of more than 45,000 students, the district has already placed 14 schools on a year-round schedule.

The district has also been building schools at a rate of about two per year and has added 517 portable classrooms at various school sites to deal with the record enrollment.