All Schools in Hawthorne to Go on Year-Round Schedule in July

Nearly a year after putting four campuses on a year-round calendar to offset overcrowding, the Hawthorne School District Board of Trustees voted unanimously Wednesday night to shift the district’s remaining five schools to a year-round schedule beginning in July.

The board vote puts Ramona, Washington, Jefferson and York elementary schools and Hawthorne Intermediate on a year-round calendar. It came after a brief discussion with Supt. Roger G. Bly and drew mixed reaction from the 65 parents and teachers who attended the meeting.

Several parents with children at Ramona, in the southern part of the district, spoke against the proposal and later expressed anger at the board’s decision. They said Ramona Elementary and Hawthorne Intermediate, into which it feeds, don’t need a year-round schedule because they are not overcrowded. They said they didn’t believe that the board had explored all the alternatives.

“I’m shocked,” said Kathy Amato, 32, who vowed to pull her fifth-grade son, Johnny, out of the district at the end of the school year. “I thought they would at least give us” an option that would have let the district’s two less-crowded campuses maintain traditional calendars while the rest of the district went on a year-round schedule.

But Bly said Ramona and Hawthorne Intermediate are fast on their way to becoming overcrowded, if only because district officials need to shift students there to ease conditions at the other schools. As of this week, enrollment in the district rose to 6,549 students, representing a growth rate of 5.8% over last year.

Bly said that Jefferson, which school officials have said should have been put on a year-round schedule last year, is so crowded that children must take their lunch breaks in 10-minute shifts.

“We’re not growing as fast as we were last year, but to be adding 357 students to a district this size is a lot of growth,” Bly said, referring to the increase in attendance since January, 1990.

If the growth rate stays the same next year, the district will have to add 14 new classes to sites that are already filled beyond capacity, he said. The district currently has 50 portable classrooms and trailers, with some at each campus except Williams.

As a result of the board’s vote, the five schools will join the district’s other four campuses in July on a 60/20 plan. The plan runs on 80-day cycles, with students in school for 60 days and off for 20 days during each cycle. Elementary students will be placed in one of four tracks, three of which will be in session while the fourth is on vacation. Like Yukon Intermediate, Hawthorne Intermediate students will have only three schedule tracks from which to choose.

In the elementary schools, the plan reduces the number of students in classes at any one time by 25%, whereas the three-track system at the middle schools reduces the number of students in session by one-third, school officials said.

Preliminary information from the four schools that have been on a year-round calendar since last July shows those students are better disciplined, have fewer suspensions and need shorter review periods than their counterparts on traditional schedules, Bly said.

During the meeting Wednesday, only one of seven parents and two teachers, including the teachers’ union president, who spoke supported the plan.

Sheila Dorsheimer, who has two children at York, supported year-round schools for the entire district. “What’s good for the few should not override what’s good for the many,” she said.

But several Ramona parents said they believed that year-round schooling would not be good for their children. “We do not have any enriching activities to offer our children” during these monthlong breaks, Amato said.

Another Ramona parent, Michael Leffler, expressed frustration that the board seemed to have made up its mind, “regardless of what the parents say.”

After the vote, board President Buddy Takata agreed that year-round education is “a temporary solution” to classroom shortages and urged Ramona parents to support a bond issue to raise money to build a new school.

Year-round education has divided the district since 1989, when the board introduced it in the schools. Although parents in many schools support year-round schooling as a way to ease overcrowding, parents at Ramona have resisted the change.

In an affluent neighborhood with mostly single-family homes, Ramona has not had to confront the population growth of areas in which apartment growth has boomed. Ramona parents successfully persuaded the board to put only four of the district’s campuses on a year-round calendar last year.

The board also created a steering committee to review the need for year-round schooling at the district’s five remaining schools. The committee reached a consensus that space problems warranted putting Jefferson, York and Washington on a year-round calendar. Members, however, disagreed over the need to do so at Ramona and Hawthorne Intermediate.