Cash-Starved Schools Eye Year-Round Schedule : Funding: Escondido is the latest district to consider the move, which is all but a requirement in order to get state construction money.

The Escondido Union Elementary School District is considering putting some of its schools on a year-round schedule, but, like many overcrowded districts in California, it is being driven by economic, not educational, expediency.

With intense competition for state construction funds, any school district hoping to receive such money is virtually required to convert many of its schools to year-round education, educators say.

“We have no choice. We would love to not have to jump through as many hoops as we do under the present (state construction) program,” said Anne Kelley, an assistant superintendent in Escondido.

“But with the way the funding structure is set up, we don’t have any alternatives.”

The state requires districts to exhaust all means of avoiding further construction--such as year-round schools--before they will be given aid to build.

The Escondido district, which holds a public hearing tonight, is considering a plan that would put 30% of its kindergarten-through-fifth-grade schools on year-round schedules.

Following the hearing, the school board may give direction to its staff as to whether and which schools should be converted to a year-round calendar, Kelley said.

Other districts in San Diego County facing overcrowding are formally or informally considering the year-round option, not because they want to but because they have to.

“It’s become impossible to compete for funds in (the state construction) program without gaining some priority points that you need by participating in year-round schools,” said Dan Armstrong, an administrative assistant in the Oceanside Unified School District.

“We still have a lot of schools to build, and to stay in the existing program we are going to have to get serious about year-round education,” he said.

Oceanside Unified would prefer to be on a traditional school calendar and offer an extensive summer school, a plan it was able to follow until recently, when the summer school program was slashed due to budget constraints, Armstrong said.

San Marcos Unified had hoped to place a general-obligation bond before the voters to build a new school.

But when those plans faded, the school board asked its staff to develop a long-term plan to house students, which could include year-round education.

“Right now, we don’t have a whole lot of options. Revenues for school construction are down, and so when you ask are we considering year-round, we are considering anything we can do to house students,” according to San Marcos Unified Supt. Mac Bernd.

Other options include double-session schools and putting more portables on already crowded campuses, Bernd said.

There are those who say year-round education has benefits independent of relieving overcrowding.

“We reorganize the school year in such a way that we have more continuous instruction.

“It’s very difficult for educators today to justify the traditional calendar with that long summer vacation,” said Charles Ballinger, executive director of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education.

Ballinger argues that long summer vacations are “periods of forgetting” and that teachers end up spending four to six weeks a year reviewing lessons forgotten over the summer.

The only options to state aid that the state construction program leaves open to school districts are to put a general-obligation bond before the voters or to pay for construction out of their general funds.

But with the current state budget deficit, every district in the state will feel the pain of budget cuts as they did last year, leaving little or nothing for capital improvements, educators said.

And general-obligation bond elections require the approval of two-thirds of the voters to succeed, a test that, in San Diego County, only Escondido Union Elementary has been able to pass since 1978.

A state bill that would have placed an initiative on the ballot to reduce the two-thirds majority burden to a simple majority failed in the Assembly last month, killing hopes for it to be placed on the June ballot.