7 High Schools in L.A. District Will Switch to 4-Year Program : Education: Board’s approval will force changes at many elementary and junior high schools. Plan expands a movement that began in 1980s.

The Los Angeles Board of Education gave the go-ahead Monday for several high schools to open their doors to ninth-graders, a decision that will affect thousands of students and expand a movement that is changing secondary education throughout the district.

The board’s unanimous vote allows seven Westside and San Fernando Valley high schools to make ther transition from three-year to four-year campuses. Kennedy, Granada Hills, Monroe and Venice high schools are scheduled to bring in ninth-graders by this fall, while three schools--Chatsworth, Hamilton and University--will make the transition by fall 1993.

In all, 64 schools will be reconfigured, including the elementary and junior high campuses that send students to the seven high schools, said Joyce Peyton, district director of school utilization. Students attending 47 elementary schools will graduate in the fifth grade. The 10 junior high campuses will become middle schools, accommodating students in grades six through eight rather than seven through nine.

“It’s a good thing to do, to have a four-year high school (and) a middle school,” said board member Mark Slavkin, whose district encompasses some of the schools making the change. “I think we’ve developed big support in the communities.”

It will cost an estimated $223,680 to pay for the changes, much of which will go toward textbooks, instructional materials and staff training, according to a district report.

Reconfiguration began in the district in the early 1980s as a way to relieve overcrowding in elementary schools and increase enrollment in high schools. With Monday’s decision, 26 high schools--more than half of the district’s high school campuses--will have grades nine through 12.

The board action mirrors a nationwide movement that says ninth-graders have more in common with senior high students than with seventh- and eighth-graders, such as meeting criteria for college admission. Advocates of middle schools believe that sixth- through eighth-graders perform better academically and socially when grouped together.

Peyton said district officials would like to reconfigure all schools, but are limited because some high schools do not have space for the ninth-graders.

In an unrelated action, board representatives unanimously voiced their opposition to a “parental choice” initiative, proposed for the November statewide ballot, that would require the state to provide every school-age child with a $2,600 voucher that could be used to attend private school.

Board member Roberta Weintraub, co-sponsor of the motion against the proposal, said the initiative would “take money away from a very broke public school system . . . and by destroying one system, you create another.”