San Marcos Votes for Year-Round School Calendar

The San Marcos Unified School District, in an effort to secure state building funds and ease classroom crowding, Monday became the latest North County school district to switch to a year-round calendar.

The board, like that of the Escondido Union Elementary School District last month, voted unanimously to move to the multi-track schedule.

The San Marcos district, which has opened three schools in the past six years, is predicted to grow by more than 2,000 students in the next five years. That would require the construction of four more schools if the district stayed on a traditional calendar.

“We can’t afford to build new schools. Revenue from developer fees has gone down because of the economy, and we can’t go to a bond issue and hope to win, so we have to go to other alternatives,” school board member Seena Trigas said.

Trigas said she is upset that the district, like others in San Diego County, was forced to make the move based on economic rather than educational factors.

“It does make me angry,” she said. “Schools are now pushed into a corner, and very often we have to look at the economic realities and the practicalities of the situation.”

However, Trigas and others have noted that some studies indicate that year-round calendars can be educationally beneficial, although the studies remain inconclusive.

Under the board directives, all of the San Marcos district’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools will go on a year-round calendar beginning July 1, 1993. The precise design of the schedule will be determined by a community advisory committee.

Year-round education eases crowding by putting students and teachers in the same school on different calendars, or “tracks,” with some portion of the students on vacation at all times.

Parents, teachers and administrators of Vista Unified, which was the first district in the county to put all of its elementary schools on a year-round schedule in 1990, said the past year and a half has been successful.