Public Hearings to Weigh Year-Round School Plan

Ventura school officials said Thursday they are planning to hold public meetings to discuss the possibility of converting seven schools to a year-round calendar as early as next summer.

Terry Holts, principal of Cabrillo Middle School, said officials will hold meetings with parents in November to discuss how the year-round school system works and why it is preferred over the traditional school calendar.

In addition to Cabrillo, officials from Blanche Reynolds, Lincoln, Loma Vista, Pierpont, Poinsettia and Will Rogers elementary schools will participate in the meetings. Officials from Ventura and Buena high schools will also take part, although the schools are not interested in pursuing a year-round calendar at this time.

Holts said Cabrillo has tried for the past two years to switch over to a year-round calendar, but has met with opposition from parents who have children in different schools and fear that their vacation schedules would be split up.

Also, a district survey taken in 1991 showed that parents at several elementary schools--including Lincoln, Poinsettia and Will Rogers--also opposed switching to a year-round schedule because it would wreak havoc on their own schedules.

Last April, officials from each of the schools interested in a year-round program formed a study group to further explore such a conversion.

Holts said that clustering the seven schools into a year-round program would help prevent students from the same family ending up on different schedules. All six elementary schools feed students to Cabrillo.

However, Holts said some Will Rogers and Poinsettia students also graduate to Balboa, Anacapa and De Anza middle schools.

Under a year-round schedule, students would generally be in class nine weeks and off three weeks throughout the 12-month calendar. Year-round students participate in the same types of course work and receive the same amount of instruction as students attending schools that are in session from September to June.

“We’ve had a lot of interest coming from parents about a year-round schedule,” said Dan Munday, principal at Poinsettia. “Quite a few are in favor of it. It gives children more frequent breaks, so they don’t get tired of school.”

“It makes more educational sense,” Holts said. He said students under the traditional system have trouble retaining what they have learned when they move from one grade level to the next because of the three-month summer break in between.

Arlene Miro, director of administrative services for the Ventura Unified School District, said six elementary schools and one middle school are already on the year-round schedule. She said it has proved to be a successful and popular system among parents and teachers.

“Teachers love it,” Miro said. “They like it because the students are rejuvenated. And they retain more because they aren’t away from school for so long.”

Those schools now on a year-round calendar include Oak View, Arnaz, E.P. Foster, Sheridan Way and Mound elementary schools as well as De Anza Middle School. Miro said that all but Mound feed students to De Anza.

Miro said it would not cost the district anything for the schools to switch over to a year-round calendar.

Still, she said, it is too early to say if all, or any, of those schools wanting to convert to the new schedule will be able to do so.

“We’re going to test the waters in November to get a feeling of what the community thinks,” she said. “We’re going to put all our cards on the table.”

A parent survey will probably be taken in December, and the school board will make a decision after that time, Miro said.

If all goes well, Holts said, at least some of the schools would be ready to convert to a year-round calendar by next August.

Countywide, only two other school districts, Oxnard Elementary and Fillmore Unified, are on year-round schedules.