Pleasant Valley Board to Discuss All-Year Schools

Pleasant Valley school board members Thursday will consider how to implement year-round schools, including a proposal that would give parents with scheduling problems a chance to send their kids to a traditional school with summers off.

The board voted in May to change the traditional school year for the district’s 13 elementary schools because of academic reasons and to accommodate the district’s growing number of students. Within two years, the district expects to have about 7,100 students, 300 more than it has this year.

Under a year-round schedule, students still go to school 180 days a year. But instead of having a long summer off, students take off three other months of the year. In the Pleasant Valley School District, students probably would have vacation during November, July and March as well as holidays such as Christmas and Easter.

Supt. Shirley F. Carpenter said that breaking up vacation time is a way to improve academic performance. She said students have trouble retaining what they have learned when they move from one grade to the next because of the long summer break.

Board member Ricardo Amador said that with shorter vacations, “there’s less of a degree of burnout. If there are breaks in between, you can recharge the batteries. It allows for the energy to remain high.”

In an effort to grapple with overcrowding, the district will consider putting one eastern Camarillo school on a multitrack system, where students would attend school at staggered times.

Because eastern Camarillo, which has seen a boom in new home construction, has only one elementary school, 200 students are bused to western Camarillo. In 1991, voters rejected two school bonds that would have funded construction of a new school in the Mission Oaks area.

The district will consider three options at its meeting Thursday.

In the first, eastern Camarillo’s Las Colinas School would be on the multitrack system. All other schools would be on a single track and would close for three months a year.

In the second, Las Colinas would be on a multitrack system and most other schools would be on a single track. But parents who prove that a serious scheduling conflict existed could send their children to one of several schools that would offer the traditional three-month summer vacation.

The third option proposes that, if a new school is built in eastern Camarillo in the next two years, Las Colinas and most other schools would become single-track year-round schools. Several schools may be kept in the traditional schedule to give parents options.

Carpenter said the school district is working with Pardee Construction Co. to get money to build a school in eastern Camarillo, where Pardee has built up the Mission Oaks area.

Carpenter said the new schedule would cost the district $31,620 to start but would be cheaper in the long run than busing students. She said it “would buy us some time to deal with the overcrowding.”

Countywide, only Oxnard Elementary and Fillmore Unified school districts are on year-round schedules. Ventura Unified School District is considering expanding its year-round program.

The Pleasant Valley district must approve the changes by Nov. 1 if it wants to implement them next school year.

But Robert Rexford, a candidate for the school board, said he is concerned that Camarillo parents haven’t been involved in the district’s decision to go to year-round schools.

“If there’s considerable parental concern, it can be delayed another year until parents are sold on it,” he said. “Although year-round will improve students’ skills proficiency, the trade-off is that it disturbs the normal patterns of vacations.”