NEWHALL : School Schedule Requests Granted

Newhall parents, who camped out overnight in early November to obtain a year-round elementary school track that would assure their children a July or August vacation, might just as well have stayed home, Newhall School District officials said.

More than 96% of the 600 families who submitted track preference forms in advance of proposed year-round classes scheduled to start next July at Wiley Canyon Elementary School received their first or second choice, school board member Pat Willett said Tuesday.

Of those 600, parents of about 200 children had camped overnight outside the school, waiting to register Nov. 6. They were concerned that the first-come, first-served method of track selection would not allow their families to vacation together, Willett said. All families who do not indicate a track preference, she said, will be assigned one.

To ease overcrowding in fast-growing Newhall, officials have proposed multitrack year-round classes at two more of the district’s six elementary schools--Wiley Canyon and Valencia Valley. Both schools plan to stagger their calendars so that four groups of pupils at each school would attend classes for 60 school days, then recess for 20 school days at a time the year around.

A group of parents opposed to year-round schools in Newhall is gathering signatures on petitions in the hope of blocking the proposal by placing it before voters next June. The group must obtain 6,500 signatures by Dec. 10 to put the issue to a vote, officials said.