Korenstein ‘Traditional’ Schedule May Lack Vote

A proposal by Los Angeles Board of Education member Julie Korenstein that could pave the way for a return to the traditional September-to-June school calendar appears to be teetering on the brink of passage--or defeat.

Korenstein’s motion, which would direct Los Angeles Unified School District officials to produce a traditional schedule for consideration by the board, seems certain to garner three of the four votes needed for approval Thursday. But a deciding vote to push the motion over the edge remains in question--and may be hard to come by, as Korenstein herself acknowledged Tuesday.

“I know how difficult it is to get four votes on an issue like this,” she said. “I’m going to be working on it between now and Thursday.”

If approved, the measure would probably be the first step in dismantling the so-called “common calendar” that put all of the district’s 625 schools on some form of year-round operation just a year and a half ago.

The common calendar has proven especially unpopular with parents on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, where most children attend single-track schools. Those schools do not require a year-round schedule of rotating groups of students to alleviate crowding, as at multitrack campuses. Officials adopted the calendar with a view toward relieving future overcrowding and to make the schedules of single-track schools run parallel with multitrack schools.

Board members Roberta Weintraub and Mark Slavkin, who has presented his own plan to allow schools to choose their own schedules, have pledged to support Korenstein’s motion, which was formally introduced at a board meeting Monday.

Weintraub and others point out that a return to the traditional schedule would save the financially beleaguered school system the $4.2 million it costs annually to implement the year-round calendar. Those costs come mostly in the form of extra staffing hours to prepare schools for the extended winter break as well as to maintain after-school sports programs for students who may be off in January and early February.

But board member Barbara Boudreaux, who opposes Korenstein’s motion, said the amount was negligible in comparison with the district’s $3.9-billion budget and insufficient to justify as big a disruption as a calendar change.

“To upset our whole educational program for $4 million--I’m not ready to sacrifice the children’s education that way,” Boudreaux said.

She added that community opinion has not been sufficiently plumbed to take such a drastic step so late in the school year. If Korenstein’s motion passes, the board would not actually decide until May 3 whether to revert to the traditional calendar.

“It’s very untimely,” Boudreaux said. “We need about a year’s lead time to do it effectively. It would be a great disservice for all of our children and our teachers to implement it at this late date.”

But Korenstein--who has been accused of seizing on the issue to score political points for her current reelection bid--said it would not affect multitrack schools but simply extend summer vacation for single-track students, who would begin school in September rather than August.

At Monday’s meeting, she resisted an amendment to her motion by board member Jeff Horton that could hold the key to her motion’s success or failure.

Horton requested that district staff be instructed to develop a second alternative schedule that would maintain a common August start date but cut the current eight-week winter break--a hiatus that has many parents chafing--down to two weeks. “I know that’s a compromise, but there are arguments for preserving a common calendar,” he said.

Horton said he would not support Korenstein’s motion unless his amendment was included, partly because he feared that a yes vote would be misconstrued as a promise actually to adopt a new calendar instead of a simple agreement to look at alternatives.

“That’s why I’m reluctant to vote for her motion, because it would look like I was committed” to scrapping the current year-round schedule, he said.

School board President Leticia Quezada also appeared at Monday’s meeting to make her support of the motion contingent upon the addition of Horton’s amendment so that the board would “have a menu” of options May 3.

She said last week that rescinding the common schedule would be a tough decision. “The board would be in a very difficult position to backtrack and change the common calendar” barely a year and a half after it was instituted.

And the issue of fairness is still “very much on the table,” Quezada said. Proponents of a districtwide year-round schedule argue that it is inequitable for children in poor and densely packed neighborhoods to be on a year-round calendar while students in less crowded and more affluent communities are not.

Board member Warren Furutani, who is running for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. The year-round issue has been a sensitive one with Furutani since 1987, when he reversed his swing vote to put the district on a year-round calendar within two years.

Slavkin’s proposal, which is also scheduled to come before the board May 3, would allow each high school and its feeder campuses to adopt their own calendars. However, critics of the idea have predicted chaos for the district’s huge busing program, and the plan did not seem to have enough support for approval during a brief discussion at Monday’s meeting.

“Some decisions are made best centrally,” Horton said.