School Year Vote Forces Officials to Scramble : Education: Decision leaves only a few weeks to reschedule summer sessions and rewrite bus schedules. The fate of millions of dollars also hangs in the balance.

The decision to allow Los Angeles district schools to jettison the year-round calendar has raised a host of questions--many of which cannot be answered until school officials know how many of the 450 eligible campuses decide to return to a traditional September-to-June schedule.

Under the plan narrowly approved Monday by the Los Angeles Board of Education, parents and employees at most of the school district’s 49 high school complexes--each consisting of a high school and its feeder elementary and junior high schools--will vote on the calendar issue by the end of this month.

They will decide whether to remain on the current 11-month “common calendar”--running from August to June with breaks of six to eight weeks in the winter and summer--or resurrect the traditional calendar.

When the results are determined, school district officials will have only a few weeks to carry out a host of complicated tasks, ranging from rescheduling summer school sessions to reweaving a tangled web of busing routes throughout the sprawling school system.

Also, until the votes are counted, officials cannot say what will happen to the $4.2 million it currently costs to implement the districtwide year-round calendar. It is unclear whether some portion of the money will be recouped or whether the upcoming changes will actually cost more.

“We’ve just got to see the results first,” said Gordon Wohlers, head of the district office that supervises scheduling.

Some school officials predicted Tuesday that trying to implement several different school calendars would bring even more headaches to a district already beset by extreme financial troubles and low morale among teachers who were recently threatening to strike.

“This is not the best policy for the district,” said board member Julie Korenstein, who failed to get the board to adopt her rival motion to abolish the year-round schedule at most schools. “There will be tremendous confusion and chaos.”

But others hailed it as a way to turn over more control to local schools and to parents who accuse the district of being unresponsive to their needs.

“My goal is to make permanent this concept of control at the local level, to create the complex as the key unit of decision-making,” said board member Mark Slavkin, who sponsored the local-option proposal.

About 450 schools are eligible to abandon the current “common calendar” and revert to the traditional school year beginning this fall. Although the details of the balloting process have yet to be resolved, schedules will be determined by a majority vote by parents and school employees within a high school complex.

To carry out the voting, school district officials must first define which schools belong to which high school complexes, because many elementary and junior high schools feed to more than one high school.

Officials must also decide whether to extend voting privileges to parents and employees at multitrack schools that cannot change their schedules because of crowding but belong to complexes with other schools contemplating a switch.

Several school officials and parents predicted that schools in the west San Fernando Valley and on the Westside will probably vote to return to the traditional calendar. Parents from those neighborhoods were among the loudest critics of the school board’s decision three years ago to implement the year-round calendar.

“Everyone I’ve talked to feels it would be a lot better to go back,” said Carolyn Hubbs, whose children attend Westside schools. “I’m for the traditional school year. It may have not been better for the school district, but it is better for the education of children.

But about 200 so-called multitrack campuses--located mostly in poor, minority neighborhoods--have no choice but to remain on the year-round schedule to ease crowding. Through the years of debate, that issue has raised questions about fairness. “It is a choice, but not for everybody,” said Antonio Garcia, principal at Huntington Park High School, which has operated on a multitrack schedule for more than a decade. “The only way they could get us off multitrack is if they built 10 schools tomorrow.”

“It was a very poor decision,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, a former school board member who was one of the staunchest proponents of the common calendar. “It really is like turning the clock back. It was just predicated on folks’ desire to please a constituency that was unhappy with year-round schools.”

The 4-2 vote on Slavkin’s motion represented a clear compromise between adhering to the year-round schedule and switching all single-track schools back to the traditional calendar, as Korenstein proposed.

Officials attributed the decision to a change in the composition of the seven-member school board as well as a newfound appreciation of the problems posed by putting children in classrooms without air conditioning during sweltering August heat.

“The current board is less ideologically driven than we’ve seen in the past,” Slavkin said. “And I think people understand . . . that the heat issue is much more serious and compelling than people were willing to acknowledge before.”

As expected, Slavkin and school board member Roberta Weintraub voted for the local-option measure. But to the surprise of many district observers, so did school board President Leticia Quezada and member Jeff Horton, both of whom support a common calendar and express the most concern over the issue of fairness.

“There is not a fourth vote today on a common calendar,” Quezada said. “In the absence of four votes, the best way to go was a compromise.”

But she added that newly elected board member Victoria Castro, who takes office in July, could tip the scales back toward a common calendar if the scheduling issue is raised next year.

Wohlers said he hopes to send out packets to schools next week informing them of the new local-option measure. Under the traditional calendar that his staff has developed, which must be cleared with the teachers and administrators unions, classes at schools that make the change would begin Sept. 7 and end in mid-June, with a two-week winter recess, a one-week spring break and a three-month summer vacation.

Times staff writer Sharon Bernstein and correspondent G. Jeanette Avent contributed to this story.