Scheduling Choice Causes Headaches : Education: Parents and school employees, with some irritation, appear to be leaning toward scrapping year-round classes.

Amid continuing confusion over school calendars for the coming year, a consensus appeared to emerge late last week among parents and teachers that a return to a traditional September-to-June schedule was likely for most Westside schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The sentiment was far from unanimous, however, and even parents and teachers who welcomed the likely change tended also to express irritation at the school board for changing its policy on the calendar so late in the school year.

Under the plan narrowly approved by the board on Monday, parents and employees at each high school complex will select their calendar for the coming school year. They will decide whether to stay on the “common calendar,” which runs from August through June with long breaks in the winter and summer, or to revert to the traditional calendar.

A high school complex is made up of a high school and the elementary and junior high schools that send students to it.

There are complications, however. Probably the biggest one is that elementary and junior high schools in the Los Angeles district may feed into two or three different schools.

School district officials worked all last week to establish a voting procedure. Information packets are expected to go out to schools this week.

Gordon Wohlers, who heads the district office that handles scheduling, said that the district will begin meetings with principals as early as Monday to discuss the plan.

The voting plan has to make clear which schools belong to each high school complex, Wohlers said. “We want to have it make sense.”

The voting plan also must consider students who go to magnet schools and come from all over the district as well as children who are bused across town because of crowding at their neighborhood schools, he said.

“All of those issues are complex and interrelated,” he said.

Wohlers said he expected general agreement within most high school complexes on which calendar was preferable.

In some areas, such as the San Fernando Valley, a primary concern in choosing a calendar may be the hot weather facing children who start school in August under the common calendar, Wohlers said. In other areas, such as the Westside, a bigger concern might be the availability of child care or recreation during school breaks.

“I would think parents in a general neighborhood would have a common theme,” Wohlers said.

While school district officials scrambled last week to organize the vote, parents and teachers spiritedly discussed their options.

Judy Page, parent of a child at Overland Avenue Elementary, said she much preferred the traditional calendar.

“It was unbelievably hot last summer,” she said. “There’s a lot of down time in the afternoon in an older school with no air conditioning.”

The long winter break was also a problem, she said. “I have a second-grader. When winter break came, he was just starting to catch on with his math.” After the eight-week break, he went back and “everything was lost. There’s a tremendous review process at the elementary school level.”

Gary Garcia, a Hamilton High School teacher, said he and his wife, who is also a Los Angeles teacher, like the current calendar.

“Most teachers expend a great deal of energy teaching and they use the winter break to recharge,” Garcia said.

“I think it’s also good to have the breaks balanced (throughout the school year) for optimal student learning.”

At University High School, Principal Jack Moscowitz said there was a great deal of anxiety over not knowing what the calendar would be for the coming year.

“Many teachers would support returning to a traditional calendar, but it’s certainly not universal,” he said.

At Venice High School, Principal Bud Jacobs said teachers have been conducting informal surveys and appear to be split. Parents appear to favor the traditional calendar, he said.

Jacobs predicted that the Venice complex would go back to a traditional calendar, partly because of its location between two school districts, Santa Monica and Culver City, which are on a traditional calendar. With Venice High nearly surrounded by school districts on a different calendar, “It makes our kids a little off,” he said.

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Regardless of their views on the two calendars, the prospect of change had many parents, teachers and administrators up in the air about such diverse concerns as vacations, summer camp, summer school and fall sports.

Overland Elementary parent Sandy Terranova said she couldn’t understand why the board didn’t decide on the calendar year in the late fall or winter.

Parent Wendy Ziegler Marsh was even less charitable. The board’s decision is a “complete and total embarrassment,” she said. “I have no faith or trust in any decision they make.”

School board member Mark Slavkin, who introduced the local-option measure, defended it, but added, “There’s no good argument for doing it in May and I wish we could have done it in February.

“No one is compelled to change if they feel it is too late in the year. We’re not compelling anyone to do anything they don’t want to do.”

Slavkin said he first introduced the motion in February, but because the board was absorbed with a possible teacher’s strike, the matter did not come up until this month.

Board member Julie Korenstein, who failed to get the board to adopt a rival motion to abolish the year-round calendar at most schools, said she found parents to be “absolutely dismayed, dumbfounded and shocked. They can’t believe the board would pass such a crazy, bizarre policy.”

“No one,” she said, “has thought this out.”