Year-Round School Plan Rescinded : Education: Parents, teachers and officials at 10 local L.A. district ‘complexes’ vote to return to the traditional September-to-June calendar.

Westside schools in the Los Angeles school district have voted overwhelmingly to return to the traditional September-to-June school calendar this fall, dumping the unpopular year-round schedule that lengthened the winter break and shortened the summer vacation.

Ten Westside high schools--Crenshaw, Dorsey, Fairfax, Hamilton, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Palisades, University, Venice and Westchester--and most of the middle and elementary schools that feed into them will reopen Sept. 7, take two weeks off at Christmas and one at Easter, recessing in mid-June for the summer.

“The vote was a surprise to me,” said the measure’s sponsor, Westside school board member Mark Slavkin. “It counters the myth that only a handful hated the new calendar, that the opposition was an elitist thing. People felt the same throughout the whole district, but just may not have been as vocal everywhere.”

Parents, teachers and administrators throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District cast ballots last week on whether to revert to the old schedule. The schools were grouped into “complexes” composed of a high school and the lower schools that feed into the high school.

Only the Jefferson High School complex in South Los Angeles opted to stick with the current schedule.

Multitrack schools, which are in session year round to relieve overcrowding, were not eligible to vote and will remain on their existing schedule. On the Westside, these exceptions include Braddock Drive Elementary near Culver City, which opted to go year round two years ago as an alternative to adding bungalows to increase capacity, six schools in the Hollywood complex and 10 schools in the Crenshaw, Dorsey and Los Angeles complexes.

Opponents of the return to the traditional calendar had argued that a uniform calendar should prevail throughout the district, even though most schools on the Westside and West San Fernando Valley had only enough students for a single track. Mandating the new calendar was said to spread the misery around and not favor uncrowded schools in more affluent areas.

But it was not only affluent white Westsiders who voted for a return to the traditional school year. Even at schools in the wealthiest, least integrated parts of the city, the minority enrollment is about 70%, because those schools receive large contingents of children bused in from crowded inner-city neighborhoods. Parents of the bused children also voted strongly for the old calendar.

“Everybody suffering together for another two years wouldn’t build a single new seat,” Slavkin said, adding that the district needs to build or lease facilities in the inner city to relieve overcrowding. “You don’t do that by just changing the Valley or Westside calendar.”

Slavkin also admitted, a bit sheepishly, that his wife had cast the family vote in favor of retaining the year-round calendar at Canfield Elementary, where their son is a kindergartner. She was outvoted.

The family of each student attending a single-track school was allowed one vote, as was each teacher and administrator. Families of students enrolled at multitrack schools did not vote because no change is feasible in already jammed schools.

Slavkin said the school board agreed to put the calendar decision in the hands of parents, teachers and administrators as another step toward local autonomy. Returning to the traditional calendar will save the district $4 million a year and end the widespread dissatisfaction and criticism the year-round schedule had engendered.

“It was a trade-off,” he said. “There are benefits and efficiencies to uniformity, but the system is so skewed that some lost sight of the benefits of local control. We cannot have cookie-cutter schools; we need variety.”

Parents had opposed the common calendar since its inception two years ago. They complained that the eight-week winter break interrupted learning momentum, disrupted family summer plans, created child care problems and, in the Valley especially, left children unnecessarily sweltering through June and August in classrooms without air conditioning.

They also said the calendar widened the rift between public and private school students, since many summer programs popular with Westsiders--everything from surfing camps to theater summer stock--continued to run on the traditional schedule, shutting out public school students who had to return to school in mid-August.

On the Westside, 78% of the Palisades Complex--comprising Palisades High, Temescal Canyon High, Revere Middle School, and Canyon, Kenter Canyon, Marquez and Pacific Palisades elementary schools--voted to go back to the traditional school year, with its three-month summer vacation.

The narrowest vote was in Hollywood, where only about 60% supported the old schedule. But the bulk of that complex’s schools remain unaffected, because they are multitrack.

All other Westside complexes chose the old calendar as well: 77% at University and Westchester, 76% at Dorsey, 72% at Fairfax, 70% at Crenshaw, 69% at Hamilton and Venice, and 66% at Los Angeles.

School-by-school results are still being tabulated, and the results will be formally ratified Monday at the board’s next meeting.

Schools will begin notifying parents that the first day of classes will not be in mid-August, but on Sept. 7. That may send families scurrying for summer camp spots or cause them to revamp vacation plans, but this time the change is their choice and no one seems to be complaining.

Vote Against Year-Round School Here’s how teachers, administrators and parents of students at Westside schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District voted last week on the calendar for the 1993-94 school year. A high school “complex” consists of the high school and elementary, middle and junior high schools that feed into it. Schools that are on multitrack schedules to relieve overcrowding were not eligible to vote. The choice was between the traditional September-to-June schedule, which is followed by most schools in the country, and the “common calendar” adopted by all L.A. Unified schools two years ago. The purpose of the common calendar was to place all schools on schedules similar to those of the multitrack campuses.

High school complex Traditional calendar Existing common calendar Crenshaw 2,492 939 Dorsey 2,077 655 Fairfax 2,875 1,070 Hamilton 4,756 2,050 Hollywood 467 299 Los Angeles 1,578 804 Palisades 2,019 563 University 2,885 823 Venice 3,605 1,607 Westchester 1,956 573

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District