IRVINE : Parents Angry About Combination Class

Parents who chose Westwood Basics Plus Elementary School in Irvine for its traditional educational methods are upset that 29 students will be drafted into a combination classroom when school opens today.

Parents have swamped the Irvine Unified School District with angry phone calls, complaining that they were told only 48 hours before the first day of school that students in fourth and fifth grade will be placed in a single classroom with one teacher.

“Parents needed to know sooner,” said Lupe Cook, president of the school’s PTA. “The expectation of a lot of our parents is that there would be no combination classrooms at this school.”

“Parents have made it abundantly clear that they selected the ‘basics plus’ option . . . because they wanted to avoid combination classes,” Supt. David E. Brown said. “The absence of notice was also a recurrent theme.”

Both Westwood and Alderwood Basics Plus schools are options for Irvine parents seeking the traditional educational emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. The two schools also offer fully enclosed classrooms--in contrast to the open-classroom design of Irvine schools built in the 1970s--specific educational requirements for each grade level and a reliance on workbooks that have been jettisoned by other schools.

While there are combination classes at many Irvine public schools, parents were assured in the past that the “basics plus” schools would not combine grade levels. Alderwood continues to have no combination classes.

But because of small numbers of fourth- and fifth-grade students enrolled at Westwood, school district officials combined those grades to save the cost of hiring an additional teacher. There are just 29 fourth- and fifth-graders enrolled at the 18-year-old school, where overall enrollment has fallen by about 10 students, to 566.

“This is the first time that we’ve ever had a combination class at Westwood,” Principal Beverly Khalil said. “Money is the big factor here. If we’d had just a few more children at the particular grade levels, it would not have been possible to have a combination classroom.”

Deputy Supt. Paul Reed said the combination class will save the tightly budgeted school district the cost of a teaching position. District teachers have average annual salaries of $43,000 per year, plus benefits, but officials said it would be difficult to calculate exactly how much the combination classroom will save.