Students Stage 2nd Protest Over Year-Round Schedule

About 200 Van Nuys High School students staged their second campus rally in as many weeks Friday to show their opposition to a year-round schedule that eliminates traditional summer vacations for about two-thirds of them.

School authorities, after long debate and heated protests from parents, adopted the 12-month calendar to cope with the 600 ninth-graders who will be added in July, when the school goes from a three-year to a four-year institution.

The students gathered in the morning sunshine in a grassy quad between classroom buildings, many with signs in hand to illustrate their frustration with the decision. They planned to be there through the afternoon, they said. Although many students admitted that they joined the demonstration simply to enjoy an outdoors break from classes, others voiced energetic opposition to the new program.

Molly Dames, 16, said the district ought to rent five bungalows to accommodate the additional students instead of changing the calendar, and added that a fund-raising drive had been started to help finance that plan.

“We don’t have a voice in this school,” the 11th-grader said during the rally. “If we go on year-round classes, there won’t be as many class options, special electives or [Advanced Placement] classes. Year-round has caused a very emotional issue in this school.”

The protest exemplified the growing pains associated with converting five San Fernando Valley schools to the controversial year-round multitrack calendar.

As a districtwide reorganization nudges sixth-graders into middle school and ninth-graders into high school, Van Nuys, Monroe, North Hollywood, Francis Polytechnic and San Fernando high schools are also adopting the year-round timetable. In all, the five schools expect an influx of more than 4,400 ninth-graders come July 1.

Under the new calendar, students are divided into three groups, or tracks. At any given time, two groups will be attending class while the other will be on vacation to ease overcrowding.

Over the past three years, Van Nuys school administrators have looked at several options to avoid the year-round option, such as seeking bond issues, renting bungalows, eliminating the medical magnet program or even changing attendance boundaries. All these choices have been dismissed by the district, and in turn the school has become something approaching a battleground.

“We’re falling apart,” said French teacher Laurice Myron after teachers met to discuss the switch. “We’re stressed, wondering, worrying, losing control. We’re fighting each other about what’s best for the school.”

Myron, who is a member of the school’s Shared Decision-Making Council, feels that the school was allowed no other choice but to adopt the year-round plan. So she, along with three other teachers, voted against it.

“I was so angry at feeling forced that it became a protest vote,” she said.

Students are eager to be assigned to the track that gets traditional summer vacation time, which would offer the best chance to land temporary jobs and get into specialized academic enrichment programs.

Although many students at the rally seemed resigned to the new schedule, they voiced concern about sitting in classrooms without air conditioners in the summer heat. Others felt the year-round debate pitted magnet students against other students in a competition for limited resources and diminished class choices.

And teachers and students are wondering how the student body will be distributed into three calendars, a decision that teachers’ union representative Charlie Wilken said must be made by March 1.

At North Hollywood High School, meanwhile, Principal Catherine Lum and administrator Carmen Schroeder are planning to examine the school next week to see if the multitrack schedule can be avoided.

“We are still investigating the possibility--slim as it may be--of not going multitrack,” Schroeder told about 65 students in the highly gifted magnet program Thursday night at a meeting in which tempers occasionally flared.

“We are going to look in every single corner to see if some space can be made,” she said, hastening to add, “but I don’t want to raise any false hopes.”

*

But parents of the gifted magnet students, whose sons and daughters have been given a calendar with May, June, November and December off, fretted that the schedule would kill their children’s chances of going to summer enrichment programs at Ivy League schools.

Attempting to soften the blow, Los Angeles Unified School District board member Jeff Horton outlined solutions to problems that a nontraditional calendar might create. The agitated parents pushed for a switch to the September-through-June calendar or wanted the magnet program moved to a neighboring school with enough space to accommodate a traditional calendar.

When Horton suggested that students could miss some school to attend enrichment programs and later make up missed classwork, he was answered with a sarcastic, “Oh, please!” His comment that students enrolled in enrichment programs could correspond with teachers and classmates via electronic mail was greeted by a cry of “That’s elitist!”

Horton also suggested that highly gifted magnet students and parents work with colleges to create enrichment programs that would be scheduled during the two-month winter break the students will get.

Parent Lew Eisenberg suggested that his son and the other highly gifted students relocate en masse to Reseda High School, which has ample space to fit the 244 pupils on a traditional calendar.

Assistant Supt. Ted Alexander, who oversees the racial integration program, explained that the magnet program helped integrate North Hollywood High and could not be moved without throwing the school back into a racial imbalance.

Horton, whose district includes North Hollywood High School, later said that relocating the magnet program would set a “terrible precedent.”

“That says that when a school gets crowded, it doesn’t get a magnet anymore,” Horton said.

Meanwhile, North Hollywood High administrators pledged to survey magnet students about their summer plans in an effort to accommodate their enrichment needs. Magnet parents will stake their claim at a school Leadership Council meeting on March 4, hoping to have their children placed on the more traditional September-through-June calendar.