School’s Year-Round Schedule Put on Hold

Under pressure from parents and students, a Van Nuys High School council voted unanimously Tuesday night to put on hold for a week its previous decision to adopt a year-round calendar beginning July 1.

The panel--made up of parents, teachers and administrators--rescinded the decision and agreed to reconsider the matter at a meeting next Tuesday with a “serious, intensive investigation of returning to the traditional [school] year,” council member Rachel Dunne said.

The group, called the Shared Decision-Making Council, acted after nearly three hours of emotional testimony from 225 parents and students, who contended that a year-round calendar would weaken the school in spirit and ethnic diversity.

Some parents expressed concerns that putting the school’s three magnet programs on one annual calendar, while the predominately Latino local students are placed on other schedules, would result in de facto segregation.

“We’re a family,” parent Susan Vogelfanger-Moreno said. “We have to stay together--like mother and father and kids. This is our happy home.”

The panel also was influenced by the actions of six Van Nuys High School students who said they secured nearly $8,000 in pledges this weekend to pay for five temporary double bungalows--which they hope would solve the overcrowding problem that forced consideration of the year-round calendar.

The school expects an influx of about 600 ninth-graders in July because of a districtwide plan that bumps sixth-graders into middle school and ninth-graders into high school.

Because of the districtwide grade reorganization, several San Fernando Valley high schools must cope with hundreds of new students in the coming year as the three-year schools add a ninth grade to become four-year schools.

To accommodate these students, the school board converted four high schools to the controversial year-round system beginning this summer.

Those schools--Francis Polytechnic, Monroe, North Hollywood and San Fernando--had no other choice but to abandon the traditional September-to-June calendar for two-thirds of their students.

Parents and teachers at those schools, while mostly resigned to the change, are concerned that students will be forced to forgo traditional summer activities, such as jobs and special academic programs on college campuses.