Vacations Come to an End for Year-Round Students

As summer vacation stretches into its seventh week for most Ventura County students, more than 3,100 elementary and middle school children on Monday headed back to class in Ventura and Santa Paula.

Classrooms and playgrounds filled with youngsters as seven schools in the two districts began the first day of year-round school--a calendar created on the premise that students retain more information if they take shorter vacations.

Grace Thille Elementary, which on Monday became the first and only school in Santa Paula to switch over to a year-round calendar, made the change mainly to raise its students’ English skills. About 70% of the school’s 317 students have limited English skills, officials say, and long summer vacations spent speaking only Spanish can lead some youngsters to forget what they have learned.

“We are always looking for ways to keep them connected with English,” Principal Norah Byron said. “The shorter breaks will make it easier for them to acquire English faster.”

Countywide, four districts have now fiddled with the once-sacred length of summer vacation in the hopes of boosting learning and getting the most use out of scarce classroom space. All of the schools are in session for the same total time as campuses on the traditional calendar--180 days.

More than 3,500 elementary and middle school children in Oxnard will begin a new year of classes Wednesday. The 14,300-student Oxnard Elementary School District adopted the year-round schedule in the late 1970s to ease a serious overcrowding problem.

All students in that district now attend school in four separate shifts, maximizing the use of class space.

Classes begin Monday in the Fillmore Unified School District, where educators switched to a year-round schedule in 1991 to counter what they said was the tendency of students to forget their lessons. Although initial studies showed that the change generally helped the 3,500 students in the district’s six schools do better scholastically, Supt. Mario Contini said he is now less certain about its benefits.

“It has been a controversy here,” Contini said. “Some people really don’t like it. It is really hard to show documentation that shows this calendar really works.”

In Ventura, school officials put five elementary schools and De Anza Middle School on year-round schedules in 1991 after parents on the city’s west end lobbied for the change.

Supt. Joseph Spirito said the nearly 2,800 students and hundreds of school officials on the special calendar appeared ready Monday to tackle a new year of school work.

“Shorter breaks and more frequent breaks give the students and teachers more chances to rest,” Spirito said. “From what we can find, there is more retention because students are not out [of school] over an extended period of time.”

Santa Paula parents waiting at the entrance of Grace Thille to meet their children for lunch Monday seemed to agree that the new schedule would pay off.

“I think they will learn more,” said Enriquetta Vasquez, whose two sons attend the school. “They will remember what they learned last year and they can go over it more quickly and move on.”

On the whole, students did not seem to mind that their summer vacation had shrunk from about three months to less than seven weeks.

“At first I felt that my brothers were lucky because they had more summer,” said fifth-grader Ivan Hernandez, whose brothers attend other schools in the district. “But I was ready to return to school and play with my friends. Now I don’t have to baby-sit my little sister.”

Grace Thille teachers also appeared to support the new school-year calendar, even if it means they too will lose their nearly three-month summer vacation.

“A lot of us have looked forward to be able to partake in our own children’s school activities,” said Louise Lessley, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher whose new schedule will give her time off when her children are in school.

Like students in Ventura’s year-round schools, Grace Thille students will still attend class 180 days a year as would youngsters on a traditional calendar. But to compensate for the shorter summer vacations, the students will gain longer breaks during the year--including three weeks in October, three weeks in the winter and two weeks in April.

According to teachers, the longer winter break is better tailored to the vacation plans of school parents, who instructors said often pull their children out of school over the Christmas holiday.

“Now they will be able to go to Mexico and they won’t lose any school time,” Lessley said.

Trudy Arriaga, a principal at Ventura’s Sheridan Way Elementary, said the year-round schedule’s biggest potential downside is that it makes it harder for families to plan vacations when schools run on different calendars.

“That has been a difficulty through the years,” Arriaga said. “But it hasn’t been anything major.”