Anaheim at Work on School Crowding

A local biologist might help students dissect earthworms on the third floor of a vacant office building. After a lunch break, the students could climb aboard a bus and head off to start their school day, which wouldn’t end until late afternoon.

Anaheim City School District is hoping scenarios like this will extend students’ learning time and keep them off the streets and out of trouble when the district starts double sessions to relieve overcrowding.

Double sessions in essence create two schools--morning and afternoon--on one campus. The sessions will be the same length as a traditional school day, but some students will start in the morning and some in the early afternoon.

The district has been working since August on what it calls an extended-learning plan to keep students busy and learning during the hours before or after their sessions. To brainstorm ideas and get support for making them happen, the district joined up with Anaheim Union High School District and Orange County Department of Education officials, city leaders, UC Irvine and area businesses, forming a group called Schools for the 21st Century.

“What we’re talking about is extending learning through technology and establishing partnerships with nonprofit organizations,” said UCI Department of Education Chairman Luis Miron, who helped organize the group and is researching its work.

“It’s dealing with the crowding issue and community development in a way where kids can continue their learning day rather than being latchkey kids.”

But not everyone is happy about the extended-learning concept. Some parents and day-care operators in the district express concern that before- and after-school lessons and structured activities will mean a long, tiring day for elementary-school students. And day-care centers are worried that the program will cost them business.

Steadily increasing enrollment and a lack of money for new facilities forced the elementary district to approve double sessions, which will start at two or three schools in July 1998, Anaheim City Supt. Roberta Thompson said.

This could affect more than 3,000 of the district’s nearly 19,000 kindergarten through sixth-grade students.

This alteration of the school day has community leaders worried.

“How we deal with kids before and after school is a community problem, it’s not strictly a school problem,” said Chris Jarvi, director of the city’s Community Services Department. “Certainly we have a problem right now with one-fourth of students out on the street at any particular time because of multitrack, year-round school. With the staggered scheduling, the possibility exists that the problem will be exacerbated.”

Some of the suggestions so far: using empty office space for classrooms, busing students to existing parks and recreation programs, using technology to create classrooms in students’ homes and getting members of the local business community to oversee science, drama and computer classes.

At this point, the group is nailing down plans for a July pilot program at Anaheim City’s Thomas Jefferson Elementary School.

The district hopes the pilot, which will be implemented at the single session school as a test, will give them an idea of how many students the program can accommodate and what classes students like. The pilot will start with 200 to 300 of the school’s nearly 1,000 students, Thompson said.

Funding also is still in the planning stages, but grants and private support are expected to make up the program’s financial base. Parents will apply for their students to be in the program and a small fee may be charged, Thompson said.

Although the pilot is still in the developmental stages, the group has received a lot of interest from outside the district, including Anaheim Union and Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified.

“We’re not going to be the only district in this boat,” Thompson said. “Many districts are faced with communities that continue to grow and aren’t receiving funds to build new facilities.”

But some parents remain unconvinced.

“It’s glorified baby-sitting and it makes for a long day,” said Maureen Christensen, who has a second-grader at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School and a second child entering kindergarten in the fall.

Stacy Hampton, mother of a Roosevelt kindergartner, said she wonders how the students will be selected for the program and fears that children who need day care will take precedence and other children won’t get a chance to participate.

Local day care centers are also concerned about the plan cutting into their business. Cathy Duran, director of the Anaheim Childtime Children’s Center, said she thinks parents will be attracted by free or low-cost activities, but that their children will suffer from burnout.

“If there are these other programs with nominal fees that are covering the hours before and after school, parents won’t need day care,” she said. “But, especially with the before-school programs, they’ll be so tired by the time they get to school. Children need to be able to play, and this is too much added stress on them.”

The logistics of double sessions may mean that Kindercare Learning Center in Anaheim won’t be able to transport all of its enrolled children to class, said director April Marlowe. If students are turned away, then parents may enroll them in the community programs, she said.

But Miron at UCI sees the program as a potential trendsetter for improving relationships between schools and communities, and extending the reach of education.

“You can blow the system wide open and provide any kid who wants to the opportunity to be involved in extended learning through computer access at home or at a nonprofit site,” he said.

“Creating cooperative ventures among the private sector, city government and schools could be a national model for reinventing urban schools.”