Short Summer

The cool, gray Monday morning looked and felt like fall. And for students of year-round schools in Ventura, it truly was summer’s end.

After six weeks of vacation--of beach trips, theme-park excursions and sloth--they were back for the first day of school. Gathering in a faint drizzle, they sucker-punched friends, screamed at each others’ stories and trooped through classroom doors as teachers called their names.

Inside the classrooms lay schedules and textbooks and, yes, homework assignments.

Within a week, year-round schools in three other Ventura County communities will open for business, kicking off a schedule that gives kids more vacation time during the school year and less time, during the summer, to forget their lessons.

Students of Ventura’s six year-round schools were the first back from break. And yet few kids at De Anza Middle School were whining Monday.

Keenly aware that most of the adolescent world was still on vacation, they bragged about how much time off they’d get this fall.

And even if their shortened summer went fast, at least they weren’t sitting around the house, slowly going nuts.

“I like it a lot better than the traditional year, because the summer takes too long and I get bored,” said Erin Buonocore, 10, as she sat on a bench at De Anza, waiting for sixth grade.

“I actually wanted to come back,” said Barbara Kopp, 12.

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Although year-round schooling has met some staunch resistance throughout the country--tampering as it does with deeply ingrained tradition--it has also won converts among parents and teachers. They praise what some call the sense of continuity it offers, linking one school year to the next without an immense gulf in between.

“I love it, love it,” said Lynn Sohasky, dropping her daughter Kristen off at Ventura’s Mound Elementary School for the first day of kindergarten. “The kids get intermittent breaks, nothing too long or too short.”

Mound Principal Ken Coffey said his teachers don’t need to waste weeks at the start of a school year rehashing last year’s lessons.

“The kids, for the most part, don’t forget what they’ve learned,” he said. “So you actually earn about a month of instruction.”

However, the few local school districts on the system have found some drawbacks. The stretched out schedule can tamper with family vacations, professional training programs for teachers and summer sports programs or camps for kids.

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Those problems tend to pop up more often in the higher grades, said Supt. Mario Contini of the Fillmore Unified School District. High School students often pack more organized activities into their summer breaks than grade-school children, and that can cause conflicts with the year-round schedule.

As a result, parents of older students tend not to be as enamored of year-round schooling as families with young children, Contini said.

“You get some new problems, and you relieve some others, and that’s the way it works,” he said.

For the teachers and students plunging back into school Monday, such concerns were a world away. At De Anza, Principal David Myers was pacing the schoolyard, fielding questions from parents and kids and wondering how to start classes without the school bell, which was malfunctioning.

The debate between a traditional school year and De Anza’s modified schedule, he said, was a nonissue.

“Once you make that switch, it just really makes sense,” he said.