Sprung Out

Darlene Llorens rushed around her Mission Hills home Wednesday grabbing things and throwing them into the suitcases she and her three school-age children planned to take on their trip to Lake Arrowhead.

What she wanted to take, but couldn’t, were her husband, Steve, and their two teenage daughters, whose conflicting work and school schedules kept them from taking off the same week.

“If we were all off at the same time it would help us to have our family time together,” Llorens said, expressing a growing complaint from families pulled apart by conflicting spring break schedules.

Once upon a time, public schools typically scheduled breaks between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. But today Los Angeles city public schools are not on the same vacation track, and local colleges have their own timetables, with some breaks over and others winding down this week.

For working parents, juggling school vacations, child-care arrangements and work schedules can be maddening.

“This is no small task,” said Barbara Polland, a child development professor at Cal State Northridge and psychotherapist in private practice. “I have had parents calling me all week who are trying to juggle schedules and are feeling frustrated.

“What has evolved is a more inclusive calendar than an exclusive calendar. We are more sensitive to religious holidays like Passover and Ramadan,” Polland said. “In many ways it is a shock for us who grew up with an invariant week.”

The clash of schedules is exemplified in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where students at a charter school, Vaughn Street Elementary, have the week off while counterparts at nearby Fenton Avenue Elementary, another charter school, have their noses in the books.

To complicate things further, Morningside and San Fernando elementary schools in San Fernando are year-round schools where students on one track are off for the month of April, while pupils on two other tracks continue to attend.

The higher-education vacation schedule is just as knotty.

Cal State University students are living it up this week, while Spring Break ’98 is in the memory books for Los Angeles Community College District students who resumed classes March 30 and University of California undergraduates who returned to campus Monday.

Religious schools, which set their break schedules around holy days, are on a completely different track.

“Catholic schools have always taken off the week after Easter,” said Stephanie Connelly, principal of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. In the period of religious holidays leading up to Easter, she said, “students should be in school focusing on Holy Week and not out playing around.”

At Tufenkian Armenian Pre-School in Glendale, students observe both Easter and the traditional Armenian holiday known as Memorial Day during a school break that began Friday and ends next Tuesday.

“Armenians go to cemeteries and [will] remember the dead on Monday,” said school director Arsine Aghazarian. “It’s a very important part of the Armenian Apostolic Church. It’s a very special day, and people must be able to have time to celebrate it.”

For the Llorenses, the conflict of secular and sacred schedules twisted their vacation plans.

Darlene, a nurse with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s infant program and a graduate student at CSUN, is off this week, along with her three younger children, who attend the district’s Danube Avenue Elementary School in Granada Hills.

But daughter Michelle, 16, a student at Los Angeles Lutheran High School in Sylmar, is off next week.

Another daughter, Milani, a 19-year-old student at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, is off this week, but is working at a supermarket to earn tuition money.

And husband Steve couldn’t take time off from his boat-maintenance business.

“This has been really difficult because the little ones don’t want to go without their father,” Llorens said. “But they’ll be fine once they get there.”

Leslie St. Martin, a part-time English professor at the University of Judaism in Bel-Air, faces the same dilemma: Her 4 1/2-year-old daughter, Alexa, a preschooler at Calmont School in Topanga, is off this week, but St. Martin won’t get time off until next week when the college closes to observe Passover.

“It’s really tough to juggle everything,” said St. Martin, who also has a 4 1/2-month-old son, Cameron, and has enlisted her husband, Steve, and parents to help with child-care duties.

Erin Grace of Granada Hills says she took a position as a teacher’s aide at Valley Presbyterian School in North Hills so that she could have the same days off as her three teenage children in Los Angeles district schools.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Instead of spending the week at Leo Carrillo State Beach campground in Malibu, she will be in her sixth-grade classroom while her husband, Tim, will be working at Universal Studios and the kids will be hanging around the house.

“They are old enough to stay home by themselves, but I am uneasy that they are home all the time,” Grace said. “I would prefer to be home when they are home for any extended period.”

To help parents make sense of the confusion, child development specialist Polland suggests they plan ahead by finding out exactly what days children are out of school, putting in for the time off from work and having a backup plan. The tension and anxiety of last-minute problems, she said, “doesn’t breed good health.”

Parents who can’t get the time off can take their children to the office, hire older siblings to baby-sit or get them into short-term programs at the YMCA, YWCA and Boys & Girls Clubs, she said.

Many middle schools and high schools require students to perform community service, a mandate parents can use to their advantage, Polland said.

“Students can volunteer at an adult day-care center, child-care center, library or hospital, where they are being supervised by an adult,” she said. “They are being watched, without feeling they are being watched.”

Polland also suggests that parents learn to scale back grand expectations for annual vacations.

“When we think about holidays, we imagine the family hopping into the car and setting off for a glorious time,” Polland said. “It isn’t always so glorious, and sometimes you feel a little cheated, but you can compensate by planning delicious weekends.”

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Correspondent Jon Steinman contributed to this story.