Number of School Days Runs the Gamut in O.C.

By NICK ANDERSON

Jan. 6, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to lengthen the public school year would add eight days to the typical high school student’s calendar in Huntington Beach but none at all for students in Garden Grove or Laguna Beach.

What accounts for the gap? In a phrase, staff development.

Under California law, schools may take up to eight days out of the 180-day school year for teacher training. For teachers, those are work days. For students, they’re days off.

Details from Wilson’s 1998-99 budget, made public over the weekend, show that the governor wants to spend $350 million to guarantee that all of California’s 5.6 million public schoolchildren go to class for a full 180 days.

Dan Edwards, a Wilson spokesman, said the proposed 180-day, in-class mandate is an attempt to boost student performance in math, reading and other basic skills. He said districts seeking days for teacher training would have to schedule them outside regular school hours--”weekends, after school, during summer, during breaks.”

“This initiative has nothing to do with devaluing the importance of good quality staff development,” Edwards added. “But when you’ve got test scores like we have, every minute counts in that classroom.”

Like their counterparts throughout California, Orange County’s 27 school districts vary widely in their use of staff days. The statewide average for annual student days in class is 175.5

Many school officials say they need the training days to keep their staff informed about new state policies, including phonics-based reading instruction, the reduction of class sizes in elementary grades and the administration of new standardized tests.

In Huntington Beach Union High School District, most schools this year are taking the full eight days allowed, said John Myers, an assistant superintendent. He said educators are using the extra time to prepare for a periodic accreditation review, in addition to the usual updates in curriculum.

But in Garden Grove Unified School District, students already attend class for an unqualified 180 days. Spokesman Alan Trudell said the district’s teachers receive one staff day between semesters, plus summer training. The district also uses substitute teachers when regular faculty need to be pulled out of class.

“We just do it differently,” Trudell said. “Our district has chosen not to sacrifice school days for staff development.”

Laguna Beach Unified School District and the Westminster School District, which serve students from kindergarten through eighth grade, are the only others in the county with a 180-day student calendar.

School officials interviewed Monday said they were well aware that the public demands as much class time as possible. But they said schools also are obligated to invest time in their faculty.

“Just like any business or any industry, people need an opportunity to retool, retrain, find out what’s going on and improve their schools,” said Michael Escalante, superintendent of Fullerton Joint Union High School District, which offers students 176 days a year of class. “It is not vacation time.”

In Fountain Valley School District, officials recently beefed up the school calendar by cutting six staff development days. The district now has just two, giving students 178 days in class.

“I think the community is very pleased,” said Marc Ecker, Fountain Valley’s superintendent. “This certainly is not to mean that there’s not a need for staff training. But I would like to see that training go into the summer, and into the holidays, to provide what I would consider to be more of a professional year.”

Some school officials said they were skeptical of another Wilson proposal, which would require junior high and high schools to subtract the minutes between class periods from the state’s accounting of the total instructional day. As a result, the typical school day could be lengthened by about half an hour to enable educators to meet minimum class-time requirements.

But Edwards said the governor is budgeting no extra money to make that change.

Dean Waldfogel, a deputy superintendent of Irvine Unified School District, said that at most schools, time between classes is not time wasted.

“If you walked through any of our campuses,” Waldfogel said, “you’d see that teachers are spending that time with kids. It’s rare for teachers to have that time available to do personal things. That is a valuable time for teachers to work with kids on an individual basis.”

Times correspondent Liz Seymour contributed to this report.

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Class Time

The amount of time students spend in Orange County’s public schools varies, depending on how many staff development days school districts choose to take (up to eight out of the 180-day school calendar). Such days are set aside for teacher training. Here is the average number of actual teaching days for each of the county’s 27 districts:

District: Days

Anaheim City: 176

Anaheim Union High: 176

Brea Olinda Unified: 177

Buena Park: 174

Capistrano Unified: 176

Centralia: 174

Cypress: 177

Fountain Valley: 178

Fullerton Joint Union High: 176

Fullerton: 178

Garden Grove Unified: 180