Have Books, Must Travel

The bell rings at Virgil Middle School and teacher Paul Hession dashes out of room 511 right behind his students.

With a briefcase in one hand and a roll book in the other, the life science teacher hustles down three flights of stairs to his fourth classroom of the day. He’s teaching about bones on this occasion, but his model skeleton sits in yet another classroom across campus.

“I’m off kilter,” he says. “A fish out of water.”

Hession is a “traveling teacher.” He wanders from room to room each day, with no place to call home. His school, like other crowded middle and high school campuses throughout the region, rotates teachers through idle classrooms to ease overcrowding. The idea is to increase the capacity of schools by using all available space every period of the day.

The shuffle keeps students off buses, but teachers and administrators widely condemn it as disruptive. Critics complain that traveling cuts down on preparation time and leaves instructors in unfamiliar rooms without supplies.

Some teachers keep their books in their cars and lug their materials across campuses on little two-wheeled carts, an exhausting routine for even the hardiest souls.

“It’s demoralizing--one of the worst things you can do to a teacher,” says Hession, 47, who has taught at Virgil for 17 years. “I’m really getting worn out.”

The practice is common in urban and suburban communities alike, from Glendale and Long Beach to Santa Ana and Santa Clarita--any place that is experiencing enrollment growth.

“It’s not the ideal. We don’t recommend it,” said Leslie Crunelle , an assistant superintendent in the William S. Hart Union High School District.

The Hart school system, which serves the Santa Clarita Valley, has virtually doubled in size--to nearly 18,000 students--in a decade. The district has added portable classrooms and is seeking a bond measure to fund new schools. Still, Crunelle anticipates that teachers will be traveling this year at most of the district’s eight junior high and high schools.

“It’s not good for teachers,” Crunelle said. “It’s not good for students.”

While the practice is common throughout the area, nowhere is it more prevalent than in Los Angeles Unified, where every middle school and high school--more than 120 campuses--is affected. Elementary school teachers do not travel because their students stay with them the entire day.

The school district is building dozens of schools to alleviate overcrowding, but those campuses will not open for several years. And so the traveling continues.

District officials estimate that most secondary campuses have 15% to 20% of teachers switching classrooms at least one period a day. At the most crowded campuses, 30% of teachers--or more--do it.

But district and union officials are concerned about the impact on inexperienced teachers, who have so many other things to worry about. Concern is so great that the new contract protects first-year teachers from traveling. In schools where the practice is unavoidable, new teachers are last on the list, union leaders say.

“The first year of teaching is the hardest,” said Bev Cook, a vice president of United Teachers-Los Angeles who is in charge of secondary campuses for the union.

Cook traveled for more than 15 of her 28 years as an L.A. Unified teacher. “I never felt that my students were getting the best of me,” she said.

At Virgil Middle School, a campus near downtown with 2,800 students on a year-round schedule, nearly one-third of its 101 teachers travel. Most move just one period a day, filling empty rooms that would otherwise be occupied by teachers during their conference periods. Several move two, three or even four periods a day.

Despite the traveling and its year-round schedule, Virgil is still oversubscribed: 1,100 neighborhood students ride buses to campuses on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

Virgil administrators also are critical of traveling but have no choice. It’s either that or put even more students on buses.

They say they try to spread the pain as evenly as possible. While some teachers, such as those in special education, are exempt, all others are placed on a rotation: they travel for eight weeks--half a semester--and then return to their own rooms for the rest of the year. Administrators say they try to keep the actual distance that teachers move to a minimum.

Hession’s stint began last month.

He starts his day in his own room, 521. Next, he spends a short “homeroom” period and his conference period in the science lab or its equipment room. Then he moves to 522 for period three, and then to 511, and finally 811, which is a shop room across the campus and down three flights of stairs.

Even though the first three rooms are in the same building, Hession still feels the strain.

He can’t get a warmup assignment on the board because, like his students, he’s scrambling to class. He doesn’t have chalk and overhead projectors readily available.

And he can’t meet with parents because he has no room of his own during conference period. Instead, he sees them in the schoolyard or the dean’s office, as secretaries and students mill around.

Hession has stopped doing one of his favorite activities--”scientist of the day”--because he can’t carry all the necessary videos and supplies. The lesson calls for students to stand before the class, give a one-minute report on a subject and entertain questions.

“I’m not able to give my students what I want to because of all the traveling and rigmarole,” Hession says. “I’m so out of my element. I’m trying to survive until I get back to my room.”

Hession’s room--521--is a marvel of creativity, filled with the props he has collected during the 10 years he has been in the same spot.

There’s the life-size model skeleton, the charts of the digestive and reproductive systems, the shoe boxes (with colored pencils, markers and calculators) that he used to place on each desk. There are two fish tanks, a blowup shark hanging from the ceiling and student drawings on the wall.

He can’t wait to return to it.

“You set the tone at the beginning of the year,” Hession says. “It seems like I’ve missed that tone this year.”