A Schedule to Suit Students

Most students in the county’s public schools are off for a couple of weeks on the traditional winter holiday break. Students at Carr Intermediate School in Santa Ana will also have the two-week holiday--and then some. They are getting a whole month off.

The extended vacation is a novel approach to the attendance problem caused by some Latino parents who keep their children out of school for weeks longer than the traditional two-week break because they journey to Mexico to visit relatives. Because such trips can be unaffordable on a frequent basis, some families stay for weeks at a time.

The result is lost time in class for the student, and lost income for the district because state funding is based on attendance.

So, officials at Carr school, which has mostly Latino students, decided to restructure the school year. They abandoned the system that split the school into four groups with each group rotating breaks throughout the school year. Instead, students now are off four weeks for the winter break, two weeks in the spring and a week at Thanksgiving.

The approach, however, is not without drawbacks.

One problem, for now at least, is that Carr is the only school in the Santa Ana district on such a schedule. This presents a problem for families in coordinating trips for all youngsters. Families with children who attend other elementary or high schools still pose the same absentee problem, and there is still missed class work when they go away. When those students return, they will be behind their many classmates who return to school after the regular two-week recess.

One of the main reasons for the rotating schedule is overcrowding.

By rotating vacations, fewer students are on campus each cycle. That raises new issues: How many schools in the district have the capacity to have all their students in class at the same time, and whether all parents, teachers and school officials want the extended holiday schedule Carr adopted.

One educator said that the best gift to give children is education--and keeping them in school.

School officials plan to evaluate the Carr school’s new schedule to see if it actually does improve attendance.

It must also evaluate how much it might disrupt the overall academic program. This is a chance to find out whether it’s worth keeping, and duplicating districtwide.