L.A. Schools Pressured to Add 17 Days

The Los Angeles Unified School District is looking at such unpleasant possibilities as Saturday classes and running double school shifts from morning to night to ease problems of multitrack calendars at its most overcrowded campuses.

Nearly 200 schools--serving almost half of the district’s 736,000 students--operate year-round on staggered tracks that keep two groups of students in session and one on vacation at any time.

That system offers about a half hour more of classes each day, but 17 fewer days a year in a schedule that many educators believe shortchanges academics.

District leaders are eager to expand the school year from 163 days to the statewide standard of 180 days at these campuses--an enormous challenge in a system short of money and land for new construction.

They are facing pressure for extra school days from state legislators, as well as parents and teachers.

“We have to find a way to make this work, so that everybody has 180 days and everybody has an equal opportunity,” said school board member Mike Lansing. “To me, that’s the real challenge.”

To build new schools and relieve overcrowding, the district says it needs to pass an expected $3.3-billion local school construction bond in November and receive additional funds from a $13-billion state school bond on the same ballot.

But new schools will not entirely relieve the pressures. Many existing campuses could still face various forms of year-round schedules even if their calendars grow to 180 days.

Los Angeles Unified officials are studying several scenarios for extending the school year. The officials insist that the proposals are not a scare tactic meant to sway voters to approve the bond.

In fact, they acknowledge that the alternatives under review could create new problems for students, parents and teachers in the district’s most crowded neighborhoods.

The options include:

* Operating campuses six days a week. Under this scenario, half of a school might attend Mondays through Wednesdays and the other half Thursdays through Saturdays. Both groups would get shorter vacations to ensure that the students meet the 180-day minimum.

* Running double sessions on the same day. The school day would be split in two, with separate teachers and administrators running morning and afternoon shifts, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The school year could run up to 220 days by shortening the length of each school day.

* Switching the three-track campuses to four tracks, which generally rotate groups of students for 90 days of class and 30 days of vacation repeatedly through the year. This change would extend the calendar to 180 days, but would make it harder for students to get Advanced Placement classes and other specialized courses that would have to be distributed over additional tracks. The scenario also might require increased busing, perhaps doubling the 17,000 students who now commute from overcrowded schools.

The various options could create new child-care dilemmas for parents. Athletic teams and extracurricular groups also would not be able to use gyms and playing fields that would be occupied all hours of the day under the double-session proposal.

Many of the ideas have yet to be tried in California, according to state education officials.

Only the double session has been attempted, and only by one other school system, the Anaheim City School District, the state officials said.

Anaheim introduced staggered sessions four years ago to accommodate double-digit growth while also reducing class sizes in first and second grades.

Half of the students in these two grades attend in the morning and half in the afternoon at 17 of the district’s 23 schools. The groups overlap for about two hours in the middle of their school days.

Anaheim teachers complain that the schedule allows no time for recess and only 20 minutes for lunch.

“It’s very hard on children. It’s very hard on teachers,” said Carol Reinbolt, a teacher at Westmont Elementary and president of the Anaheim Elementary Education Assn. “There isn’t even time for a teacher to go to the bathroom.”

The Orange County district passed a $111-million school bond earlier this year, and officials plan to build more schools and phase out the staggered, double sessions over the next decade.

But even as Anaheim envisions the end of double sessions, the Los Angeles Board of Education is expected to consider the option and other alternatives in August.

School board members acknowledge the downsides to the various scenarios for replacing the 163-day calendar. But they insist that the solutions are less painful than the current situation.

“Let’s look at this as an opportunity to say we’re not serving a certain segment of kids the best we can,” said school board member Marlene Canter. “We’ll have to make some hard decisions.”

Multitrack schools on the shortened calendar add 21 to 39 minutes to each school day to ensure that they meet the minimum number of annual instructional minutes required by the state. But many experts believe that does not compensate for the lost 17 days.

Critics point to a Los Angeles Unified study last year that showed slightly smaller testing gains for schools on the 163-day schedule compared with campuses on traditional calendars. District analysts attributed most of that difference to socioeconomic factors.

The district is facing pressure from Sacramento to abandon the shortened multitrack schedule. Proposed legislation would require Los Angeles Unified and a handful of other crowded districts to end the calendar by 2008.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a former Los Angeles school board member who introduced the bill, called the 163-day schedule “a disaster.”

“There’s no good reason to keep doing it if you are building schools and getting space,” she said. “We shouldn’t have any calendar in this state that doesn’t have the minimum 180 days of instruction.”

The 163-day calendar was introduced at a single school in Los Angeles a quarter century ago as a temporary fix for overcrowding.

Today, three-track campuses account for about one-third of the district’s regular schools and 42% of its population--310,000 students.

While the three-track calendar allows schools to dramatically increase their capacity, the schedule has drawn fierce criticism from teachers, students, parents and administrators.

Seventeen lost days of class, they say, means fewer tests, less homework and inadequate time to prepare for the Stanford 9, Advanced Placement exams and other important tests.

“Pedagogically, it doesn’t work. I can’t assign kids as much reading as I would under a regular schedule,” said John Bennett, a history teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles since 1968.

Garfield High, one of the district’s largest high schools with more than 4,100 students, has been on the three-track calendar for nearly 20 years.

Students say they can’t get all the classes they need on their tracks, so they sometimes have to attend school part time on their vacations to get necessary courses.

The daily schedule itself presents another problem. Teachers and students, who begin class at 7:25 a.m. and end at 3:11 p.m., say the schedule burns them out.

“It’s hard to concentrate on AP calculus at all. It’s especially hard at 7:25 in the morning,” said senior Daniel Santos, who also is cross-tracking to get two AP classes.

“I would personally like it if they would get rid of the track system. I think it’s a really bad idea.”