Calendar Can Leave Students Out in Cold

After a two-month vacation, North Hollywood High School freshman Ryan Hitchcock had to return to school last week. A few hours into his first day back, his eyes were a little glassy and he dragged his feet around campus. He was unaccustomed to the fast pace. Without much to do during his break on the A-track schedule at the year-round school, he had spent weeks “sitting at home, practicing on my guitar.”

At the same time, senior Marta Garcia began a B-track vacation that would keep her away from school until May 1.

“The last break I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I just stayed home.” Now Garcia is planning to work part time during her break so she doesn’t just get bored and sleep late, as she said she did during her September-October vacation.

Throughout Los Angeles, about 350,000 students like Hitchcock and Garcia are out of school during what would be considered unusual times of year in less crowded school districts.

Students on a traditional calendar can take advantage of many camps, recreation programs, internships and jobs during their summer breaks. But those are not so plentiful during schedules that also put youngsters out of school for long stretches of time in the fall, winter and spring. In fact, there is a painful shortage of programs to keep schoolchildren busy during non-summer vacations, parents and teachers complain.

Such programs have been slow in coming since the track system began as a response to bulging enrollments in the late 1970s. And although some students find productive ways to spend their time, many don’t do much more than watch TV, which can leave them bored and parents uneasy.

Nearly half of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s schools operate on multitrack, year-round calendars, and more will switch to the schedule later this year. Usually, those campuses distribute students among three tracks, A, B or C, with rotating vacations in two chunks of time, about two months each. Some schools have a more complicated, four-track system.

‘There’s Nothing Around Here’

Leshan Bradley has four children in Figueroa Street Elementary School in South-Central and wishes there were more for them to do during their vacations, which fall in November, December, May and June. “There’s nothing around here. It’s a no man’s land,” said Bradley, who complained that there isn’t a YMCA or Boys & Girls Club within walking distance.

She doesn’t have a car and doesn’t like for the kids to play outside because of the violence in her community. So, she said they “just stay at home” with her.

Adding to the frustration is that some families have children on different tracks. That makes it hard to coordinate vacation and child-care plans, especially for single-parent families or households in which both parents work full time.

Peggy Hentschke, who has worked to provide activities for students with non-summer vacations, said the need is growing as more schools adopt the multitrack calendar. “A lot of organizations will do programs in the summer,” she said, “but we really need to be doing year-round programs.”

That’s why in 1990 she founded a series of three-week science- and math-based enrichment programs offered for free to off-track elementary school students. But the Intersession Enrichment Program run by the Education Consortium of Central Los Angeles was recently squeezed out of three schools because of a space crunch. Now it operates only in two schools.

John Liechty, assistant superintendent of extended day programs for L.A. Unified, said he worries that the shortage of activities during non-summer months could lead bored youths, especially impressionable 10- to 15-year-olds, to negative influences like gangs or drugs.

“We’re trying to find activities,” he said. “We’re looking at recreation and parks, churches. We’re looking at almost anything to give them.”

Liechty runs Beyond the Bell, a program that oversees all before- and after-school programs in the district’s elementary and middle schools. While off-track youngsters can take advantage of those early morning and late afternoon sessions, daytime activities are harder to find.

At North Hollywood High, overcrowding threatens the only program specifically for off-track students--six weeks of remedial intersession classes, which last four hours a day.

After this summer, the school may have to replace those with night or weekend classes, said Karen Waligun, intersession coordinator at North Hollywood High.

“We’ve got to start thinking out of the box, because there’s just no room on this campus,” she said.

Some Students Visit Family or Find Jobs

Meanwhile, many students have found their own ways to occupy their time.

Daniel Garcia visits family during his winter break. “Usually, I go to my grandparents’ house in Mexico,” said the North Hollywood High senior. Returning to school is difficult because during vacation, Garcia said, “you don’t think about education, you just think about having fun.”

Jose Di Raimondo, a 16-year-old junior, complained that he can’t even go on family vacations anymore because of his year-round schedule.

“My parents used to get their off time during the summer,” he said, which worked when he went to a traditional school.

But now that he has his breaks in March, April, September and October, while his younger sister is off in the summer, the family can’t coordinate a group trip. Instead, he attends intersession classes and works at Anchor Blue, a clothing store in the Media City Center in Burbank.

Elnora Banks has three children at Figueroa Street Elementary, two on B track and one on A track. When they are out of school, she said, she has to “switch them among relatives” who act as baby-sitters. Then after regular school hours, she takes them to LA’s BEST (Better Educated Students for Tomorrow), an enrichment and recreation program, at the school.

System Makes It Harder to Identify Truants

The multitrack calendar has also made it harder to deal with truants, said Lt. Brad Walker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. With youngsters legitimately out of school throughout the year, he said truants are not so easy to identify at hangouts such as Universal CityWalk, where he has worked for eight years.

“If it’s 10 a.m. and you see six 12-year-olds walking around, there’s a good chance that one of them is truant,” Walker said. The procedure is to question all youngsters about their track, then call the schools to confirm.

Officer Jason Lee, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said he has also seen resulting problems with truancy. “It’s kind of difficult to enforce staying in school and curfews because of the kids’ schedule and the schools’ schedule,” Lee said.

The year-round track system seems very strange to people such as Becky Pantoja, who has two children in North Hollywood area schools and works full time at a medical office. “We lived in Texas before we lived here, and they didn’t have anything like that,” she said.

When Pantoja’s 7-year-old son has his A-track vacations, she said, “He has to stay with the baby-sitter all day. He doesn’t like that too much, because she has a son the same age, but they’re on different tracks.”

And her 17-year-old daughter, Ashley Ramos, is taking intersession classes during the B-track vacation. She wanted to work at Universal CityWalk, Ashley said, to save money for a car. But her mother decided it was more important to make up her classes.

North Hollywood High career advisor Joseph Lane said he has no problem placing juniors and seniors in jobs during their various breaks. “Companies don’t have a need for employees only during the summer,” he said.

Lane also said he helps students sign up for classes at community colleges or adult schools during their breaks. “There are students who are going to take every opportunity to stay busy, and there are students who won’t,” he said.

Keeping Up With Sports or Other Activities

In another oddity of the system, some off-track students struggle to keep up with ongoing sports, Advanced Placement classes and other special activities. They feel as if they are never truly off.

Antonio Jackson, a 15-year-old B-track freshman at North Hollywood High, is one who stays busy. He’s off from school now but he’s on the football, basketball, and track and field teams, which have practices and seasons that don’t fully coincide with his academic calendar.

So, Jackson said with a sigh, “I still have to come here.”

Stephen Wade, a 16-year-old sophomore who is on the A track, was at North Hollywood High during his vacation too. Because he had six periods a day of Advanced Placement review for six weeks, Wade said his vacation was “almost like the break that wasn’t.”

Lissete Varo, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Figueroa Street Elementary, said she continues to go to the campus by choice when she is on vacation. To keep herself busy she volunteers to serve food in the cafeteria and helps with the LA’s BEST program after school hours.

The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks two years ago began offering free off-track enrichment programs to 5- to 18-year-olds.

The program, which includes academic exercises and sports, operates at 34 recreation centers in Los Angeles. In the past year, the program has served almost 140,000 youths, said Alfred Tutungi, senior director of the Off Track Enrichment Program.

He knows that’s not enough but said it’s better than what most youths do now.

“There’s a lot of kids who are staying home, watching TV, playing Nintendo and just hanging out,” Tutungi said.