Overflowing With Problems

Inside one South Gate High School classroom on Wednesday, students chatted and strolled in and out while their substitute teacher sat, engrossed in a novel. In another class of 40 students, a boy held his backpack while searching for a seat among 38 desks. Last week, a senior algebra class -- also staffed by a substitute -- watched the comedy “Big Daddy.”

When South Gate High moved to a traditional schedule this fall, after 24 years on a complicated year-round calendar, many teachers and students expected to start the school year on a more comfortable campus.

Instead, the Firestone Boulevard school has been in a triage operation this month, scrambling at the last minute to find books, desks, teachers and classes for nearly 300 unexpected students.

Two dozen Los Angeles schools moved off controversial year-round schedules this year, due to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s construction program that opened 32 schools this year. South Gate sent nearly 2,000 students to the newly built South East High School nearby, which also enrolled more students than expected.

As parents in the community learned that South Gate had switched to a September-June schedule, many decided to keep their students close to home instead of sending them to private schools or putting them on buses to less crowded campuses, said Merle Price, superintendent for District 6, which includes South Gate High.

“Now that it is a traditional calendar year, they had confidence, and they came back,” Price said.

Each day this week at least five students have enrolled.

The unexpected overflow has pushed some students into classes already straining with up to 48 students. Some have been forced to take notes on their laps or while sitting on floors. Nearly 200 students spent the first weeks of school rotating through the auditorium as they waited to receive class schedules. Administrators still need to hire at least nine more teachers, Price said.

Most campuses opened after Labor Day, and middle and high schools across the district are dealing with crowded classes, students who need schedule changes and assorted other problems.

But teachers at South Gate, along with some parents and students, are complaining that education is suffering on their campus. They held a rally Wednesday morning to call attention to the problems.

Bill Crosgrove had 13 students in his AP economics class last year. He has 39 this year.

On Wednesday, he was three desks short. One student stood. One sat in a chair without a desk. One sat at the teacher’s desk.

“It’s worse than ever now,” he said. “We’ve never had this many students here at the same time.”

Principal Patrick Moretta said 3,669 students are enrolled at South Gate, though the district had projected closer to 3,400.

Part of the crowding comes from the administration’s decision last year to keep South Gate’s entire senior class of 1,100 students, instead of sending 400 to the new high school. Enrollment will drop significantly next year as those seniors leave.

Moretta still needs teachers, particularly in math and science. District officials said several Los Angeles high schools hired too many teachers this year, and there are plans to send them to South Gate by Sept. 30.

For years, scores of Los Angeles schools have operated on year-round schedules that often interfered with students’ getting classes they needed for college admission. Those schools, which operated on the so-called Concept 6 calendar, shaved 17 days off the school year.

School board member David Tokofsky called South Gate High’s overcrowded classes and reliance on substitutes unacceptable.

He added in an e-mail that the school is “detoxing” from more than 20 years spent on the year-round schedule. Though the problems are expected to be fixed immediately, he said many parents will appreciate “17 extra days of school this year for the first time in 20 years, so let’s try not to waste them all.”

Some teachers say students can’t afford to wait much longer.

This year, South Gate also moved to a block schedule, in which students attend four classes a day instead of the traditional six. Each class runs 90 minutes.

Students who spent the last two weeks in the auditorium waiting for classes, or in classes with unprepared substitutes, have missed the equivalent of nearly a month of instruction.

Substitutes are “coming in and leaving, coming and leaving,” Crosgrove said. “Kids are sitting, watching TV, doing busywork.”

Crosgrove shares his classroom with a filmmaking class, which substitutes have handled for the last three weeks, he said. Most of the filmmaking students, he said, had thought they were taking “life drawing.”

“For an hour and a half they had substitutes telling them to draw something,” Crosgrove said.

Then last week students were informed that the drawing class had now turned into a filmmaking class, but Crosgrove has yet to see any cameras or equipment. Instead, on Wednesday a substitute showed the movie “The Time Machine” without discussing it.

Also Wednesday, English teacher Trista Mayoral stood outside the classroom she shared with a substitute math teacher. Inside, the substitute chitchatted with a class of noisy students. Mayoral rolled her eyes as some teenagers in the 12th-grade algebra class talked on cellphones, applied makeup and listened to music over earphones.

In the last two weeks, the class has watched movies and completed little work, she said.

“It’s sad,” she said. “These are seniors. If they are in algebra as seniors they are already struggling.”

Freshman Jessica Carranza, 14, said she spent two weeks in a geometry class with rotating substitutes, even though she was supposed to be enrolled in algebra.

“The substitute didn’t really know what to do,” she said. “She just gave us copies of problems and then we sat there.”

Counselors moved Carranza into an algebra class this week, where she is struggling to catch up.

Her dance class has gone through three substitutes, but no dance moves.

“It’s unfair,” she said. “This school must not care about us. They should have been more organized.”

Inside Tim Stephens’ classroom of 36 students, 14 raised their hands when asked how many had been taught by substitutes over the last two weeks. Nine hands stayed up when he asked how many had classes still being taught by substitutes.

“It’s a breakdown of planning and bad management,” said Stephens, the campus teachers’ union representative.

Price said the district can learn from South Gate High’s struggles as more schools move off year-round calendars.

“In a broader view, this is all a good news story,” Price said.

“We don’t have them bused. We have them back to a traditional schedule. We just have to get the crystal ball right.”