Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education.
Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days.
Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation. Others will take the state's new high school exit exam just two days after they return from their winter break.
Many teenagers can't get critical summer internships and jobs that look good on college applications because they're in school, while others must return to campus during their vacations to participate in extracurricular activities such as band and yearbook.
Ask nearly any teacher at Hollywood High whether students are getting a first-class education and the answer is a resounding no.
"If you wanted to destroy public schools, you'd start with year-round schedules," said English teacher Richard Cunningham.
Hollywood High offers a glimpse into the future of education in Los Angeles.
Within five years, every high school in L.A. Unified must convert to a schedule like Hollywood High's, casualties of explosive growth and the district's failure to build schools. More than half of middle-schools will have to run year-round.
Twelve-month schedules have become a primary solution to overcrowding in a growing number of districts because they allow schools to serve additional students in shortened, overlapping terms.
Use of the year-round calendar has grown steadily in Los Angeles over two decades. L.A. Unified now has more year-round campuses than New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami and Houston combined.
The experience at Hollywood High shows how multitrack schedules present students with hurdles that do not exist at other schools. The setbacks, while not crippling on their own, take a cumulative toll on learning, spawning what many call a two-tiered system of education.
"In a well-intentioned effort to solve overcrowding, we have exacerbated inequities in schools," said Jeannie Oakes, associate dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. "People with more privilege and political clout don't want their children in these schools."
