Year Round School

A majority of Orange County residents favors year-round schools, at a time when national polls indicate that most Americans are evenly divided on their preference for the traditional school calendar, a Times Orange County poll shows. In a poll of 600 Orange County adults, 58% indicated that they favor schools being open year-round. The approval rate was even higher--at 61%--among parents with school-age children.

Ventura school officials said Thursday they are planning to hold public meetings to discuss the possibility of converting seven schools to a year-round calendar as early as next summer. Terry Holts, principal of Cabrillo Middle School, said officials will hold meetings with parents in November to discuss how the year-round school system works and why it is preferred over the traditional school calendar.

Beginning in July, students at Glendale's six most crowded elementary schools probably will attend classes three months on and one month off under a year-round education schedule proposed Tuesday. Glendale school district staff members introduced the calendar to the Board of Education, which in June approved starting year-round education for at least eight schools during the next two years.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has abandoned attempts to place all city schools on a year-round schedule by July, 1989. School administrators withdrew the plan last week because they were one vote shy of winning school board support. That must change someday. Keeping schools open all year is not a popular idea, but it is far better than the alternative--keeping students in overcrowded classrooms.

In Los Angeles, the prospect of year-round education has caused an anguished public outcry. Sixty miles up the coast in Oxnard, year-round schooling is as controversial as Bambi. A booming agricultural community of 125,000, where strawberries tremble in the ocean breeze and real estate values are soaring along with the sea gulls, Oxnard has had year-round classes for a dozen years. Other school districts, including, ironically, Los Angeles Unified, had year-round schools earlier.

Los Angeles' new year-round schools may be a learning experience for Southern California's tourist attractions. "It certainly won't help us during the summer," said Stuart Zanville, a spokesman for Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park. Noting that the park's 3.5-million annual attendance depends largely on the weather, he said: "We don't know whether people will automatically come in the wintertime."

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about the Los Angeles school board's decision to put schools on a year-round calendar: Q: How will my child's school be affected by the board vote?

A tradition of long, lazy summer vacations passed quietly Tuesday morning when 4,250 students at six Glendale elementary schools returned for the first day of year-round classes. After the controversy surrounding the adoption of a year-round school calendar, the first day of summer classes at Balboa, Columbus, Jefferson, Mark Keppel, Mann and Marshall elementary schools proved little different from previous first days, except for the hum of newly installed air conditioners in all the classrooms.

George McKenna, superintendent of schools in Inglewood, has returned to his teaching days. With scores of parents as his students, McKenna delivered a string of lessons in the last two weeks on year-round schools and how the concept might just be the answer to the district's congested elementary schools.

For years, the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District has operated like two separate worlds. In one, thousands of children rise before dawn and board buses to schools up to an hour away, where lessons are delivered in a language they barely understand. And others are crammed into year-round schools, where 1,000 children might vie for space on a 2-acre playground.