Year-Round Schooling Is Voted In Los Angeles

The L.A. board of education, has voted to put all its schools on a year-round schedule. This decision does not necessarily increase the number of school days, but it is expected to save money on new construction and allow more efficient use of ex­isting school facilities. Students would go to school for the same total 180 days a year, but they would have more, shorter vacations. In crowded schools, vacations would be staggered to ease the demand for space. Educational experts would study closely whether the benefits of a year-round program are worth the sacrifice of the traditional summer vacation. If it is proven that test scores of students are improved and performance is up, other cities win emulate the program.

The supporters of year-round education believe educators simply cannot justify that long three-month summer vacation any more. The nine-month schedule was never designed for education. It is a 19th century agricultural-economic schedule. Supporters, many from Hispanic and black inner-city areas, contend that the year-round schedules are the only economi­cally practical way to cope with continuing influx of new stu­dents into schools that are already strained beyond capacity.

But there is a lot of opposition simply because it's a change. It's a deep-seated tradition that kids don't go to school in the summer and teachers don't teach.

The decision in Los Angeles was driven primarily by a need to alleviate overcrowding in the schools. Besides many educa­tors also back the theory that children learn and retain more when breaks from class-room work are shorter and academic performance often ijhpcoves in year-round schools. The exact calendar to be used is still under study, but most students will either go to school on a cycle of 60 weekdays of class followed by 20 weekdays of vacation, or 90 weekdays of class followed by 30 weekdays of vacation. For example students would have one-month vacation in August, December and April. In most crowded schools students would be broken into "tracks", or groups that would follow overlapping schedules to ensure that school facilities are in constant use with a minimum of over­crowding.

Parents in Los Angeles had jammed hearing on the issue for several years with many protesting that vacations would be hard to coordinate, especially if children in different schools were in different schedules, and that it would be difficult for older children to find summer jobs. Others say that they would just as soon have vacation time to ski in the winter as they would have time off in the summer.

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