School in Palmdale Launches 1st Year-Round Program : New Schedule for 940-Student Campus Predicted as Trend-Setter for Growing Antelope Valley

Unable to build schools fast enough to keep pace with its explosive growth, the Antelope Valley on Monday inaugurated its first year-round education program, which officials predicted will become a trend in the region.

About 750 youngsters cut short their summer vacations by more than a month to troop in for their first day of classes at Cactus School, a kindergarten-through seventh-grade campus in Palmdale.

Students and parents generally praised the new schedule. And Palmdale School District officials portrayed the year-round approach as the way to fight looming overcrowding.

“If we’re successful, I’m sure it will happen at some other schools next year,” said Judy Fish, principal at Cactus, which had operated on the traditional September-through-June schedule until now. “I think all eyes are going to be looking to see how this program works.”

By switching to a year-round schedule, the school can accommodate about 20% more students. And that prospect holds a major appeal for school officials, who are already fretting about overcrowding problems at the district’s other elementary and middle schools, which are to open in September.

The Cactus program is part of a four-year pilot project being subsidized by the state to evaluate the effectiveness of a new year-round schedule developed in Utah.

The Palmdale school, which will get an extra $180,000 in state funding over three years, is one of four selected in California for the experimental schedule. The others are in Chula Vista and El Cajon in San Diego County, and in Oroville in Northern California.

More Schools Could Follow

If the program is a success, four or five Palmdale schools could follow next year, said Patrick Duffy, assistant superintendent of educational services for the 12,000-student district.

In the coming year, the district plans to open five new schools, for a total of 18, officials said. But most of the new facilities will not be available in September, and school officials are worried that they may start out lacking enough classrooms.

Duffy called year-round schools “the coming thing” for the Antelope Valley. The Palmdale district is the first of seven elementary and middle school districts in the area to try the program.

For most of the decade, various forms of year-round schooling have been in place in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, to cope with overcrowding. Spokesman Shel Erlich said about 102 of the district’s 640 schools are on year-round schedules, including at least a dozen in the San Fernando Valley.

However, those schedules have never been particularly popular with Los Angeles parents, and school officials in outlying areas in the past have typically kept to traditional schedules. But with tremendous population increases in such areas as the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys, school officials there are being forced to consider year-round systems.

Cactus School, a collection of portable bungalows nestled on a sloping hillside on the west side of Palmdale, is an example of why enrollments have been growing by about 15% each year in the booming area. The campus is surrounded on three sides by new homes or developments under construction.

The school is unique because it draws students from the entire 72-square-mile Palmdale district. It has a waiting list of more than 200 students, school officials said.

Three 15-Day Breaks

The school’s new schedule will run from August through June, with July as the common vacation month. Students will no longer have a single three-month vacation, but will get three 15-day breaks interspersed among three 60-day periods of instruction.

Cactus School will have a total enrollment of about 940 students this year, Fish said. The students will be divided into five rotating tracks; only four of the tracks, totaling about 750 students, will be in session at one time, with the remaining track on its 15-day break.

Despite the complaints that year-round schedules have drawn in Los Angeles, both students and parents at Cactus School spoke enthusiastically about the change Monday.

“If you get tired of school, pretty soon you can go off on vacation,” said Andre Tidwell, a fourth-grader. Added Nicholas Carillo, another fourth-grader: “I think it’s pretty cool because you get three weeks off while the other kids are in school.”

The prospect of shorter but more breaks likewise appealed to parents, but for a different reason. “About halfway through the summer, kids begin getting bored,” said Eileen Bartholet, a Sepulveda resident who is moving into a new home in Palmdale and has three of her four children at Cactus School.

Much Larger Home

Bartholet said that her family got a much larger house and a smaller mortgage by moving and that she considered enrolling her children in the regular school for their new neighborhood. But she said she decided against it after hearing that the school would be “in a state of siege” because of overcrowding.

School officials said the schedule should be an improvement over those used in Los Angeles.

There are several major differences. Among them, Cactus students will at least share common vacation time in July, while most year-round schools in Los Angeles have no common breaks. And teachers at Cactus will work an 11-month year and be paid extra. Most year-round teachers in Los Angeles work and are paid for nine months and take the same intermittent breaks as students.