Schools for All Seasons

By Ezra Bowen

At 10 each weekday morning, the asphalt playground of Franklin Elementary School in Oakland swarms with some 900 boys and girls shooting baskets, playing tetherball and skipping rope. This large number of children are not at Franklin for a summer recreation outing. They are at morning recess in Franklin's year-round school, one of three such programs in the Oakland unified school district, and one of 394 year-round education projects that are nourishing at scattered locations in schools across the country.

Unlike traditional summer schools, which usually provide remedial or enrichment courses, YRE extends the regular schedule through a calendar year. Many schools conduct 45-, 60-or 90-day sessions, with different student groups on overlapping schedules that provide short breaks in between. The program is most popular in California, which runs three-quarters of the nation's YRE schools. Los Angeles, where year-round programs were launched at two schools eleven years ago, now has 130,000 youngsters (23% of the city's 565,570 public school students) attending year-round classes in 95 schools at all levels. In nearby Oxnard, yearlong attendance has jumped to 7,700 of the district's 11,100 pupils, after starting in two schools in 1976. Twelve-month schooling is catching on in other parts of the Sunbelt. Houston has just approved YRE for 25 elementary schools. In 1983-84 the city had just one.

YRE programs have been adopted for the most part in districts facing enrollment crunches. Los Angeles, for example, expects its student population to climb by some 13,000 pupils over each of the next five years. With twelve-month scheduling, educators can spread the larger number of pupils through existing classrooms. Commonly, two-thirds to three-fourths of the student population can be in attendance, with the others off on rotating vacations. Los Angeles has saved at least $250 million in school construction funds since the YRE programs started.

Although intended to relieve overcrowding, YRE programs are paying some promising extra dividends. At Franklin Elementary, since 15-day vacations take the place of the long summer break, "students seem to retain more," says Susan Chin, a bilingual Chinese/English teacher. A few schools have already implemented YRE strictly for educational reasons. Parry McCluer High in Buena Vista, Va., boasts the state's only year-round program, and a student body that consistently scores above 95% on the state's compulsory competency test.

The year-round grind is definitely not for everyone. Families in cold-weather states generally refuse to break with their traditional summers off. Even in the Sunbelt, families with children in extracurricular activities tend to see YRE as disruptive. The staggered vacation times often clash with seasonal schedules for games and practice sessions. Nearly 200 parents in Oxnard lined up in the early-morning hours two years ago to be sure they could register their children in a conventional semester program. But despite such limitations, YRE has grown nationwide, from 243,000 pupils four years ago to 330,000 today, and promises to continue spreading as more districts struggle with the combined pressures of greater enrollments and fewer dollars to spend. --By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Charles Pelton/Oakland

With reporting by Reported by Charles Pelton/Oakland