Year-round schools here to stay

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2002 | 11:18 a.m.

For the Nelson family of Henderson, the usual confusion and excitement that comes with a new school year will have an added complication -- two children will be at year-round Lamping Elementary School while a third is enrolled at Bob Miller Middle School, a nine-month campus.

Charris Nelson said she's "trying to look on the bright side" of having her children's academic schedules divided.

"I'll have more time to spend with each kid individually," Nelson said. "We're making the best of it."

The Nelson family is one of thousands facing split schedules because of the Clark County School District's enrollment boom.

While Superintendent Carlos Garcia has said he would prefer to have the entire district on a traditional nine-month calendar, the change is unlikely to happen anytime soon given the unflagging growth of the Las Vegas Valley.

The district expects an enrollment increase of about 12,000 students, an increase of almost 5 percent, to balloon enrollment to 258,000 students when classes begin Monday.

"We're opening seven new elementary schools next week, and even that isn't enough to ease the crunch," said Dusty Dickens, director of zoning and demographics for the school district. "As long as we continue to have such huge growth, we're going to need year-round schools."

The district has relied on a year-round calendar for more than half of the elementary schools to meet the demand -- year-round calendars, which stagger student time off throughout the year, allow more students to attend a school than if the school was on a traditional schedule.

"We can take a campus designed for 450 students and zone 900 to go instead," Dickens said. "If we didn't do year-round, we'd simply have no place to put those children."

The district has 97 of its 172 elementary schools on year-round schedules this year. That's an increase of three schools on the year-round schedule. Last year 70,000 students were enrolled in year-round schools.

Year-round schools have some supporters -- educators say there's less catching up to do after a long summer break and that teachers and students perform better. But some parents say the 12-month schedule wreaks havoc with family vacations and extracurricular activities and makes car-pooling a nightmare for families with children attending different schools.

Karen Barter, a Las Vegas mother who at one time had two children in a year-round school and a third child on a nine-month calendar, said she struggled to keep track of "who was on and who was off."

"There was no such thing as a vacation, at least for the parents," Barter said. "I think it was more of a problem for me than for my kids."

School Board President Sheila Moulton, whose children attended one of the district's first year-round schools more than 15 years ago, said it was difficult having children on separate schedules.

"It was hard when the kids were all out playing in the pool to tell the younger ones to get out and do their homework," Moulton said. "I know there are parents out there who love the year-round setup, but there are also families where it means a lot of extra work."

However, Moulton said, the year-round school is better than the alternative of double sessions, in which one group of students attends class from 7 to 11:30 a.m. while a second group uses the school from 12:30 to 5 p.m.

At year-round schools, students are scheduled on one of five tracks, rotating in and out of the classrooms at roughly 10-week intervals. Track 4 is the most requested by parents because its schedule runs the closest to the nine-month school calendar, district officials said.

Two years ago there were also five junior high schools on a year-round schedule, but that plan was scrapped because of scheduling difficulties, Dickens said. It was impossible for the schools to offer all of the electives to each track, which meant students were denied opportunities to study foreign languages and music, Dickens said.

Another quandary -- during the summer months, when high schools offered sports and band camps for incoming freshmen, many students were still finishing eighth grade and could not attend.

Sharian Connell, principal of O'Callaghan Junior High School in Las Vegas, said she doesn't miss the days when the campus was on a year-round schedule. An assistant principal at the time, Connell said there were regular phone calls from angry parents demanding their child be moved to track 4.

"We had a lot of families with one kid in elementary school, another in middle school and a third in high school, all on different schedules," Connell said. "It was a nightmare for them to try and schedule any time together."

Connell said she has seen no significant difference in either student behavior or achievement since O'Callaghan switched back to a nine-month schedule. In fact, there has yet to be a study anywhere in the United States showing students at year-round schools outperform their peers at traditional campuses, said Judy Costa, director of testing and accountability for the Clark County School District.

"In theory, year-round schools are supposed to be producing a higher level of learning, but so far there's no hard evidence to support that," Costa said. "That doesn't mean year-round schools are hurting students, it just means there's no statistically significant difference."