Scheduling Squeeze : Year-Round Schools Aren’t Enough to Handle Severe Overcrowding

After district officials revised the boundaries of his children’s school, Jose Paz and his family of six recently moved into another apartment two blocks down their street so his sons could continue to attend Key Elementary in Anaheim. But when he went to enroll his three boys, he was turned away.

There was no more room at Key Elementary, he was told, and the boys were referred to another school.

“I wanted to keep my children at Key Elementary,” Paz said. “They were really becoming attached to the school and their friends there. It was hard for them to make the change.”

Year-round schooling, once the solution for overcrowded campuses such as Key Elementary, is increasingly becoming not enough for facilities still spilling over with too many students.

Anaheim City, a kindergarten-to-sixth-grade district, and Santa Ana Unified were the first in the county to implement year-round programs in the 1980s when a boom in the school-age population due to immigration trends began to peak. But like a crash diet, year-round systems have only temporarily taken care of the bulge, and over time, schools keep bursting at the seams.

Several other districts in the county now have year-round schools. But unlike their more suburban counterparts, Anaheim City and Santa Ana Unified school districts do not have room to expand or the money to do it, especially at the elementary-school level where the problem is most severe.

Virtually all year-round schools in the Anaheim City and Santa Ana Unified are at full capacity. The result: A shell game of sorts whereby district officials shift children around various schools as they spot wiggle room.

“It’s like a checkerboard game,” said Anaheim City Unified School District Supt. Roberta Thompson. “One school gets too full so we close enrollment and send kids to another school. It’s really hard to predict where the next growth will be. Our enrollment is climbing every day.

“We’re reaching an enrollment crisis,” she added.

About 19,000 students are squeezed into Anaheim City’s 15,000 seats at 22 schools this year, Thompson said. And an additional 1,000 children continue to enter the district annually.

Santa Ana Unified, with an elementary population of about 26,000 in 30 schools, similarly is growing by about 1,400 annually.

Even though both districts each opened a new elementary school this summer, the extra seats barely alleviated their enrollment woes. Jefferson II Elementary opened in Anaheim with 800 spots in July to absorb the overflow at Key and Paul Revere Elementary schools. Jefferson II houses 1,000 students.

“We were considered the solution for this year,” said Jefferson II Principal Ruth Sorensen. “We weren’t the solution for very long.”

Key Elementary, suited for 615 students, has taken in 667 students this year. Since July, some 40 children have been reassigned to nearby Paul Revere Elementary, leading to emotional hardship and inconvenience for many families.

Jose Jimenez’s second-grade son has secured a seat at Key Elementary for this year. But Jimenez’s kindergartner son was diverted from Key to Paul Revere Elementary. Although Revere Elementary is not any further from their home, Jimenez said he didn’t want the children to go to separate schools. So, he uprooted the second grader, who “cried for days after we took him out of Key,” the father said.

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Santa Ana’s Hoover Elementary, built for 800 pupils, capped its enrollment this month after it hit 1,070 students. The school’s staff has been referring students to a nearby school with a traditional September-June calendar or recording names on a waiting list for parents insisting that their children attend Hoover.

The wait at Hoover is usually only a week because of a high turnover rate from kids moving in and out of the area.

“Children are always coming in and we’re always filtering them into classrooms,” said Hoover Principal Jan Boukather.

Both Anaheim City and Santa Ana serve highly transient populations, which further complicates the overcrowding dilemma.

High-density apartment complexes act as transitional housing for many families; some Key Elementary students have already gone through 10 schools in several cities by mid-year, school administrators said.

Key Elementary serves two large apartment complexes and a few scattered homes that surround the school. The mobility rate at this school is so high that more than half of its students move out of the area before the year is over.

But, again, there’s never difficulty in filling the vacated seats because new families constantly move in.

Amy Shively, a Key Elementary first-grade teacher, said she always reserves a crate of empty files and extra sets of crayons for a new student who may walk into her classroom. On any given day, her class size can suddenly balloon to 33.

“One time, mid-year, three new students came in on one day,” said Shively, who’s been teaching at Key Elementary for 10 years. “I’ve had five new students come in a week. . . . The box of supplies is there so that I’m always prepared for a newcomer.”

Other teachers said they refrain from throwing out former students’ paperwork because sometimes they often return to the classroom months later.

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The enrollment crunch at these districts became more glaring in July after Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill that awards $650 per student to schools that limit primary-grade class sizes to 20. The fluctuating student enrollment and tight space at year-round schools make planning for smaller class sizes a dicey gamble.

“If we get class-sizes down in the beginning of the year, but then they go up mid-year, and there’s no wiggle room or we’ve slightly underestimated our projections, then we lose money for that entire class,” Thompson said. “We’re left with very little room to manipulate numbers and space as we’re still trying to accommodate the kids coming through our doors.”

Santa Ana Unified is in the process of cutting class sizes in all their first grades by hiring about 50 teachers, adding 60 new portable classrooms and rotating more of their year-round teachers, said assistant superintendent Joe Tafoya.

Twenty-two out of 30 Santa Ana elementary schools are on a multitrack system, in which students start on staggered dates, attend class on a cycle of 60 days in school, 20 days off throughout the year. In other words, when one track goes on vacation, another returns and occupies the vacated spaces so that 75% of the students are on campus at any one time

Currently, only a portion of these year-round teachers “rove” from class to class every three months. Space can be maximized by rotating more or all year-round teachers every three months, Tafoya said.

Some educators are concerned that roving takes away from a consistent classroom environment that’s important to learning.

“It is like musical classrooms,” Tafoya said. “It’s really hard on the teachers. They don’t have the luxury of having ownership over a classroom, but these are the choices we must make.”

Unless the state can come up with more money for facilities, Thompson said Anaheim City may have to resort to implementing as soon as next year double sessions, or two shifts of students per day in all grade levels.

Double sessions at year-round and traditional schools would free up about 25% more space. But the stacked school schedules could mean classes beginning as early as 7 a.m. for the first shift of students, and ending as late as 6 p.m. for the second shift.

According to the California Department of Education, the state has not been able to respond to $7 billion of requests for new schools, some which date back to 1990. To make up for slow-moving development of new facilities, districts like Anaheim City and Santa Ana Unified must fuel more money into portable classrooms and buses to transport students where there are openings.

“We have a real crisis on our hands,” Thompson said. “Our schools are like microcosms of our society. We know what we need to do to help them succeed but we’re facing major obstacles. If these kids don’t succeed, neither will our communities.”