End to All-Year Schedule Is Sought : Education: Julie Korenstein and Mark Slavkin ask L.A. Unified school board to take steps to return to the traditional calendar year.

Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein asked the board Monday to take steps that could scrap the year-round school calendar introduced two years ago which has proven deeply unpopular with many parents in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside.

Opponents accused Korenstein and board member Mark Slavkin, who proposed giving individual schools authority to change their school year, of pandering for votes in the Valley and Westside districts where they face a primary election April 20.

Korenstein formally introduced a motion at Monday’s board meeting instructing Los Angeles Unified School District officials to develop and submit to the board for consideration a school schedule essentially resurrecting the traditional September-to-June calendar.

But she asked that action on the directive be delayed until Thursday after it became apparent she would not be able to muster the four votes needed to approve the measure because Slavkin left the meeting early.

Six of the seven board members attended Monday’s meeting, and Slavkin’s support was viewed as crucial if the motion is to pass the closely divided board.

With the proposal, Korenstein is reviving a controversial issue that generated angry protests when the school board adopted the current calendar two years ago.

The school board approved the so-called “common calendar” in 1991 with an eye toward relieving future overcrowding and to bring the schedules of single-track schools into line with those at multitrack schools, which groups of children attend throughout the year on staggered schedules.

Under the current “common calendar,” Valley and Westside children on all but the most crowded campuses, which employ the multitrack calendar, attend classes from August to June. They get a six-week summer break and an eight-week winter break that has sent irritated parents scrambling to keep their youngsters occupied.

Korenstein and other board members argued Monday that the current calendar throws many students into classrooms without air conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year. District officials also acknowledged that reverting to a more traditional calendar would save the cash-strapped district most of the $4.2 million it costs each year to implement the year-round schedule. The money goes for such items as busing athletic teams during traditional sports seasons when school is no longer in session, and providing review programs for advanced-placement students before spring tests for college credit.

“We’ve spent, over the last two years, $8.4 million to implement this calendar. Everyone knows the district is having severe financial problems,” Korenstein said. “Many schools are ending up in tremendous heat in August . . . We have to look out for the welfare of the children in this district.”

Board member Roberta Weintraub agreed, saying she originally voted in favor of the year-round calendar believing there would be money to air condition schools, but it is clear now that such funds may not become available for many years, if ever.

“It seems kind of awful to keep changing your mind about something,” she said, “but it’s equally awful to stay with something that you know is ineffectual and not working.”

But board President Leticia Quezada, who appeared inclined to vote against Korenstein’s motion, said the issue required careful study before the district imposed yet another calendar change on parents.

“Clearly you can’t jerk around the community as this board’s been doing,” she said.

Slavkin’s proposal, which comes up for a vote next month, would allow each high school and its feeder campuses to decide on their own schedule. But Douglas Lasken--a teacher who is running against Slavkin in a district stretching from the West Valley through the Westside--said such a measure would cause chaos in the district’s busing program.

He called Slavkin’s proposal a politically motivated maneuver to win votes. “This particular move is an election move in my mind, not a policy move,” Lasken said.

Korenstein, who is running for a board seat in a reapportioned mid-Valley district, also came under criticism for the timing of her motion.

“Where was she two years ago?” asked Eli Brent, the head of the school district’s administrators union and Korenstein’s chief rival in the upcoming election.

Korenstein, who voted against the common calendar in 1991, maintained that she has always opposed the year-round schedule but that parliamentary procedure forbade her from trying to overturn it because she was on the losing side of the original measure.

Her motion Monday included a request for a waiver that she believed the board would have to grant to allow her to make the proposal, but the board’s attorney, Richard K. Mason, told Korenstein that was unnecessary.

Slavkin, who said he would support Korenstein’s motion, defended his own plan as exemplifying his philosophy of decentralizing power to local schools. He said he recently decided to offer his calendar proposal only after retiring board member Weintraub first resurrected the scheduling issue last fall. Weintraub asked for a study of the issue after a San Fernando High School youth died from heat stroke during an August afternoon football practice. Nothing came of the study.