Los Angeles Unified School District Ruined My Next Three Winters

Three Weeks Is Too Many Weeks for Winter Break

Earlier this week, the Board of the Los Angeles Unified School District—the public-school system in the city of Los Angeles—voted on the school calendar for the next three years. By a margin of 6-1, they maintained an annual schedule that starts school at the hottest time of the year, ends school shortly after Memorial Day, and interrupts school with an extremely long break. I’m not sure who this calendar is for but it’s definitely not my family.

When a survey buried at the bottom of my kids’ school’s weekly email newsletter went out a few months ago asking for input on the school calendar, I was very happy for the opportunity to navigate a barely functional but likely extravagantly-(taxpayer)-funded website to share my thoughts. I wasn’t alone in my excitement, but it was close—only five percent of parents and guardians filled out the survey.

The instructional calendar of a public-school system is a parochial issue, but the abysmal level of parental involvment in these types of decisions represents a missed opportunity to gain valuable experience in politics. How many powerful lunatics started out as concerned lunatics ambushing local school-board meetings to read out loud the “dirty” parts of children’s books with trembling but clearly excited voices?

A school’s schedule is less sexy than all of the steamy filth you can find in a school’s library if you just know where to look, but it’s still important. I’ve always found two aspects of the LAUSD calendar particularly painful: the early start to the school year and the three-week winter break.

The LAUSD school year starts in the middle of August, which is, incidentally, on average the hottest month of the year in Southern California.

Sweltering heat isn’t particularly conducive to learning, so LAUSD spends a lot of money cooling classrooms—assuming a school’s air-conditioning even works. Last November, when LAUSD asked for—and received—voter approval for a small increase in property taxes to pay for a $9 billion bond measure to renovate the district’s aging schools—sixty percent of which are over fifty years old—what was at the very top of their public wish list? “50,000 HVAC units need replacement now.” (The bold is theirs, so you know it’s serious.)

I believe it—my kids’ school dates back to 1915 and it wouldn’t surprise me if they still cooled the building the same way they did back then, with an enormous fan generating cold air by blowing onto a giant block of ice LAUSD paid to ship down the Pacific from Alaska. LAUSD is set to spend about $195 million this year on utilities and maintenance, but there doesn’t seem to be much public discussion about how much money the district could save by starting the school year a few weeks later.

I don’t like the August start but it’s not uncommon in California, and soon enough, the kids get into the swing of the school year, learning and making friends and not melting the bottoms of their sneakers on the asphalt in the yard. The fall has a nice routine, even with the monthlong celebration Halloween now seems to have become.

And then comes Thanksgiving.

LAUSD gives a week off for Thanksgiving, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that means nine straight days when your kids have nothing to do. There are countless “camps” in Los Angeles more than happy to take your money to entertain your kids during school hours on these days off, but that’s obviously not an option available to every parent, particularly in a high-needs district like LAUSD.

Thanksgiving is only a hint of the pain to come for parents. When just a few weeks later students say goodbye to their school for winter recess, they don’t return for 23 days. That’s a full three-quarters of an entire month, which is math I’m able to do because winter break was only two weeks long when I was in school.

Going three full weeks without childcare is a challenge for parents but the extended break seems even worse for kids. My own children are still in elementary school, so perhaps my perspective will change when they’re older, but the long layoff is disorienting for them and their peers and it always seems to take a week or two after the break for everyone to get back into the rhythm of school and start learning again.

Presumably to address the risk of learning loss, LAUSD has started offering a program at the beginning of the break called Winter Academy, where students can go to a school they’ve never been, with kids they’ve never met, and spend a few days learning from teachers they’ll never see again. Two years ago, when the program was only two days long, it cost the district $36 million, which was revised down, without any evidence, to $11.6 million after parents went justifiably nuts that so much was spent on a program attended by less than ten percent of the student population.

I could live with the August start and the weeklong Thanksgiving, but the three-week winter break is an enormous hardship for a lot of parents, including one in particular, me. Unfortunately, the current three-week winter recess was the clear preference among those who responded to the survey: 84% of school employees chose the longer break and, completely unsurprisingly, high school students voted 91-6 for one more week of vacation.

The results weren’t quite as overwhelming among parents—34% voted for a two-week winter break. It’s a clear minority but I don’t feel quite as alone in not wanting my kids skulking around the house into the middle of January.

What’s most disappointing to me is how few parents responded at all. I don’t blame parents for their apathy, because one, filling out surveys is annoying, and two, it rarely feels like we have a lot of say in how LAUSD is run. It’s a function of, among other things, how LAUSD is organized: LAUSD is divided into four regions, forty-four communities of schools (give or take, it wasn’t easy to hand-count on this map), and seven Board districts.

I was on an appointed districtwide board in LAUSD for three years and I still can’t make sense of who’s responsible for what. I emailed my elected board member to thank him for casting the only dissenting vote against the calendar, even though my kids go to school in a different board district than the one where we live and vote. The only way parents even know regions, communities, and districts are different is that we’re bombarbed with separate robocalls from each of them—until you figure out how to unsubscribe. (It only took me five years).

When it’s unclear how decisions are made, it can feel pointless to participate. And that’s how you end up with ineffective, unpopular and expensive programs like the Winter Academy—now extended to five days as part of the new calendar.