Glendale News Press
Published March 3, 2005

School staff and parents welcome ‘traditional’ shift

Balboa, Marshall and Muir elementary schools will change to a nine-month
calendar this fall.

By Darleene Barrientos, News-Press and Leader

GLENDALE — Muir Elementary School Vice Principal Haoori Chalian is looking
forward to walking into a thoroughly cleaned school next year.
Since Muir started on a year-round, multi-track schedule 12 years ago, the
district’s custodial staff has had a hard time scheduling a deep clean that
traditional schedule schools get when classes are out for summer, she said.
advertisement
“I’m looking forward to that,” Chalian said. “The deep cleaning is when the
walls are vacuumed, they wax the floors — it’s not just a surface cleaning.
It’s hard to schedule that when people are on campus. It makes it easier for
them to truly give us a fresh start for the beginning of the school year.”
Officials and parents at Muir, Balboa and Marshall elementary schools are
preparing to shift from a multi-track, year-round schedule to a traditional
nine-month calendar this fall.
The three schools saw severe drops in enrollment during the past few years,
with Muir having lost 324 students since the 2000-01 school year.
The schools were transitioned to year-round schedules when district
officials saw a surge in the student population.
Now that enrollment is declining, some of those schools are being brought
back to a traditional calendar.
District officials will first shift those three schools back to the
traditional calendar and will consider changes for Columbus, Edison, Mark
Keppel and R.D. White elementary schools.
So far, parents’ feedback has been positive, said Alice Petrossian, the
district’s assistant superintendent of educational services for elementary
schools.
“There are some teachers who liked the year-round [schedule], but most look
forward to a lengthy break,” Petrossian said. “The trade-off will be those
schools won’t be year-round and will lose year-round funds. But because
schools will be closed, there will be some expenses that won’t be incurred.”
The change will be, for many children, teachers and administrators, the
first time they have worked on a traditional school calendar.
“I have not ever worked on anything other than year-round,” Chalian said.
“It will be something new for me, as well. The change is difficult for
everyone … the change to year-round was difficult, but now we love it.”
Parent Perry Barin likes the idea of his children enjoying summertime and is
not worried about his daughter Erica forgetting what she learned from one
year to the next.
“She goes to summer school and she volunteers tutoring other kids, so she’s
still involved academically,” Barin said. “[It will be good], especially
with her cousins growing up. They’re in traditional school, and when they go
on vacation, my daughter can’t go because she has school. It can bring a big
family closer together.”