Praise for LAUSD's year-round calendar
Charles Fleming's op-ed in the L.A. Times on Sunday offers the rare viewpoint of a parent who likes LAUSD's year-round schedule, which almost a third of district students use.
When reading, watch for Fleming's pretzel-like description of the labyrinthine four-track schedule. Fleming, a communications teacher at USC, offers this rationale for why he likes the schedule for his daughters:
Both of my daughters, in addition to taking summer family vacations, working summer jobs and enjoying the traditional summer hang-time with friends, have gotten excellent value out of their winter breaks, or "intersessions." Katie used one year's holiday to go on an extended class visit to Spain and still had time to squeeze a semester's worth of "health and life skills" into a slightly more intensive six-week class during the intersession -- like attending summer school in the winter. The next year, she toured college campuses in Washington, Oregon and Northern California and still had time to prepare for a tae kwon do black-belt examination in the spring. (She passed.)