Chino schools extend school year due to clerical error

Remember that Alice Cooper song, “School’s Out”? It’s out for millions of Southern California kids this week – except for more than a thousand students at two elementary schools in the Chino area. Students there have to make up a month of class because of confusion over how long a school day should be. KPCC’s Steven Cuevas has details.

Steven Cuevas: Imagine school kids had to punch a time clock everyday. They punch in at 8 in the morning. They punch out at, say, 2 in the afternoon. Now, imagine the time clock is a tiny bit fast. Kids punch in at the right time, but they punch out about 5 minutes before they’re supposed to. That's kind of what happened in this case.

Julie Gobin: The way the state calculates the instructional minutes, they do it in four different ways.

Cuevas: Julie Gobin is the spokeswoman for the Chino Valley Unified School District.

Gobin: It was just one of the calculations for grades 4, 5, and 6 at those two schools that were not met over a 10-day average.

Cuevas: Two elementary schools, Doris Dickson in Chino and Rolling Ridge in Chino Hills, thought they’d timed their school days correctly. But it turns out they came up a few minutes short of a full school day 34 times. The combined time could be made up in an extra day or two of school.

No big deal, right? Not exactly. The rules that govern education in California don’t recognize those short days as legitimate school days. So Dickson and Rolling Ridge have to make up those 34 short days with 34 full school days. If they don’t, the Chino Valley district could lose critical funding.

Gobin: A penalty of $7 million that this district cannot afford. To lose $7 million in funding would be a hardship that this district has already borne enough of. So that is something we cannot put at risk.

Cuevas: Instead, the district is spending $200,000 to make a kid’s worst nightmare come true: no summer vacation, at least for now. It’s making some school kids miserable, sure – but their parents?

Maria Bonsangue and Selia Yala have kids in 4th and 5th grades at Dickson Elementary. Yala says kids have the option of doing independent study at home or on vacation. But she’d liked to have the kids in class and out of her hair for a few extra weeks. Otherwise, they’d spend too much time watching TV or playing video games.

Selia Yala: My son don’t like school, but, ahhh, it’s OK.

Cuevas: Well, Yala’s son could be in luck. The state Assembly is considering an urgency measure that would let Chino Valley Unified use an alternative calculation. If approved, Dickson and Rolling Ridge could make up the time they lost with just two extra school days – time that students already served this week.