MORE VALLEY SCHOOLS MAY GET YEAR-ROUND SCHEDULES.

Faced with a swelling population of secondary students, Los Angeles Unified School District officials proposed on Tuesday to add more portable classrooms to campuses and place more high schools on multitrack year-round calendars.

Under a plan presented by district Chief of Staff Gordon Wohlers, Monroe, Polytechnic and Sylmar high schools would receive a total of 17 more portables as early as next year. An additional 85 portables would be erected the following academic year at other San Fernando Valley high schools, including 36 at Reseda High and 23 at Kennedy High in Granada Hills.

Additionally, the plan would convert El Camino Real and Granada Hills high schools into multitrack campuses by 2003-04.

Officials at the schools were unavailable for comment Tuesday because campuses were closed for Rosh Hashana.

The proposal to expand school capacity is prompted by an enrollment swell that has crowded elementary schools in recent years and is now moving through secondary schools. But with no new secondary schools expected to open for at least three years, district officials on Tuesday began discussing interim overcrowding solutions.

``We can make it through this enrollment bubble with a few more portables and a few more schools moving to multitrack,'' Wohlers said during a facilities committee meeting Tuesday.

Preliminary attendance figures show 11,000 more middle and high school students enrolled in the district during the first week of school compared with the same time last year.

But the plan already has ignited debate over the most cost-effective way to temporarily seat the surging number of students while the district completes its ambitious long-term plan to build 83 new schools in the next six years.

``I see a scenario that jams a lot more portables on school sites,'' said school board President Caprice Young, who urged facilities staffers to examine other options.

Wohlers said he too would like to remove portables and return all schools to traditional single tracks but that the district is unable to do so.

``We don't have the money right now,'' he said, reminding committee members the district must focus on building more than 80 new schools during the next six years.

``Portables are the cheapest, quickest and most effective way under the board's current policy of providing classroom seats.''

Wohlers also said the district limits portables on sites where a school has less than nine acres for playground or more than 3,600 students.