N. HOLLYWOOD TEACHERS TO VOTE TODAY\Faculty to weigh backing for year-round, traditional calendars.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

North Hollywood High School's 100 faculty members will meet today to gauge support for either a traditional September-to-June calendar or for a year-round schedule of classes, officials said Monday.

"It's going to be a really uncomfortable situation, whatever they do," said Principal Catherine Lum, after a two-hour meeting Monday of the school's Leadership Council.

If the teachers vote to stay on the traditional schedule, one-third of them will have to change classrooms several times each day, said Jim Burr, a faculty member on the Leadership Council.

No classroom would go unused at any time during the school day, meaning many teachers would have to pack up their supplies and move out of a room during their free period so another teacher could hold class there.

Under the year-round schedule, two tracks of students would be in session while the third is on vacation - meaning teachers would get their own classrooms, Burr said.

On Jan. 16, the high school's leadership council agreed that the year-round, three-track schedule was the high school's only option.

But parents, particularly those whose children attend the highly gifted magnet program for students with IQs of 145 and above, objected to the calendar - wherein one group would have to attend school July through October and January through April.

Many in the highly gifted program apply for summer programs at Ivy League colleges, an educational opportunity that would be lost if they were assigned a track other than the September-to-June option.

The school needs to make room for the first class of freshmen as the campus converts from a three-year to a four-year high school. The 2,300-student enrollment is expected to swell by 850 when ninth-graders arrive at North Hollywood High School this fall.

Lum told the Leadership Council on Monday that school district officials had scraped together some emergency funds to convert seven rooms on campus into classrooms. Currently, textbooks are being stored in one room, another is office space for North Hollywood's magnet program for highly gifted students, another is a career center, she said.

Carmen Schroeder, an administrator who oversees the high school, said the Los Angeles Unified School District would provide roughly $65,000 to convert and furnish the classrooms.

With that additional classroom space, the school might have room for the freshmen without needing the year-round schedule, Lum said. But the success of that plan depends on the teachers - and that's why she and the Leadership Council agreed Monday to abide by the faculty's decision in today's meeting.

"If the teachers do not buy into the plan to keep (the school) single-track, it's not going to work," Lum said.

Last month, a North Hollywood teacher filed a grievance with United Teachers-Los Angeles, arguing the vote had been taken without posting the agenda notice in the required time in advance of the meeting, Burr said.

While the vote violated a section of the UTLA contract with the school district, Burr described it as "an oversight" that would be corrected.

If the teachers stand by the year-round option that was approved Jan. 16, then the Leadership Council will meet again next Monday to discuss how to divide students onto the three tracks.