To the Editor: San Diego Unified School District claims it’s considering calendar changes that will benefit students (per our March 27 story, ‘San Diego schools propose start date before Labor Day’)? Instead of interfering with summertime by starting school in the heat of August, the district might trim: 1) elementary half-day Wednesdays; 2) weeklong half-days of instruction that precede what has become an expanded five-day Thanksgiving vacation; and 3) a second week of half-days that precedes the weeklong spring vacation. Those ten half-days are supposed to cover parent-teacher conferences, which require working parents to show up at school for 10 minutes in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Whatever happened to report cards? By my count, only two months of the school year are without some kind of holiday: September and October. Frances O’Neill Zimmerman
La Jolla