The Year-Round Go-Round

"But we had a board of trustees at the time who were adamant that we were going to have year-round," Kennedy says. "They were gung ho to be trendsetters, and their philosophy was that if parents didn't like it, they were going to have to move.

"But what's happened in the last two years is we've had the largest turnouts ever in school board elections and those incumbents were removed from office."

The first thing the new anti-year-round board did was appoint a 31-member committee to study ways to combat overcrowding. Toward that end, the committee solicited suggestions from the Cy-Fair administration. Lampe and Kennedy were amazed to discover that, contrary to what administrators had maintained for years, by changing the boundaries for about 5 percent of the district's schools, they could put off building even one new school until the year 2000.

"The bottom line is," says Kennedy, "it turns out we didn't need any new schools. So their whole argument goes out the window."

Last month's decision by Cy-Fair trustees to lift the year-round mandate at all but three elementary schools gives parents at those three the option of relocating their children to a school with a traditional calendar. Students at the other schools will make their choices during the upcoming registration, and by the end of next month, the jury should be in on year-round education in Cy-Fair.

But it's unlikely that the bitterness of the last three years will dissipate anytime soon. Schools trustee Bill O'Brien says the issue has "permanently damaged" a few of his friendships. Some fear that, depending on the outcome of future school board elections, the district could end up switching back and forth between year-round and traditional.

Former trustee John Mahoney thinks the strife in the district may be just beginning. He worries that FOCUS members will attempt to set the agenda for the entire district, using school board and bond elections to get their way. He's already irate that Lampe is criticizing the district for the cost of its new administration building.

"I predict that if they get the upper hand," Mahoney says, "you will never get rid of them."

That would suit Charlotte Lampe just fine. She's found she has a talent for the blood sport that is school-board politics.

"This is really cutthroat and intense and volatile, because when you're dealing with people's families and people's kids, it gets nuts," she says. "But I can't imagine not being involved in it.