No day at the beach for students

ATLANTIC CITY - Spring arrived right on time here yesterday with a bright blue sky, sparkling sunshine, temperatures approaching 70, and an ocean tide rolling gently on the beach.

It was, in many ways, a perfect Saturday.

Except, perhaps, for the city's 6,615 public school students.

"It's Saturday," said Christopher Creamer, a sophomore at Atlantic City High who had just finished working on a geometry problem on the blackboard in Don Coleman's class. "I should be in bed."

Instead, Creamer, 17, was in school, completing the first of three Saturday sessions designed to make up for time lost to the winter's snow.

"We have to be here," Coleman, the geometry teacher, said with a laugh. "There's no sense mumbling and grumbling about it."

In fact, there appeared to be very little mumbling and grumbling as students in the high school and the city's eight elementary schools went through a modified schedule that began around 8 a.m. and ended at noon.

Attendance, said Assistant Superintendent Donna Haye, was about 85 percent in the 2,200-student high school and about 90 percent in the grammar schools.

"Everyone did a great job," Haye said shortly after classes had been dismissed. "We're keeping our fingers crossed for the next two Saturdays."

School will be in session again next Saturday, and a final session will be held April 17.

Students and teachers questioned seemed resigned, if not ecstatic, about the situation.

"If we do it now, we don't need to make up the days later," said Dave Fegan, 16, who also said he'd "rather be home sleeping."

Instead, at 10 a.m. he and Creamer were working on geometry problems. Other students were in their typical fourth-period classes.

Members of a JROTC team were drilling in the hallway of one wing of the large high school, a modern complex just off Route 40 bordering the bay.

To the east was the skyline of the city's casino strip, where, while students ran through math, language, or art skills, tourists and hopeful gamblers meandered along the Boardwalk from casino to casino.

For a good part of yesterday's session, high school principal Oscar Torres roamed hallways talking with students and teachers, offering encouragement and maintaining an up-tempo attitude.

Students, said the veteran educator, function better when they know the routine. The idea was to make the Saturday session as close as possible to a normal day.

Classes lasted 22 minutes instead of 40, but the day included breakfast and lunch periods.

One concession, which Torres described as an "incentive" to get students to show up, was a relaxed dress code.

Normally, students must wear a golf-type shirt in white, black, or navy blue and dark slacks. Yesterday, jeans, shorts, and T-shirts were the norm for both students and teachers.

"Thank God nobody came in pajamas," Torres said with a laugh, noting that had happened at another school that once scheduled a Saturday session.

"Oh, don't write that," Haye said. "Don't give them any ideas."

The exchange was typical of the good-natured, we're-all-in-this-together vibe that emanated from Torres' office.

"It is what it is," said a smiling Regina Banner, a biology and environmental-science teacher who wore a black T-shirt with the logo "teach green."

Banner said she was emphasizing review work each period in her lab classroom.

"It's not bad," said Luis Esparza, 18, a senior sitting in the sun outside the front doors during a break period shortly before 11 a.m.

Esparza was sporting a bright yellow T-shirt, black jeans, and coordinated black-and-yellow high-top unlaced sneakers.

"This way, we can graduate on time," he said.

The district decided on the Saturday sessions to get the state-mandated 180 school days in before the high school's June 23 graduation.

The annual gala is scheduled in Boardwalk Hall, the former city convention center.

Unlike many other graduations where seating is limited, the locale - former site of the Miss America Pageant, among other events - is large enough to accommodate everyone who wants to come, school officials said. And Jumbotron television screens and other high-tech bells and whistles make it an event to remember.

Haye said the school would not have been able to hold graduation there if the school year had been extended.

She said paring days off spring break, another option for many schools, had not been considered because many staff and faculty members and families of students had planned vacations.

Saturdays, she said, were the best option.

And yesterday at least, with a bright sun in the sky and a warm spring breeze blowing across the campus, it seemed to be working.