Parents Take Issue With Boundary Plan, Busing : Education: Families in middle- and upper-class areas of the Ventura district would pay the price for others to be able to attend neighborhood schools.

The avowed goal of Ventura school officials is to keep the city’s children in neighborhood schools from kindergarten to college.

So why bus hundreds of youths five miles from their residences to Ventura High School when Buena High is much closer?

Outraged or confused, residents of four exclusive hillside neighborhoods and of the middle-class Montalvo area began asking that question in a virtual telephone blitz last week after the Ventura Unified School District unveiled a sweeping plan to change the boundaries of its 23 schools.

Some parents said in interviews that they will sell their houses and move if the proposal is adopted by the school board in May after four public hearings.

They bought houses in the eastern Ventura hillside communities of Ondulando, Clearpoint, Hidden Valley and Skyline, they said, so their children could go to Poinsettia elementary school and eventually to Buena High.

“I just really want my kids in a middle- and upper-class school system,” said Marci Cutting, an Ondulando resident whose three children attend nearby Balboa Middle School and Buena High.

Parents are more involved in such schools, she said. And she is concerned about a gang problem she has heard exists at Ventura High.

“My kids are so upset they said, ‘Mom, I’m not switching schools.’ And we will move.”

Response at Montalvo elementary was only a bit more restrained.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Meri McNally, president of the school’s PTA. “The ones who live closest to the schools are the ones who should go to those schools.”

District administrators who drew the proposed new school boundaries agree with that concept, which is the basis for their overall proposal.

For the large majority of Ventura’s 15,000 students, the district’s first major boundary realignment since the 1970s would mean that they could graduate from an elementary school down the street from their residences to a nearby middle school and finally to the closest high school.

But that structure would come at a price. And, under the new plan, the price would be paid by Montalvo families and those who live in the hillside communities north of Foothill Road and near Victoria Avenue.

School district officials acknowledged the problem but said they had no choice but to bus some students from the east side to Ventura High in the central city, because the bulk of the district’s enrollment comes from neighborhoods east of Victoria Avenue.

District enrollment is so heavy on the fast-growing east side that Buena High School--on the eastern edge of the district when it was built in 1961--is today in the western half of the school district, officials said.

Michael Sellwood, district director of administrative services, said officials recommend busing students to Ventura High from the hillside and Montalvo areas because that would cause less disruption than numerous other options.

Most of those students already are bused to distant middle schools, rather than attending Balboa, which is closest to their residences. Under the new plan, Balboa would be filled with students living directly around it, so there would be no room for children from the hillside or Montalvo, he said.

Sellwood said administrators knew that no matter which option they endorsed, controversy would follow. Parents of students bused away from neighborhood schools will always ask why they should bear that burden, he said.

But the district’s proposal is hardly final, officials stressed. Indeed, most members of the five-person school board said last week that the plan could change substantially as parents, teachers and principals comment on it over the next three months.

“There is no doubt about it, there are some people who are going to be hurt by this plan,” board member John Walker said. “We had to start someplace. We may get to the point where we scrap the whole thing. That’s possible.”

Parents from Montalvo and the hillside communities said they hope that changes are made so that children are bused from other areas, not theirs.

Sheryl Baldwin, president of the Poinsettia elementary school parent organization, said the proposed change would move about a third of the school’s 450 students elsewhere. Most of those children are from the hillside communities and would go to Loma Vista elementary two miles to the west.

“They’re going to destroy a working unit and try to create it at another place,” Baldwin said. “And that is very hard to do.”

As things are, Poinsettia benefits from a highly involved parent organization that spends between $20,000 and $30,000 a year on school items such as computers and library books, she said.

About three-fourths of the members of the parent group’s executive board are residents of the hillside communities and would move with their children to another school, she said. Most parent volunteers also come from the same neighborhoods, she said.

Baldwin said she thinks the district’s plan is a good first step but that it should look harder at directing Elmhurst elementary school students, who live closer to Ventura High, into that school. The district’s Sellwood said that is an option.

At Montalvo elementary, east of Victoria Avenue and north of the Ventura Freeway, parents said they back part of the new proposal that funnels Montalvo youngsters into a single middle school, Anacapa. The students are now split between Anacapa and Cabrillo middle schools.

But they are strongly opposed to busing their children to Ventura High School, instead of nearby Buena, they said.

“I’m not putting down Ventura High. To me that’s not the problem,” McNally, the PTA president, said. “The problem is, do you want your child on a bus every day?”

In addition to concerns about busing, some hillside-area parents said they think the quality of their children’s education will decline if they are forced to attend Ventura High, which consistently scores lower on state math and reading tests than Buena.

School district officials acknowledged that a perception does persist that Buena is the better high school.

“No one denies the perception,” Sellwood said. “But I honestly don’t believe it’s true. And if you talk with Ventura High School parents and students, the vast majority feel they are at a very fine high school.”

Robert Cousar, principal at Ventura High, said some Buena High parents may believe their school is better because Ventura’s aging buildings are so unlike Buena’s park-like campus. Also, Ventura High is less safe and less aesthetically pleasing because Poli Street divides the campus in half, he said.

“It’s a myth,” Cousar said of the supposed educational differences between the 1,800-student Ventura High and Buena, which has 2,100 students. Despite a highly publicized drive-by shooting of a Ventura High freshman during school in 1989 by a member of a Santa Paula gang, the principal said gangs are virtually no problem at his school.

Information reported to the state shows that the academic performance of students at both high schools is well above state average. But there are differences.

For example, reading scores for 12th-grade students at Buena have consistently improved and were at the 87th percentile statewide last school year. Ventura’s 12th-grade reading scores have declined over the same three-year period and were at the 64th percentile. A score at the 50th percentile is average for the state.

Similarly, Buena seniors improved their math scores sharply to the 82nd percentile over three years. Ventura’s were up marginally to the 62nd. The schools’ writing scores were about the same.

A state measure of social and economic status also showed both schools to be above the state average of 3.03 on a 1-to-5 scale. Ventura was at 3.11 and Buena at 3.45 last year. But district administrators warned that this measure fluctuates widely from year to year, and in 1988 the two schools had an almost identical ranking.

Of the test scores, Sellwood said, “There is a difference. The district would really like to see Ventura High School improve their scores.” He said he could not explain the reason for the disparity.

Yet Sellwood noted other statistics that reflect student achievement at both schools. He pointed to a survey that showed 10.3% of Buena’s 1989 graduates attended the University of California or a state university, while 12.6% from Ventura High went to those university systems.

Another survey shows that the dropout rate at both schools is one-fourth the state average: 5.5% at Buena and 5.8% at Ventura.

Some Buena High parents said they think the district is trying to achieve scholastic parity at Ventura High by transferring the hillside students, who tend to be high achievers from well-educated families.

But district officials said such factors were never considered when mapping the proposed boundaries. “We never said, ‘This is a more affluent area than that one,’ ” Sellwood said.

Race was considered, but the two high schools already have an ethnic balance. Both are about 73% white, slightly higher than the district average.

While most of the critical telephone calls came from Montalvo and hillside parents last week, parents and educators at other schools also balked at the proposed changes.

For example, at Saticoy elementary, teachers are upset because a bilingual program now at Juanamaria elementary would be transferred to Saticoy, Principal Nancy Bradford said.

Only one of Saticoy’s 25 teachers is bilingual, so a large percentage of the staff would have to go to other schools, she said. “We’re all reacting very emotionally at this point and it hurts.”

Explanations of the proposal are being distributed to parents, teachers and principals throughout the district, and district officials said nothing has been decided.

“If there’s a better way to make it work, let’s do it,” Sellwood said. “But we needed to have something for people to consider.”