3,440 Students to Change Schools : Education: It initially had been projected that 7,500 youngsters would be affected by the revised boundaries.

Changes in school boundaries proposed by the Ventura Unified School District would affect 3,440 students, fewer than half of the 7,500 students first estimated, figures released Friday show.

“That comes as good news, a relief to me,” John Walker, a school board member, said. “Any time you are moving children around and changing people’s lives, it is an unsettling feeling.”

The change in the number of affected students doesn’t reflect a change in the proposal, district Administrator Jean Rudolph said. The original figure was an estimate, and now the number of affected students at each school have been counted.

If boundary changes for the district’s 23 schools are made, the majority of elementary and middle school students affected would attend a school closer to their residences than they do now, Rudolph said. But most of the high school students that would have to change schools would travel to one farther from home, she said.

According to the report, 709 elementary school students would attend a closer school while 374 would attend one farther away. Of the middle school students affected, 1,207 would attend a closer school and 339 would travel farther. And 381 high school students would stay closer to home, while 430 would attend a school farther away.

The biggest group experiencing changes would be middle school students living in the boundary area for Juanamaria, Junipero Serra and Saticoy elementary schools, where 473 would go to a proposed new middle school closer to their residences than Balboa, the school they now attend, Rudolph said. And the largest group to go farther from home would be 251 high school students in the Montalvo area who would travel to Ventura High School instead of Buena High.

The school district proposed the boundary changes last month--the first major realignment since the 1970s in a move to allow friends to attend the same schools together from kindergarten to 12th grade--to racially balance schools and to cut transportation costs.

If approved, the plan would not take effect until the 1992-93 school year at the earliest, officials said.

For most of the district’s 15,000 students, the boundary changes would mean that they could attend a neighborhood elementary school and go on to a nearby middle school. Then all those students would go together to the closest high school.

But if schools fill up with neighborhood children, some students must be bused to another school.

More than 150 students at Poinsettia Elementary School area would have to be bused to Loma Vista school under the proposal, angering many parents who bought houses in the area so their children could attend Poinsettia School.

“I find it a ridiculous situation,” said Diane Perez, whose daughter attends Poinsettia. There is an “elementary school down the street, but kids have to be bused five miles down the road.”

Many parents at Saticoy school, who held a meeting Thursday night, also oppose the proposal. “I’m getting opposition all over the place,” Walker said. “There were probably 100 parents at the meeting in Saticoy last night, and I think I got two positive comments.”

He said even though the plan has had strong opposition, school administrators are trying to “accommodate neighborhood programs to the greatest extent possible.”