VENTURA : Schools to Report on Boundary Proposals

The board of the Ventura Unified School District will release a report tonight on the estimated transportation costs of two proposals for changing school boundaries.

The proposals are the results of months of study by a committee of parents who analyzed controversial boundary changes proposed last year by district administrators.

The parents also came up with a plan of their own.

Under the administrators’ plan, students living north of Foothill Road who attend Buena High School would transfer to Ventura High, and students in the Montalvo area would transfer to Buena from Ventura.

The parents’ proposal would allow Montalvo-area students to continue to attend Buena.

Board members have discussed the two proposals at retreats in recent weeks.

In December, administrators conducted a count of students districtwide who ride the bus under present boundaries, Assistant Supt. Richard Averett said. In the report to be released tonight, those figures will be compared with the estimated number of students who would ride the bus under the district’s proposed plan and under the parents’ plan, he said.

To get an accurate figure for the number of students who would ride the bus under the proposed plans, the district had to get accurate addresses for the more than 15,000 students in the district, Averett said.

The discovery of more than 2,000 address errors among the district’s list of students delayed the report, but officials made extensive corrections and now have only four students whose addresses have not been verified, Averett said.

“We’re feeling very good about the accuracy of our numbers now,” Averett said.

The board has not yet scheduled a date for a final vote on the boundary proposals, he said.