CAMARILLO : School Board Seeks Crowding Remedies

Board members in the Pleasant Valley Elementary School District have asked staff to prepare a plan to handle an overflow of students in eastern Camarillo.

After nearly two hours of discussion last week, the board approved, 4 to 1, Trustee Leonard Diamond’s motion to have staff members compile a number of “creative ways” to get 150 students from eastern Camarillo to schools that have space for them.

The plan is being requested as an alternative to spending $66,000 to lease two portable classrooms for a year and buy two new buses. The board asked that a plan be ready for parents to comment on at a March 19 public hearing.

Board President Leonard Caligiuri voted against having the staff draw up the plan.

“Basically, I don’t believe in floaters, and that’s why I voted against it,” Caligiuri said. Floaters are teachers who rotate out of their classrooms during their preparation period to make way for another teacher and class. This practice allows more students to be taught at a school in a given day.

Under the plan, which has been discussed but not formally drawn up, no new classrooms or buses would be purchased, but there would be some additional transportation costs, because some buses would be used twice as much.

The plan could include options for rotating Monte Vista Intermediate School teachers out of their classrooms during their preparation periods to make room for other classes with other teachers.

Also under the plan, starting times of one or more of the district’s 13 schools could be changed so that no buses would have to be purchased. The district now uses 11 buses, some of which officials said are aging and need repairs, to bus 910 students.

Monte Vista is projected to have 95 students more than it was designed for next year if all of the eastern Camarillo seventh- and eighth-grade students are bused there, Associate Supt. Howard Hamilton said.

Monte Vista is already 50 students over capacity.