Boundary Vote Upsets Parents in Montalvo : Education: They say the Ventura board gave preferential treatment to students from hillside areas by keeping them at popular Buena High School.

Montalvo parents are furious over a Ventura school board decision to transfer students from their neighborhood to Ventura High School while allowing students from four exclusive hillside subdivisions to remain at popular Buena High.

The five-member board unanimously approved new boundaries for the Ventura Unified School District minutes before midnight Tuesday after parents from both neighborhoods mounted an angry protest over the plan to bus their children to a high school four miles from home.

When the boisterous meeting concluded, parents from the wealthy hillside community north of Foothill Road had what they wanted, while the less affluent Montalvo neighborhood faced the prospect of longer bus rides for ninth-graders beginning in the fall.

The outcome prompted allegations of preferential treatment for the hillside parents, who some people said command attention from local politicians and school officials.

“Money talks,” said Jenette Wilson, a parent from Montalvo. “The people in the hillside communities carry more clout than people in Montalvo, which is not exactly the upper-income area of Ventura.”

The school board’s decision disregarded half of the recommendations made by a special committee of more than 60 parents, which spent months studying the issue and suggested that students from both neighborhoods be transferred to Ventura High.

“We basically feel like we got sold down the river,” said Steve Magoon, a Montalvo resident and committee member. He was one of the parent leaders of the effort to keep Montalvo students at Buena High.

“Hillside money won out again,” said another committee member who does not live in either neighborhood.

“That’s where all the campaign money comes from and that’s who the school board was trying to keep happy,” she said.

Board member John Walker denied the angry accusations that he and other members kowtowed to the hillside community. “What I was looking for was how can I minimize busing, reduce the number of people driving to Ventura High and keep all the parties happy,” Walker said.

“Plus, if you look at where they’re located,” he said, “it is only one mile from the school.”

Board member John Wells also denied that his vote was influenced by politics. “I don’t know that the hillside people vote any more than the Montalvo people,” Wells said.

Initially, Wells proposed allowing both neighborhoods’ students to remain at Buena High. His motion at the meeting was not seconded.

When district officials first announced plans to change the boundaries in January, 1991, the initial outcries came from Buena High parents who reside in the hillside subdivisions of Ondulando, Clearpoint, Hidden Valley and Skyline.

Many of the hillside residents said they moved to the neighborhood to allow their children to attend a middle- to upper-class high school. Some threatened to move if the district went through with the boundary changes.

After the flap with angry parents, district officials retreated from their plans and held a series of public hearings.

The district’s aim in changing boundaries, Supt. Cesare Caldarelli Jr. said, was to come up with a plan that would balance enrollment at the two high schools, prepare the district for future growth, reduce busing costs and eliminate the pockets of students not going to neighborhood schools.

He said the overall goal was to create a system by which students attend an elementary school near their home, feed into a middle school with their elementary school class, then move together to the high school closest to their home.

In August, district officials formed the parents committee and asked it to draw boundaries that met those goals. The committee eventually adopted a plan to bus students from both neighborhoods to Ventura High.

“All along, we were expecting them to send us to Ventura High,” said Ondulando resident Jennifer Hughes, the mother of two future Buena students. “I was shocked.”

Hughes disagreed with the Montalvo parents’ assertion that the school board buckled under pressure from the wealthier hillside neighborhood.

“To be honest, I resent being lumped into that category: rich people. All I wanted is for my kids to have a good education and to have them go to Buena,” she said.

Data from the 1980 and 1990 censuses do show a clear disparity between the tracts that make up the hillside neighborhoods and Montalvo.

According to the 1980 census, median household income in Montalvo was about half that in the hillside area. Median house value in the two hillside census tracts were $298,500 and $379,100, compared with $229,800 in the Montalvo census tract.

Owner occupancy rates in the hillside neighborhoods hover about 90%, while in Montalvo the number is 61%, according to census data.

Voting studies have shown that wealthy homeowners are more likely to vote than renters.

The census data also shows that Montalvo’s population is equally distributed between Anglos and non-Anglos, while the hillside communities are about 86% Anglo.

At least one Montalvo parent said the plan would disturb the ethnic balances between the two high schools.