Schools to Focus on Behavior as Well as Academics This Year : Education: Officials hope lessons in ethics and anti-gang tactics will reduce violence and weapons on campus.

As Ventura County students return to classrooms this week, teachers and administrators are teaming up to keep a lid on campus violence and maintain educational quality in the face of ever-increasing budget restraints.

In meeting these challenges, educators are under greater pressure than ever to turn in a good performance.

On Nov. 2, state voters go to the polls to decide the voucher initiative, Proposition 174, which many regard as a referendum on the effectiveness of public education in California. If it passes, the measure would allow parents to collect a $2,600 voucher from the state for each child sent to private school.

“The public is going to focus on education as never before,” Supt. Bill Studt said last Thursday at a back-to-school assembly for about 500 teachers in the Oxnard Union High School District. “We welcome the attention and the opportunity to demonstrate the excellence of our program and achievements of our students.”

Districts hope to impress the public with a variety of new programs this school year that are aimed at improving not only academics but behavior. As part of their regular curriculum, Ventura students will be learning about honesty and respect, while Oxnard high school students will learn about tolerance in a multicultural society.

These programs are being implemented in part to help avoid the kinds of incidents that alarmed parents during the 1992-93 school year.

In Ventura, a Ventura High football player was stabbed to death near campus in an apparent gang-related attack and a Buena High football player was stabbed by another student on campus.

School officials also were involved in altercations. The principal at Haddock Middle School in Oxnard was assaulted by a student wielding a miniature baseball bat. And in Santa Paula, Supt. David Philips, reportedly acting out of frustration, allegedly roughed up a seventh-grader and was suspended for 10 days.

These and other events sparked a rising public awareness of gang activity, resulting in a flurry of anti-gang efforts on campuses, from increasing security to tightening dress codes.

While these measures remain in effect this year, school officials predict that weapons on campus will continue to be a serious problem. Even in the lower grades, they say, students come to school armed.

“Last year we had 32 expulsions and disciplinary actions for weapons, more than we had over the last half-dozen years combined,” said Norman R. Brekke, superintendent of the 13,000-student Oxnard Elementary School District. “I thought it might have been a one-year anomaly here, but my peers tell me they have had similar increases in their districts.”

Last April, the Oxnard Union High School District became the only district in the county to begin using hand-held metal detectors on its students. Though controversial, the tactic has apparently accomplished its objective of deterring students from bringing weapons on campus.

In the months before metal detectors, district officials caught about 60 students with guns or knives on campus, Studt said. After the random searches began, only three knives were discovered, he said, deducing that fewer students risked expulsion by taking a weapon to school.

“The program made a dent in our problem,” Studt said.

Even though metal detectors appear to be effective, Oxnard still remains the county’s sole school district to use the devices this school year.

“I would much prefer not to have that type of atmosphere on campus,” said David Haney, superintendent of the 3,400-student Fillmore Unified School District.

Studt agrees. “I don’t care for metal detectors when I go to the airport,” he said, “but it’s something that has to be done.”

Both Oxnard Union and the Ventura Unified School District are continuing to use telephone hot lines to encourage students to anonymously turn in gun-toting or knife-carrying classmates.

Installing the hot line last spring, Oxnard distributed thousands of business-size cards printed in English and Spanish with the message: “See a gun? Save a life! Tell someone!” But the hot line fizzled, receiving only three calls. And two of them were pranks, Studt said.

“I thought we’d get more calls,” he said, theorizing that students didn’t want to snitch on classmates and perhaps didn’t feel the calls would accomplish anything.

In contrast to Oxnard, Ventura’s hot line was “absolutely successful,” said Supt. Joseph Spirito. The hot line received about 20 tips last school year and has already logged four calls this summer, Spirito said. Although the calls resulted in no arrests or expulsions, a few did alert school security to potential trouble in time to prevent it, district officials said.

With violence and weapons inexorably linked to gangs, every district has some type of anti-gang program this year, usually in conjunction with local police departments.

But Oxnard Union is taking a more proactive approach, targeting at-risk eighth-graders and employing them in summer jobs before their freshman year.

The 12,400-student district will also pay close attention to freshmen this year “to make sure they get off to a good start,” Studt said, explaining that their academic progress will be monitored and they will be given classes in self-esteem.

West county school officials feel a sense of futility in dealing with the gang problem, in part because the situation extends beyond the campus and into the community.

“We do what we can,” Brekke said. “But the number of gangs are on the increase and the number of students in gangs are increasing. What happens in a neighborhood when the kids are not in class, we’re not in a good position to deal with it. Parents have to get involved.”

In Ventura, Spirito launched a pet project that he predicts will make a positive impact on the behavior of the district’s 15,500 students. Starting this year, Ventura’s 23 schools will be teaching a character-development program modeled after a successful system in Dayton, Ohio. Each week, students will focus on one word, such as honesty or tolerance , to learn moral values.

“Discipline problems, suspensions and expulsions will diminish and teachers will have more time to teach,” Spirito said.

According to various school officials, not every district in the west county is preoccupied with gangs.

“We have groups described as gang wanna-bes,” said Andrew C. Smidt, superintendent of the 3,600-student Ojai Unified School District, “and we get a complete spectrum of behavior from the kids, but since we’re a little isolated from urban areas, the frequency of those problems is less.”

Not every district needs to take extreme measures to make all students behave, officials said.

“Certainly there are students who are disrespectful,” Fillmore’s Haney said, “but as a whole, students are not. Our teachers have strong control in their classrooms.”

But parents in the 3,300-student Santa Paula Elementary District are hoping that teachers take back the classrooms at Isbell Middle School.

Last year, a parent described the discipline problem at Isbell as “out of control.”

The trouble-filled year, which included a no-confidence vote in the Isbell principal by almost the entire teaching staff, culminated with the Philips’ suspension for his role in an altercation with an Isbell student.

Philips blames a small group of teachers for the dissension at Isbell and denies that students at the school were undisciplined.

“There wasn’t a problem with the students last year,” Philips said. “They were not out of control.”

Although a new discipline policy will be in effect at Isbell this fall, some parents are not optimistic that campus life will improve, and several have enrolled their children at schools in other districts, said Karen Cottingham, a Santa Paula parent.

“The new discipline program looks just like the old discipline program,” said Cottingham, who took her son out of Isbell. “I don’t see a positive trend at Isbell. I didn’t want to risk another year there.”

While school violence weighs heavily on their minds, district officials continue to struggle with shrinking budgets. They face an even bleaker future if the state decides to shift school funds to the counties next year, as Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) predicted recently.

This year, some districts have been hit harder than others, but all feel the pinch, officials said.

“There is continuous frustration with inadequate funding,” said Oxnard Elementary’s Brekke said. “Over the last three years, there’s been a cumulative deterioration of basic services. Even pencils and papers are in increasingly short supply.”

Schools have had to eliminate teachers--Oxnard Union has cut 46 since 1990--and special programs. Brekke’s district used to have one reading specialist at each of its 14 year-round schools; now it has none.

The district also has “one nurse now for 13,000 students,” Brekke said. If a child is injured, “we call 911. And hardly a day goes by without a kid falling off something.”

Classrooms are stretched to the limit in most districts, hitting 30- or 35-1 student-teacher ratios. “We don’t have enough money to get class sizes down to where they make sense,” said Haney of the year-round Fillmore district. “So we’re not giving kids the personal attention we should give them.”

Administrators are growing increasingly angry with the state. “It’s awful that California has the largest class sizes in the country,” Haney said. “We could do wonderful things if we had the money.”

Still, west county districts are coming up with innovative programs.

On the recommendation of a task force of citizens and school officials, Oxnard Union is starting a multicultural education program this fall to “teach students to be more sensitive to different ethnic groups in the community,” Studt said.

While many Oxnard elementary schools have no access to computers, the neighboring Hueneme Elementary School District is spending $350,000 on materials for a new science course and will be introducing a multimedia curriculum for its middle schools.

In addition to the voucher initiative on the ballot, Ventura voters will decide whether to put all the district’s schools on a year-round schedule. In Oxnard, a committee will present its findings on the issue of converting Oxnard High to a year-round schedule beginning 1994-95.

Meanwhile, district officials are keeping their fingers crossed that the voucher initiative fails. If it passes, Ventura’s Spirito predicts that it would be “the demise of public education.”

But regardless of what happens with the voucher initiative, violence and the budget crunch may have changed public school forever.

“ ‘Happy Days’ are long gone,” Studt said, “and I don’t see us ever getting back.”

West County School Openings Briggs Elementary: Tues.

Fillmore Unified: * Hueneme Elementary: Open

Mupu Elementary; Thurs.

Ocean View Elementary: Wed.

Ojai Unified: Tues.

Oxnard Elementary: *

Oxnard Union: Tues.

Pleasant Valley Elementary: Wed.

Rio Elementary: Tues.

Santa Paula Elementary: Tues.

Santa Paula Union: Wed.

Ventura Unified: Tues.

* Year-round schools

Source: School districts