Schools’ Chief Odyssey Continues

For Ventura County school Supt. Charles Weis, it’s 28 down and 152 to go in his quest to visit all 180 schools in the county.

Weis toured six schools Friday in the Fillmore Unified School District. He intends to see another 19 schools this month and finish his odyssey by the end of the school year.

“I want to get a sense of what’s going on (at schools) around the county and see if I can meet their needs,” said Weis, who was named interim superintendent in June.

“I also want to see if the schools are improving at the pace we want and whether the teacher training (that the county) spends a lot of money on is reflected in the classroom.”

As county superintendent of schools, Weis supervises an office that monitors budgets for the county’s 20 districts, operates programs for disabled children and runs teacher-training workshops.

Weis’ visit to Fillmore was a homecoming of sorts. A top administrator in the Fillmore district for 10 years, he was greeted by calls of “Hi, Chuck” from teachers and school officials during his inspection tour.

Spending about an hour at each of the school sites, Weis blitzed across the campuses, shaking hands with old friends, observing teachers in classroom situations, even schmoozing with students.

“How do you guys like this kind of work?” he asked a table of seventh-grade boys who were studying Mayan architecture at Fillmore Junior High.

Escorted by new junior high Principal Peggy Glenn, Weis was shown an innovative program, a facsimile of an archeological dig, where about 200 children carefully examined roped-off plots to find buried “artifacts” in a large dirt field.

“This is great,” Weis said to Glenn.

Then Weis noticed a few students hovering over a boy who was digging through the dirt.

“This group is like Caltrans,” he teased. “One person works and the rest watch.”

Weis, 43, is filling the unexpired term of James Cowan, who retired after nearly 25 years as superintendent.

“Chuck has a different style than Jim Cowan had,” said Fillmore school board President Barbara Mayfield, who was visiting the junior high. “You will see him everywhere.”

Weis, who has announced plans to run for the $110,000-a-year superintendent’s job in 1994, denies the high-visibility tour is politically motivated.

“I think it’s important to see what’s going on in the classroom,” he said. “If you don’t, you lose track of what your job is.”