College District Supports Voucher Initiative : Education: The Ventura County members split 3 to 2 and break ranks with other school agencies throughout the state.

Board members of the Ventura County Community College District have voted to support the school voucher initiative, breaking ranks with the vast majority of school and community college boards across the state.

After three hours of sometimes heated debate, the board split 3 to 2 Tuesday night in favor of backing Proposition 174, a constitutional amendment that critics say could cost the district as much as 10% of its $63-million budget.

The initiative would offer every kindergarten-through-12th-grade student in the state a voucher of $2,600, redeemable at public, private or parochial schools. The voucher money would be drawn from the state Department of Education funding pool, which supports elementary and secondary schools as well as community colleges.

Board members Karen Boone, Gregory P. Cole and Timothy Hirschberg, who supported the plan, dismissed budgetary concerns as doomsday predictions. They heralded the plan as a last-ditch effort to save the state’s faltering public school system.

“This initiative is a bold and imaginative stroke and that’s what public education needs,” Hirschberg said.

Cole, who is board president, said school vouchers--by promoting competition between public and private schools--will encourage public schools to improve the quality of the education they offer. “Parents and students will be able to vote, and they will vote with their feet,” he said. “Some public schools that are not providing quality education will close, and they should close.”

Board members Pete Tafoya and Allan Jacobs voted against the initiative.

Tafoya and Jacobs argued that voter passage of Proposition 174 could strip the district’s budget of millions of scarce dollars. But the other board members disagreed, insisting that if the initiative requisitioned huge chunks of money out of the state education budget, elementary and secondary schools would feel the pinch and not the community college system.

There are about 5.7 million students enrolled in California’s schools, of which about 550,000 attend private schools, officials said. If the measure passes in November, students now in public schools could apply for vouchers immediately. Private school students would have to wait until the 1995-96 school year to apply.

The $2,600 figure is about half the amount state analysts estimate it costs to educate a student in the public school system. Every time a student elected to take a voucher to a private school, the other $2,600 of that student’s education allotment would be returned to the general fund, where educators could chose to apply it to education or some other state need.

Proponents of the voucher initiative argue that although funding to public schools would be diminished, the system would need less money because it would be serving fewer students. This would not be the case, however, for the community college districts, which would not operate on a voucher system but share a budget with the public school system.

Board members who support the plan said state legislators will probably treat community colleges separately from elementary and secondary schools when divvying up school funding each year. And if they didn’t, Cole added, community colleges could always take the state to court.

“The risk is being so overblown, just to scare people away from the initiative,” Hirschberg said.

State education analyst Sandra Silva, however, said opponents’ fears are realistic. “How legislators decide to allocate that (money) is up to them, and given recent history with budget crises and the recession, we’ve seen the community colleges have taken hits right along with the K-12 schools,” she said.

Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) agreed. “I don’t see any scenario in which passage of the voucher initiative is a good thing for the community college district,” he said.

A group running the statewide “Yes on 174” campaign said they know of only one other school board, in Nevada County in Northern California, that has supported the initiative.

On Tuesday, the chancellor of the state community college system denounced the initiative in testimony at a state Senate hearing, state officials said.

Local schoolteachers and board members said they were disappointed with the board’s action. “It seems to me that those who would support this initiative haven’t got a good grasp on the devastating educational impact of this law,” said Doug Crosse, a member of the Simi Valley Unified School District board.

“They were probably either misled or under-informed.”

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