Class Consciousness : Education: Children about to make the move from elementary school to junior high or middle school harbor a number of fears.

Every spring, officials from junior high and middle schools across Ventura County visit local elementary schools to field questions from children who are about to graduate from the primary grades.

And every year many of the questions are the same.

“The question I most often get asked when I go out to talk to fifth-graders,” said Charlotte McElroy, principal of Anacapa Middle School in Ventura, is, ‘Is it true I’m going to get put in a trash can?’ ”

Trash-canning, a form of hazing, is when older students dump a younger classmate into a large trash can. Although McElroy said she’s not aware of a single instance of trash-canning at Anacapa in at least 10 years, the fear persists.

So does the fear of middle school.

For children about to make the transition from the cloistered atmosphere of elementary school to the more or less structured environment of junior high or middle school, the prospect of getting picked on by older students is only one of their concerns.

They also worry about how they will remember their locker combinations, whether they will be able to make it to their different classes before the late bells ring and if they will make friends with the new children they meet.

“The transition from sixth grade to junior high is the most difficult” of any in a student’s school career, said Phil Parish, principal of Manzanita School in Newbury Park.

And some parents may have just as much fear of the transition as their children.

Some private and parochial schools around Ventura County report that one of the most common times for parents to pull children out of public school is when the youngsters leave elementary school.

To some extent, parents’ fears about sending their children to junior high or middle school reflect a natural concern about their youngsters’ becoming more independent, educators said.

“It’s kind of psychologically a time that they know that their child is really going to be growing up,” McElroy said. “They’re facing the idea that their child is going to be leaving the nest.”

In elementary school, children generally stay in the same classroom all day with one or possibly two teachers who get to know their students--and even some families--fairly well. But students at junior high and middle schools change classes, having anywhere from three to six teachers each day.

But parents’ concerns on middle school or junior high are more than just anxiety over their children growing up.

Middle schools and junior highs have, educators concede, more fights, more drugs, more students carrying weapons than in elementary schools.

And parents know it.

School safety is one of the most common reasons parents cite when enrolling their sixth- or seventh-grade children in private school rather than sending them to a public middle school or junior high, private school principals say.

At La Reina High, a private Catholic school in Thousand Oaks, Principal Stan Hirsch said the number of applications for the seventh grade has risen about 15% in the past four years.

“The question about safety” is the chief reason cited by parents, Hirsch said.

And the principal of the exclusive Ojai Valley School said he has also seen an increase in applications from parents in Ventura County and elsewhere who want to take their children out of public school rather than enroll them in junior high or middle school.

“They are concerned about social situations, neighborhood situations and peer pressure,” Ojai Valley Principal Mike Hall-Mounsey said.

While elementary schools typically draw children from only one neighborhood, junior high and middle schools take students from a larger, more diverse area.

“All kinds of kids from all kinds of neighborhoods are going to be meshing and mixing,” McElroy said.

So students in junior high and middle school have a wider selection of peer groups to choose from, educators say, which leads parents to worry if their children will fall in with the wrong crowd.

Thousand Oaks parent Eve Dixon said that when her daughter entered the seventh grade last year at a local intermediate school, the girl became friends with a group of girls who drank.

“She wanted to fit in,” Dixon said. “She went from being this really great kid to being just a terribly unhappy kid.”

This year, Dixon and her husband began home-schooling the 13-year-old. Away from the influence of her intermediate-school friends, the girl is thriving, her mother said.

But school officials say parents’ fears of alcohol and drug abuse, weapons and other problems exceed the reality. Most Ventura County schools, educators say, are still safer than those in urban areas.

To calm parents’ fears, some junior high and middle schools hold forums for families of students who are about to graduate from elementary school.

Many other schools send counselors or other emissaries to local elementary schools to answer children’s questions. And some school officials bring students who are about to become elementary school graduates on visits to junior high or middle school campuses during the spring.

For their part, some children who are on the verge of entering junior high or middle school said they have mixed feelings about the move.

Sandy Kemptner, 12, a sixth-grader at Manzanita School in Thousand Oaks, said she is worried that when she attends Sequoia Intermediate School next year she will have trouble keeping track of the various homework assignments from her six teachers.

On the other hand, Sandy said, there can be advantages to having more than one teacher.

“If you get sick of one teacher and you don’t like them, you don’t have to stay with them all day.”

Students who already are in the seventh grade said they had the same fears as Sandy and her classmates. But they got over it.

“It’s not as hard as you think,” said Katie Moore, a seventh-grade student at Matilija Junior High in Ojai.