Ventura Schools to Poll Parents on Uniforms : Education: The district superintendent will ask city’s 17 elementary campuses to survey opinion on strict dress codes.

All Ventura elementary schools will be asked to poll parents about whether children should be required to wear uniforms, school district Supt. Joseph Spirito said Wednesday.

Spirito said he decided to give each of the Ventura Unified School District’s 17 elementary schools the choice to mandate student uniforms because of the high level of community support for a planned back-to-basics school that will couple a stringent dress code with strict discipline.

“What I’m hearing on the basic school right now is, ‘Why can’t we do this in all schools?,’ ” he said. To give parents a choice, Spirito said he would “ask every individual school to survey parents to see if they’re interested in school uniforms.”

But some elementary school principals said they have not seen evidence that parents want student uniforms.

“I did have some parents individually say they don’t believe in that,” Montalvo School Principal Marie Atmore said. But, she added, families at her school probably would support other aspects of the back-to-basics school, such as strict discipline and required volunteer work from parents.

At Loma Vista School in east Ventura, Principal Richard Kirby said few students wear the oversized, baggy clothing that has sparked complaints from parents elsewhere.

“We haven’t had that problem here,” he said.

In addition to having a tough dress code, the planned back-to-basics school will also require a certain amount of volunteer work from parents, enforce strict discipline among students and focus on traditional teaching methods in the classrooms.

As envisioned, the school would have an open enrollment, with parents from all over the district able to choose to send their children there. District officials are still trying to determine which of the elementary schools to convert to a back-to-basics structure.

But Spirito said he is worried that the back-to-basics format will be so popular that one school will not be enough. And he wants to avoid establishing too many magnet schools in the district.

Currently, Mound School is the district’s only magnet school and is open to students from all over the city. All of the district’s other elementary schools draw students only from their immediate neighborhoods.

Spirito said he has received about 30 letters and phone calls from parents around the district saying they wanted the back-to-basics school in their neighborhood. “Not one person who called or wrote or stopped me in the street said, ‘I think it’s a crummy idea.’ ”

“My concern is if I open a basics school it’s going to be popular,” he said. “And I don’t want to destroy the concept of neighborhood schools.”

Although Spirito said he personally believes school uniforms enhance student achievement, he does not want to try to require such a stringent dress code districtwide.

“I’m saying, let it start from the grass roots,” he said. “My whole design is to give people a choice, but to get them to understand the choice could be at their school.”

Schools that decide against requiring all students to wear uniforms may choose to enforce such a dress code only for children in certain grades, Spirito said.

But he said a school must have a consensus among parents before requiring uniforms or establishing other features of a back-to-basics school. School officials said the parent surveys will probably be conducted before the end of the school year.