New School With Focus on Basics Is Year Off : Education: Efforts to design a program and select a campus in Ventura will delay the program’s start.

Despite earlier plans to open a back-to-basics elementary school in Ventura this fall, officials have announced that they will probably not be able to launch the planned school until the 1995-96 school year.

“I don’t think it’s a real good possibility” that the school will be up and running this year, Assistant Supt. Gerald Dannenberg said.

One of the biggest hurdles facing Ventura Unified School District officials is to survey parents and teachers throughout the district and decide which of their 17 elementary schools to convert to the back-to-basics format, he said.

“We don’t have the luxury of a school site that’s sitting unused to start a new program,” Dannenberg said. “We’re going to have to work around an existing school site.”

Some parents who said they had been considering enrolling their children in the back-to-basics school for the fall said they were disappointed to hear about the delay.

“It’s discouraging,” said Margaret Kappel, who has a son in first grade at Pierpont School and a daughter in sixth grade at Cabrillo Middle School. “We do need as a society to get back to our basics as far as our values,” she said. “We need to address some issues now.”

Although she is pleased with both Pierpont and Cabrillo, Kappel said she may decide to enroll her son in the back-to-basics school. She likes the idea proposed by Supt. Joseph Spirito that parents at the back-to-basics school would be required to volunteer a certain number of hours each week.

“Parents need to get more involved,” Kappel said. “You’d have parents and teachers and the whole administration system working toward the same goals.”

At the same time, however, Kappel said she is not surprised that it is taking longer than expected to establish the new school because of the amount of planning that is necessary.

A committee of 21 parents, community members, teachers and other school district staff has so far held two meetings to plan the new school.

And this week the group visited a school in Camarillo that has a format similar to that envisioned for the one in Ventura.

As proposed by Spirito, the Ventura back-to-basics school would have a tough dress code, strict discipline, strong parental involvement and a focus on traditional teaching methods in the classroom. It would have open enrollment for students from throughout the district.

But committee members said they are still trying to determine what type of academic programs and disciplinary rules they want at the new school.

Dan Munday, the principal of Poinsettia School who has been chosen to head the back-to-basics school when it opens, said one of the committee’s concerns is how to ensure the new school is open to students from throughout the district.

“We want to make sure there’s equal access,” Munday said.

The only existing magnet school in Ventura, Mound School, has come under fire for being elitist and inaccessible to the district’s Latino students. Last year, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Dept. of Education required the district to find ways to boost Latino enrollment at Mound.

Once the back-to-basics school committee settles on the academic programs and enrollment policies at the new school, the group will present its plan to the public, Munday said.

The next step will be to survey the community to decide which elementary school should convert to the back-to-basics format, which committee members hope to do this spring or in the fall.

And this decision promises to be the most difficult because while some parents and teachers may want their neighborhood school to change, others may not, officials said.

“We have a lot of roadblocks to conquer yet, the main one being where it’s going to be,” said Janice Girouard, a Buena High teacher who is on the committee.