Elementary School Ups Minority Enrollment : Ventura: Mound administrators’ action follows last year’s federal inquiry. The magnet facility will still be overwhelmingly white.

Under pressure from federal civil rights investigators, Mound School in Ventura has boosted the number of minority students from 11% of total enrollment this year to 17% for the fall.

The magnet school will still be overwhelmingly white compared to the Ventura Unified School District as a whole, which has a 36% minority enrollment.

But district officials said they are pleased that they are making progress at gradually diversifying the student body at Mound.

The Office for Civil Rights of the U. S. Department of Education investigated enrollment practices at Mound last year following a complaint that the school was less accessible to minority students than whites.

The inquiry ended with school officials agreeing to take steps to enroll more minority children at the kindergarten- through fifth-grade school.

So for the first time this year, the district ran ads in English- and Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations encouraging families to apply to enroll their children at Mound.

Then school officials gave preference to minority students in the lottery that is held each spring to fill spaces for the coming school year.

Of the 252 children whose names were put into the lottery to fill 66 spaces for the next school year, about 20% were minorities, which is a higher percentage than in the past, Administrative Services Director Arlene Miro said.

Publicity about the federal investigation may have spurred more minority families to apply for the available spots, Miro said.

“There’s such an awareness now throughout the district and throughout the town that there was a problem,” she said.

And by giving special preference to minority applicants, district officials filled nearly three-quarters of the available spaces with nonwhite students.

Most of the new students are in the school’s incoming kindergarten class.

In the lottery, school officials randomly picked names of families who had applied to enroll one or more of their children and assigned a ranking to each name for the grade level of those students. The first name picked for fifth grade, for example, would be ranked first to get any available spots at that grade level.

In past years, the first students chosen for each grade would have been chosen for any open spots.

But this year, officials scanned the list of students to see how many of the high-ranking students in each grade were minorities. If most of the students in the top slots were white, officials replaced the lowest-ranking names of white students with the highest-ranking minority applicants for that grade level.

Miro said the district is careful to give preference to the minority applicants with the highest lottery ranking to keep the element of randomness. “It is by chance,” she said. “The lottery is still done.”

Since the lottery was done last month, Miro said about 55 parents have called to complain about their children not being selected, which is about the same number of calls the district received last year.

Only two irate parents charged that the district was engaging in reverse discrimination, Miro said.

Although the percentage of minorities at Mound is still far lower than the districtwide total, school officials said they are confident that the numbers will gradually increase as the new minority students’ brothers and sisters join them at the school.

The Ventura district gives siblings of students at any school preference on enrollment at that school.

Federal education officials also said they are satisfied with the progress that the district is making in integrating Mound.

“They’re doing what they said they were going to do,” Department of Education spokesman Roger Moore said. “They’re complying as agreed.”

One reason that Mound School has had problems attracting minority students is it is in a mostly white neighborhood on the city’s east side. And because it is a magnet school, parents have to provide their children’s transportation.

But school officials said that more minority families have moved to the east side in recent years, and that many of the new minority students who will attend Mound next year live near the school.

Nevertheless, Latinos make up the largest minority in Ventura, accounting for 16% of the city’s population, and a high proportion of Latino families live along Ventura Avenue on the city’s west side.

For these families, there is little incentive to send their children to Mound, said Vincent Ruiz, a former Ventura school board member. One of Mound’s selling points is that it is the only year-round school on the city’s east side, but several schools on the west side also have non-traditional calendars.

“On the Avenue, they have their own year-round,” Ruiz said. “They have very good programs over there. Most people, it doesn’t have to be Hispanics, would rather have their children in the closest school.”