School Year Offers New Campuses, New Ideas : Education: Tierra Linda opens in Camarillo and Oxnard High will be moving. Some institutions are launching reforms.

Toting new pencils and clean notebooks, thousands of Ventura County students will return to school this week with the sense of expectation and promise of a fresh start that comes with every new school year.

But Oxnard High School’s 2,200 students are heading back this morning to a school that is anything but fresh.

The teen-agers are starting their year at a 43-year-old campus of grungy classrooms, broken lockers and dried-out lawns that all bear witness to neglect.

This is, however, the last time.

With the new Oxnard High School campus on Gonzales Road scheduled to open in February, today marks the final time that the school on 5th Street will open to returning students.

“They are coming here with the anticipation of moving,” Principal Daisy Tatum said.

Not only Oxnard High, but Camarillo, Rio Mesa, Hueneme, Frontier and Channel Islands high schools and the elementary schools in the Pleasant Valley, Rio and Somis school districts begin classes today.

Schools in Ventura, Ojai and Santa Paula reopen Wednesday, while all schools in the east county resume classes on Thursday.

By Friday, all 119,000 public school children in Ventura County are scheduled to be back in the classroom, trying to cut through the mental fog that sometimes settles during the summer and to pick up where they left off three short months ago.

Most years, the end of summer and start of school pass much the same. But this year there will be some changes.

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In Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley Elementary School District, the brand-new Tierra Linda School will open its doors for the first time this morning to primary-grade children.

And throughout the Oxnard Union High School District, incoming ninth-grade students may find themselves under more scrutiny from school officials than they expected.

The district is launching a new program to curb the increasing failure rate among ninth-graders.

This year, for the first time, school officials will pay special attention to incoming freshmen and emphasize some of the basics necessary to succeed in school, such as good study skills and regular attendance.

The Ventura Unified School District is also planning to get back to fundamentals.

This year, a committee of parents, teachers and school officials will decide which Ventura elementary school to convert to a back-to-basics format beginning in fall, 1995.

The committee is also considering whether to require children who attend the back-to-basics school to wear uniforms and how many volunteer hours to request from the students’ parents.

In addition to learning which school will convert to the back-to-basics format, Ventura parents and teachers also expect to find out this year whether the district will fire football coach Bret Taylor.

Taylor, who teaches history at Balboa Middle School and coaches after school at Ventura High, will have a hearing this month on allegations that he dated and had sex with students.

He is the third Ventura High coach--after Dale Hahn and Harvey W. Kochel--to be accused of sexual misconduct in the past two years.

It was more than a year ago and prior to the allegations against both Hahn and Taylor that Ventura Supt. Joseph Spirito launched a program to teach moral values in the classroom.

But in light of the accusations against the three coaches, the district’s emphasis on teaching morality may seem to parents to be particularly relevant.

In Spirito’s open letter to the community, the superintendent told parents that they should feel confident sending their children to Ventura schools.

“As you kiss and embrace them as they leave the safety of your home, be assured we will welcome the children with your hopes and dreams in mind as we prepare them to become valued citizens of our society,” he wrote.

And to help prepare students to become good citizens, the district this year will expand its moral values curriculum to all grades at all schools.

Teachers districtwide will focus on a different positive character trait each month, ranging from courtesy to cooperation.

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But in case students at Buena High fail to always exhibit such good values, the staff is taking extra precautions this year.

Principal Jaime Castellanos and his three assistant principals will try a new method for catching students who litter or otherwise cause trouble at the school during lunch.

Each day at lunchtime, two of the four administrators will change out of their button-down shirts and ties to don T-shirts and shorts and hop onto bicycles to patrol the school grounds.

In addition to keeping tabs on their own students, the bike patrol will help school officials catch trespassers on the 54-acre campus, Castellanos said. “It allows us to get from one end of campus to another real quickly,” he said.

Getting around the campus at the new Tierra Linda School in Camarillo probably will not pose a problem for teachers and staff. Rather, the new school may not be big enough.

Officials at the elementary school expect to have trouble finding space for all the children who report for the first day of class today, Principal Dianne Quinby-Anders said.

About 750 kindergarten through third-grade students are signed up this year to attend the new school--40 over capacity.

The overenrollment is no surprise, considering that the school was built solely to ease overcrowding at other schools, Quinby-Anders said.

“All along, since this school was even begun to be planned, it was known that this was a school that would catch up with enrollment and that it would be full almost from the first day,” Quinby-Anders said.

To ease crowding at the new school, the principal said officials will probably have to transfer some students back to other district schools.

Despite the complication, Quinby-Anders said preparing for the first year at the new school has been “exhilarating. Everyone is very up, very proud.”

Just as teachers and children find it exhilarating to go to a brand-new school, ninth-grade students may feel equally excited about starting high school. But the experience of being a freshman at a big high school may also be scary and overwhelming, officials said.

In the Oxnard Union High School District, officials believe some ninth-grade students fail classes because they have trouble making the transition from junior highs with 700 or 800 students to high schools with enrollments of more than 2,000.

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Roughly one-quarter of all ninth-graders at the district’s six high schools flunk their freshman year.

The trend is particularly disturbing because students who fall behind in ninth grade have trouble catching up in later grades, officials said.

“They’re getting into academic trouble in the ninth grade and they’re not getting out of it,” Assistant Supt. Gary Davis said.

To help more ninth-graders succeed, school officials are conferring with administrators at local junior highs to determine which incoming freshmen are at risk of failing.

The six high schools are assigning counselors to monitor the performance of these and other ninth-graders. And all of the schools will hold special classes to teach freshmen basic study skills such as how to read a book for full comprehension and how to take notes, Davis said.

At Oxnard High School, incoming freshmen will barely have time to get comfortable at one school before they move to another.

But officials believe the move to the new campus on Gonzales Road will be a pleasant change for everybody.

The district succeeded in getting state money to build the $40-million campus after state officials agreed that the current school’s location in Oxnard Airport’s flight path makes it unsafe for students.

With sparkling, cream-colored buildings topped by tile roofs, the new campus will look far better than the dingy school on 5th Street, said Richard Canady, the district’s assistant business manager.

“It’s just a different world,” Canady said. “It’s like coming out of the Dark Ages into the light.”