ELECTIONS / VENTURA’S MEASURE E : Closed Street Divides School, Residents

As the lunch bell rings, Aron Ruiz and dozens of his classmates pile out of the Ventura High School weight room and head across Poli Street toward the cafeteria.

Ignoring the painted crosswalk, the teen-agers cut a broad diagonal from curb to curb and even saunter down the middle of the avenue.

They act as if they own the street. In a way, they do.

A normally busy thoroughfare, the four-block stretch of Poli Street that bisects the high school campus has been closed to traffic during school hours since early 1993.

The City Council acted swiftly to close Poli Street in the wake of community outrage over the after-school stabbing death of a Ventura High student.

Parents and school officials say the closure has helped keep dangerous intruders off campus and cut down on traffic noise, dramatically improving the campus environment.

As 16-year-old Aron said: “It’s dumb to have a street running through the middle of a school.”

But a feisty group of residents from the hillside above Ventura High is fighting to reverse the council decision, sponsoring a ballot initiative called Measure E that would reopen Poli Street immediately.

The initiative’s proponents say the closure of Poli Street clogs traffic on Main Street, obstructs emergency vehicles entering the area, and forces hillside residents to drive far out of their way to get around their own neighborhood.

They are angry not only about the metal gates shutting off Poli Street from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day, but also the chain-rope barricades that are put up during the same hours on two nearby residential streets--Sunset Drive and Palomar Avenue.

Hillside residents requested the Sunset and Palomar barricades after the closure of Poli Street, when hundreds of motorists detoured onto the quiet and narrow streets.

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But what they really want, Measure E proponents say, is to reopen Poli Street so they can get rid of the chain-ropes blocking residential streets.

“We are not against the school,” said Hazel Imbrecht, a hillside resident whose children graduated from Ventura High. “We’ve supported the school all these years. But it seems that right now we live in a gated community that we didn’t ask for.”

Now, as the Measure E campaign moves into its final weeks, the fight between the two groups is growing nastier. The camps tend to split down generational lines, with parents and students working against the measure and many elderly neighbors hoping to reopen the street.

The initiative’s proponents accuse parents and school officials of ignoring possible alternatives to the street closure, such as fencing in the entire campus, building an overpass for traffic along Poli Street or simply installing a new stoplight.

“No matter what the solution . . . there’s always a reason why it won’t work,” said real estate broker David Gladstone, president of Concerned Citizens of Ventura, which is pushing Measure E.

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Ventura High parents contend, meanwhile, that the initiative’s backers are running a deceptive campaign.

The Measure E supporters are using the school colors--black and gold--in what opponents consider a deliberate attempt to mislead voters.

Besides driving a pickup truck fitted with a huge black-and-gold placard proclaiming “Open Poli--Yes on E,” members of Concerned Citizens of Ventura are also distributing flyers in the same colors.

“They are trying to have people think that if they vote what the yellow and black says it’s for Ventura High School,” said Valerie Chrisman, whose son attends the school. “I think they thought it was a good political technique to use the school colors and confuse the issue.”

But Gladstone responds, “That’s nonsense.” His group picked the school colors, he said, because the issue is, after all, about Ventura High.

Also, the group failed to put its name or address on the first batch of flyers, running afoul of the state elections code.

For parents and school officials, the issue is clear-cut: They have tried to close Poli Street for 30 years and now they want to keep it that way.

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At first, the main problems were traffic safety and noise, school officials said. In the eight classrooms facing Poli Street, the rumble from passing cars is so loud that teachers have kept their doors and windows closed even in sweltering heat, officials said.

But in recent years the concerns have grown more serious.

In 1990, the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, which decides on schools’ accreditation, recommended during its regular review of Ventura High that the school should seal off Poli Street, officials said.

Traffic on the street had increased over the years to about 10,000 cars per day, 4,000 of them during school hours.

And as gang activity in the city has shot up, so has the number of gang-related incidents along Poli Street. School officials said the street is a favorite thoroughfare for youths who want to flash gang signs or pick fights with Ventura High students.

During one particularly violent nine-day period a few years ago, officials said, intruders who had parked on Poli Street assaulted 12 students in addition to three staff members trying to break up the fights.

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Teacher Bob Dixon recalls one Monday morning two years ago when he and his first-period physics class watched in horror as a group of boys ran onto the campus from Poli Street after spotting another youth they had apparently been trying to find.

By the time Dixon ran out to break up the scuffle, the youths were beating the student with a tire iron, he said.

Although the Ventura Unified School District had been asking the city for years to close Poli Street, the council only agreed after the stabbing death of a Ventura High student in January, 1993. Jesse Strobel was stabbed and killed on a Friday evening several blocks from the school.

No one was ever charged in the attack. But school officials said they believe the killing stemmed from tensions between Jesse’s friends and another group of students at the school.

Since the closing, officials said, violence is less prevalent and the atmosphere at the school is markedly different.

“People are a little more relaxed,” math teacher Lloyd Vadnais said. “You don’t have the constant fear that something’s going to happen.”

But Measure E proponents argue that school officials have exaggerated the dangers posed by Poli Street.

“No one has ever been killed,” Imbrecht said.

And, the initiative’s backers say, the school district and City Council have minimized the problems caused by closing the street.

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Main Street, for instance, has become a traffic nightmare because of motorists detoured from using Poli Street.

City Engineer Rick Raives confirmed that Main Street now carries thousands more cars daily than before the street closure. “It’s certainly a lot busier,” he said.

And the intersection of Seaward and Main streets is particularly congested, he said, with motorists sometimes having to sit through two or more lights during the busy noon hour.

Hillside residents also complain that the road closures are dangerous: Fire engines and other emergency vehicles, they said, will have trouble reaching hillside residences in the event of a big brush fire.

“You could have a terrible loss of life and everything else all because of those darn barricades,” Measure E proponent Jack C. Biller said.

But this fear is contradicted by Ventura Fire Chief Richard Achee. “Our response time isn’t slowed,” he said.

As an alternative to closing Poli Street, Biller and other backers of the initiative have suggested that the city and school district put a stoplight at the crosswalk on Poli, fence the campus in or take other measures to protect students.

School officials, however, say neither a stoplight nor a fence would ease the disturbances caused by having a street cut through the middle of campus.

And district officials said they lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost to build an overpass.

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The district maintains, however, that it is continuing to search for a permanent solution to the Poli Street dilemma. Parents and officials said they just want voters to keep the street closed until they find another answer.

At least some voters are having trouble making up their mind.

Mellie Morgan and her husband Paul live on the hillside above Ventura High, but on the other side of Catalina Street. The 80-year-old Morgan, whose son is an assistant principal in the school district, said she sympathizes with Measure E proponents.

“It’s a real darn inconvenience for them,” she said. “But, on the other hand, Mr. Morgan and I are both ambivalent about this because the kids have to cross.

“It’s just a real lousy situation overall.”