Ojai Group Urges Shift for 2 Schools : Education: The residents object to having their children in Ventura Unified district and will ask the county to fund a feasibility study.

Complaining of neglect by Ventura educators, a group of Ojai Valley residents will ask the County Board of Supervisors to fund a study on the possibility of shifting two elementary schools to Ojai’s public school system.

The proposed plan would transfer Arnaz and Oak View schools to the Ojai Unified School District, taking at least 500 students and more than $2 million in state funding with them.

Educators at Ventura Unified School District have already tried to quash the proposed action and are expected to mount a battle to keep the schools in their district.

The idea of linking the two schools with Ojai Unified has been discussed for several years, parents say. But no action was taken until a nine-member citizens committee voted last month to ask for the study.

That committee, made up of residents of the Ojai and Ventura River valleys, was appointed by Supervisor Susan Lacey to help the county write a 30-year plan for growth and zoning in the Ojai area, said committee member Lanie Springer.

In their report to supervisors, committee members recommend that a study be done to determine the feasibility of bringing Arnaz and Oak View into the Ojai district. The report will go before the county’s Planning Commission before supervisors review it, Springer said.

The Ojai committee agreed unanimously to include the recommendation because parents in Casitas Springs, Oak View, Meiners Oaks and Mira Monte have long complained of neglect by Ventura’s administrators, Springer said.

“Those two schools are pretty much orphans,” said Springer, who worked in the Ventura district’s administrative headquarters 27 years before retiring last year.

“They figure we are out here in the hinterland so they don’t have to pay attention to us.”

One parent, Terry Bishop, said she was disturbed two years ago when Ojai-area parents were asked to drive to Ventura to preview films being shown for drug and sex education lessons. And her daughter, who was in elementary school, had to be bused to DeAnza Middle School in west Ventura one day a week to take part in a program for bright students.

“She was so traumatized being in the big school with older children that we had to pull her out,” said Bishop, who has since enrolled all three of her children in a private Ojai school.

Other parents do not like the fact that Oak View and Arnaz serve as feeder schools for DeAnza. The Ventura middle school is about 11 miles from their homes, while Matilija Junior High in Ojai is just six miles away, parents say.

Besides the distance, however, parents chafe at sending their children to a school that they say has a bad reputation.

“DeAnza has the gang thing,” Springer said. “True or false, that’s the perception.”

Jay Paddock, whose 6-year-old daughter, Alexandra, attends Arnaz School, said he has no intention of letting her attend DeAnza.

“That’s a whole new life down there. It’s a different world,” said Paddock, an Oak View resident. “There’s fights, there’s stabbings, there’s gangs. You read all about it in the paper. As a parent, I don’t want my daughter going there.”

Ventura school board member Jim Wells said he bristles when he hears such negative assessments of DeAnza. In the past few years, DeAnza has had very few discipline problems and students have performed on par or academically above their peers in Ventura, Wells said. “I will take DeAnza Middle School and put it up against any other middle school in the state, and it will come out head and shoulders above,” Wells said.

Still, Wells said, he “understands the logic” of Ojai area parents wanting their children to attend school close to their homes. He said he would support the transfer if the study determines that would best serve students in the area.

Ventura board members Velma Lomax and Diane Harriman said they would withhold comment until a feasibility study is done. Numerous questions would have to be answered, such as whether Ojai Unified has the room to accept new students and how teachers affected by the move would secure new jobs, Harriman said.

“This isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight,” she said. “This is something that is going to be studied for years.”

Ventura Unified’s schools chief Joseph Spirito was not available for comment. But Springer said someone in Ventura’s administrative office requested that the school-transfer study be deleted from the 30-year Ojai plan in its final draft.

“It was pulled by county staff because Ventura Unified protested,” she said.

The study request was reinserted into the plan after some technical revisions, Springer said.