Parents Say No to District Back-to-Basics Plan : Education: Proposal to require students to wear uniforms at an elementary school in Ventura Unified receives little backing.

In a crushing setback to Ventura schools chief Joseph Spirito, survey results released Wednesday show little support among parents at any of the district’s 17 elementary campuses for a back-to-basics school that would require school uniforms.

About 5,500 surveys were distributed within the last month to parents of students in kindergarten through fourth grade at all 17 elementary schools in the Ventura Unified School District.

The questionnaire was intended to gauge parental support for Spirito’s proposed “basics-plus school,” an entire elementary school that would require students to wear uniforms and parents to volunteer time for campus activities.

But there was no majority of support for the proposal at any of the schools, Assistant Supt. Gerald Dannenberg said. About 45% of parents who received the surveys returned them, Dannenberg said.

“The consensus seems to be that people are satisfied with their neighborhood school the way it is,” he said.

Dannenberg said he was not surprised by the results. People grumble generally about public education, he said. But when pressed for specifics, they talk about problems in other schools.

“I think people are saying, ‘I know it’s bad, but it’s not bad at my school.’ ”

Some parents added comments to their questionnaire, Dannenberg said. The comments varied widely, from strong support for a basics school to criticism of it as a campus that would attract only well-to-do parents who are already involved in their children’s education.

“A lot of parents didn’t like the idea of school uniforms,” he said.

Dannenberg declined to release numerical results, saying he first wants to discuss the responses with an ad-hoc committee formed to look into the issue. But he said the district will continue to pursue the idea, unveiled a year ago, even if it must be scaled back to a school-within-a-school format.

Other options, which will be discussed with the 25-member basics-school committee at a meeting in February, Dannenberg said, include converting a school to the basics-plus format despite the lack of parental support.

Enrollment at such a school would be open to any student in the district, and educators are considering offering busing to students who don’t live near the school and can’t afford to commute there on their own, he said.

Parental rejection of the traditional-school proposal comes on the heels of another blow to Spirito’s efforts to respond to some conservative critics of public education.

Last week he announced he was dropping a plan to require uniforms in any of the district’s four middle schools because students and parents had issued a firm “no thanks” to the idea. An informal poll of elementary school principals also revealed little support at the grade school level.

Spirito was not available for comment Wednesday. But, in the past, he has said his proposals for school uniforms and the back-to-basics school are in response to the public’s demand for higher standards and more choice in public education.

He got the idea for the basics-plus school during the 1993 campaign by educators against Proposition 174, an initiative that would have provided taxpayer-funded vouchers for children to attend private schools.

The initiative was defeated, but Spirito has said he believed it sent a clear message that parents want public schools that are safer, stricter and more focused on teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.

Michael Elman, a member of the back-to-basics school committee, said he was not surprised by the survey results. The school as proposed by Spirito did not offer much that is new, he said.

“There would be no change in curriculum,” said Elman, a teacher at Lincoln Elementary School. “Just parents involved and students wearing uniforms. That doesn’t seem innovative to me.”

Still, Elman concedes, there are many parents who are clamoring for different choices in education. And Spirito was sincerely trying to address that need, he said.

“I really think he wants to do what is best for kids,” Elman said. “But this was just misguided. He got stuck on this idea and pursued it.”