School Asks Approval of Conversion : Education: Ventura’s Mound Elementary seeks to focus on a math-oriented program as a magnet campus.

Mound School is seeking final approval from the Ventura Board of Education to become a magnet school where special emphasis is placed on the instruction of mathematical concepts, officials said Monday.

Although the year-round school in east Ventura has already integrated much of the new curriculum, board approval is necessary to convert to official magnet status, said Pat Chandler, assistant superintendent of educational services for the Ventura Unified School District.

Chandler said the school’s status as a math magnet will be a selling point for the elementary campus, which is already so popular that it has a long waiting list of parents eager to enroll their children.

Educators hope it will also help them attract more minorities to the campus, she said. Despite recent efforts to enroll more Latinos, Asians and blacks, 86% of Mound’s 550 students are white, a far higher proportion than the 63% white enrollment for the district as a whole.

Brochures touting Mound’s math program have been printed in English and Spanish and the school has advertised its curriculum in Spanish-language newspapers and on radio programs, Chandler said.

“We have increased [minority] enrollment in the kindergarten and first grade,” she said. “It will take a little longer for the upper grades.”

Mound School teachers, parents and administrators have spent the past year revising their proposal to make it more specific, Chandler said.

The Board of Education will hear a description of the final proposal tonight and is expected to give approval for the magnet later this month, she said.

For the pilot year that is just ending, students in the elementary school more than doubled their time spent learning math, said Mound Principal Beverly McCaslin. Before the curriculum was introduced, students spent about 30 minutes each day on math; now they receive more than an hour of math instruction, she said.

And teachers fine-tuned ways of incorporating math lessons into all other subjects during the school day, she said.

For instance, the entire school currently is charting weather trends using giant maps and graphs pasted to the wall in the cafeteria, said Susan Frank, a third-grade teacher who helped design the school’s math program.

Each grade’s assignment corresponds with their level of sophistication in arithmetic, Frank said. First-graders, for instance, look outside their classroom each day and record if the skies are cloudy, partly cloudy or sunny.

The second-graders chart the high and low temperatures in Ventura each day. And third-graders put tiny dots on a map of the United States on the cities with the lowest and highest temperatures for the day.

“So they are not only learning math, they are learning geography,” Frank said.

Parental involvement is another key element. Parents are expected to help their children with homework each school night, including running them through multiplication drills, said teacher Carolyn Lavery, who helped Frank create the curriculum.

Cheryl Collart, whose 9-year-old daughter, Lauren, is in third grade at Mound, said she is pleased with the program. When she was in grade school, recalled Collart, 45, multiplication was rigidly taught using drills and rote memorization.

But Lauren has learned several ways of multiplying, she said.

“My daughter is able to multiply three, four and five-digit numbers very quickly,” Collart said.

When Mound opened as a magnet school in 1988, it was the only school in the Ventura Unified district that was on a year-round calendar. Since then, four other elementary schools have converted to the non-traditional calendar, Chandler said.

Mound needed to offer some specialized program to qualify as a magnet and retain its open-enrollment status. Under open enrollment, attendance is drawn from students who live throughout the city.