Plan Would Disperse Gateway Students, Provide More Class Time

More than 500 troubled Ventura County youths who attend Gateway Community School in Camarillo will be dispersed to school sites in their own cities under a plan to make them spend more time in the classroom, County Superintendent of Schools Charles Weis said Tuesday.

Weis said he hopes eventually to have a community school classroom in virtually every city in the county, and he has approached the superintendents of all the county’s school districts for help in finding sites.

Arrangements have already been made to have some students attend classes at Ventura’s Dorothy Boswell School, used for special education students, and negotiations are also under way for a site in Moorpark, at the old high school building on Casey Road.

The students include many who were expelled from local school districts for drug and weapon violations. Others have severe attendance problems, were ordered into the school by the courts, or attend Gateway because of its programs for teen-age mothers, Weis said.

The Gateway school has room for only about 130 of the 515 students assigned to it, Weis said. But many of the students now participate on an independent study basis, which brings them to school as few as two hours a week.

With state legislation and political pressure calling for the students to spend more time in the classroom, Gateway cannot accommodate the overflow students. So the county is sending the students back to their own communities--but at sites separate from the rest of the school population.

The decentralization, which will begin in September, will also reduce busing costs that otherwise would become prohibitively expensive, Weis said.

But at least one local school board member has expressed concerns about bringing the students back. Simi Valley school Trustee Carla Kurachi said there might be public opposition to moving the youths into a residential neighborhood in Simi Valley.

“It’s definitely something that needs public input,” Kurachi said. “Where they are located now in Camarillo, they are not in any neighborhood.”

The Gateway school is situated among government buildings and airplane hangars near the Camarillo Airport.

Still, Kurachi said she supports efforts to increase classroom time for county school students.

“They should be in school five days a week,” Kurachi said. “You don’t want them out on the street.”

That is the reasoning behind two bills in the state Legislature that would require such students to attend county schools for at least 10 hours a week and possibly as many as 25 hours a week.

“Independent study by itself has the potential to be abused. We want some more structure to see to it that these kids are truly helped,” said state Assemblywoman Dede Alpert (D-San Diego), the author of one of the bills.

Alpert said growing numbers of students are being expelled from local school districts as a result of strict zero-tolerance policies toward weapons and drugs. “You can’t just abandon these kids,” she said.

The county school system will move toward additional class time even if the Assembly bills do not pass, Weis said.

“We’re trying to comply with the public will,” Weis said. “They want [students] in school.”

The plan will ease public concern that increasingly violent youths are outside making trouble when they are supposed to be at home conducting independent study, Weis said. Such concerns were among those aired in a recent report from the Ventura County grand jury that criticized management of the school.

Weis maintained, however, that independent study can be a valuable way of easing disenchanted students back into school. He also said it is useful as a security measure in dealing with students who might endanger their classmates.

“Independent study is a really effective approach with these kids,” Gateway Director Phillip Gore said. He said most of Gateway’s students already attend the school for more than the 10 hours the new bills would require, and that Ventura County’s closely supervised independent study program was actually used as a model for Alpert’s bill.