Officials Seek to Ease Crowding at Buena High : Education: Busing and the end of a sibling-entry rule are among alternatives being considered to relieve the mushrooming enrollment.

Mushrooming enrollment at Buena High School is prompting school officials to find ways to relieve overcrowding, from eliminating a sibling-entry rule to busing some students to Ventura High, officials said Friday.

Immediate steps include ferreting out an unknown number of students who have given false addresses to attend the popular school and terminating inter-district permits, which allow transfers from other districts, said school board member Diane Harriman.

About 60 students who live in Santa Paula and Oxnard are attending Buena under these special permits, Harriman said. But those are only short-term solutions, Harriman said.

Buena has 2,359 students this year, about 600 more than the 1,700 enrolled at Ventura.

Buena’s enrollment is expected to continue to rise because new housing developments have been approved for the city’s east end. So educators need to find longer-term answers, she said.

A change in the school’s attendance boundaries is not being considered, however, because such action is always controversial and was done just three years ago, said Joseph Spirito, superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District.

And, although some administrators believe the best solution would be to build a third high school, that option is not being seriously considered because of the difficulty of passing a bond measure to fund high construction costs, Spirito said. For example, the recently opened Oxnard High School cost $33 million to build.

“In this economy, bond measures are not being passed, especially when you need two-thirds of the vote,” he said. “So it’s going to be a while before we consider that.”

But administrators are beginning to look at such options as eliminating a rule that allows the younger siblings of current Buena students to automatically qualify for enrollment, he said.

And Harriman said she believes the only solution, short of building a new high school on the city’s eastern fringes, is to require east-end students who live more than two miles from Buena to be bused to Ventura.

“I’m going to lose the entire east-end vote, but I don’t know what else we’re going to do,” Harriman said. “I was at Buena today and the counselors were screaming at me to put a cap on enrollment.”

While Harriman favors an immediate cut in enrollment at Buena of at least 150 students, Spirito said none of the suggested changes will take place during the current school year.

“It’s OK for this year,” he said. “But we need to start looking at the whole picture and start saying this is what we’re going to do.”

An imbalance in enrollment at Ventura’s two public high schools has been a problem for at least a decade, as new subdivisions in the fast-growing east side began sprouting up.

In 1992, district officials redrew attendance boundaries for all of its 25 schools, in part to relieve Buena’s overcrowding. But just three years later, enrollments are again weighted heavily toward Buena.

The hallways are so crowded during recesses and between class periods that students rub shoulder-to-shoulder, Harriman said. And the quad area at the center of the Telegraph Road campus is stuffed full of students during lunch, she said.

That kind of crowding builds tension, Harriman said.

“Nothing has happened there yet,” she said. “It’s been very quiet. But the potential is there.”

The Ventura school district has vacant land to build a new high school but no money to build it, Harriman said.

Even if redistricting was considered, the boundary lines would have to be drawn so far east to balance enrollments that it would include the Buena campus, Spirito said.

One alternative may be to ask east Ventura students who live outside a two-mile radius of Buena to volunteer to be bused to Ventura High, on Main Street in midtown Ventura, Spirito said. Harriman said she thinks only mandatory busing would work.

“Everyone wants to go to Buena,” she said.

Another idea has been offered by Ventura High Principal Hank Robertson. Robertson said he would like to see the schools reconfigured so that Buena takes students in ninth and 10th grades and Ventura takes the 11th and 12th grades.

This would accomplish two goals, Robertson said. First, enrollments would be roughly balanced at 2,000 students each. And it would also end a perennial notion within the community that Buena is academically superior to Ventura, he said.

“A lot of people would object initially,” he said. “But after it was done, they would go on to the next problem.”

Harriman said she found Robertson’s solution “revolutionary” but very likely difficult to sell. In the meantime, school officials need to find a solution, she said.

“It won’t take much to spark something at Buena,” she said. “We can’t have that big a crowd and guarantee the safety of the children.”