Oxnard College Breaks Ground for Complex

Two decades after Oxnard residents waged a bitter battle for their own community college, founders of the school and its present-day supporters gathered Wednesday to celebrate the college’s 20th anniversary by breaking ground for a $6.75-million letters and science complex.

The complex is the latest step toward completion of the Oxnard Community College campus, which was begun in 1975.

“There is an intense feeling of excitement at the official commencement of this building,” Gary Morgan, Oxnard’s academic senate president, told a crowd of teachers, students and administrators. “It is something so long awaited that it defies description.”

To Oxnard officials, the groundbreaking marks much more than the college’s 20th birthday. They are counting on the complex, with the added students it will lure, to help the Oxnard college shed its reputation as the stepchild of the larger, more established Ventura and Moorpark colleges.

It is a battle the college has been fighting since its inception amid bitter opposition to a third Ventura County community college, but one its president, Elise Schneider, thinks is almost over.

“We’re getting there,” she said. “I think it is nothing but up from now on in.”

The school--long hobbled by a lack of facilities that prevented it from offering more courses to attract new students--has grown by two buildings since 1992. And the number of students who transfer to four-year universities--although still lower than Moorpark and Ventura--has been slowly but steadily increasing.

Next spring, 26 new classes will be added. And despite a drop in enrollment of nearly 6% last year, officials believe the college is finally on the verge of attracting students in greater numbers, making it a real rival to the district’s other colleges.

The Oxnard campus has 5,094 students, compared to 9,976 for Ventura and 10,664 for Moorpark.

“To me, the potential of this college is phenomenal,” Schneider said. “We have the opportunity to be of equal size, if not larger, than the other two.”

It hasn’t been an easy battle, Oxnard officials say.

When Bill Simpson, the Oxnard representative on the district’s board from 1961 to 1981, told trustees that it was about time for the county’s largest city to have its own community college, the opposition was heavy.

Saying it would drain district funds, some board members protested its creation with proclamations of “Not a nickel for Oxnard college,” said Carlos Diaz, who began teaching English at the college when it was founded and retired this year.

Teachers argued that they would be forced to sacrifice wage increases for the new college. A Ventura coach said sports would suffer at the other colleges if they lost the enormous talent generated in the Oxnard area.

But Simpson, whose name now graces a street on the campus, pushed forward, and the board officially voted to build the Oxnard campus on March 26, 1974.

Oxnard’s classes started in storefront offices leased from banks and grocery stores in 1975.

Carolyn Dorrance, a social science professor who attended the groundbreaking, said she remembered one teacher holding class in a Laundromat and the then-president’s fight with the district for funds to erect a flagpole for the school banner.

To make matters worse, only one year after the college’s first two permanent classrooms were built at the intersection of Bard Road and Rose Avenue in 1977, Proposition 13 was passed.

The 1978 taxpayer revolt dried up public funding, and with the exception of a small cafeteria in 1982 and the Occupational Education Complex in 1984, no new buildings were built until this decade.

A small child development center was completed in 1992, then the gym in 1994. By 1996, the new letters and science complex should also be complete.

The lack of new buildings left Oxnard in a vicious cycle of low enrollment, reinforcing its status as the smallest of the district’s three colleges, Schneider said.

Without the classrooms, the Oxnard college could not offer enough sections of the courses students needed. That kept enrollment, and consequently state funding, low.

Officials are looking to the letters and science complex--a 36,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility with science labs, lecture halls, faculty offices and classrooms--to break that trend.

Irene Pinkard, Oxnard’s vice president of administrative services, estimates that the building will attract as many as 1,000 new students to the college.

In addition to the promise of new students and new courses, the school expects to benefit from the elimination next spring of a $50-per-unit fee for students with a bachelor’s degree.

Already the college has seen the benefits of having its own gym. In the past, Oxnard students interested in athletics often took classes at the Ventura college--which is equipped with swimming pools, football fields and baseball diamonds. And the school’s basketball team was forced to practice and perform at a local high school.

Today, students from the Ventura campus are making the trek to Oxnard just to take a gym class.

“I like it here a lot better than at Ventura College,” said Eric Quilantang, a Ventura College engineering student. “The new gym here is better. All the equipment is new.”

Quilantang and a fellow Ventura student both take weightlifting classes at Oxnard.

In response to the demand, the college plans to add at least three physical education courses next spring.

But although the new gym may be raising Oxnard’s profile, officials say the college is still losing too many students who can’t get into the basic courses--such as English, science and math--that are needed to transfer to a four-year university. For example, 370 students were on waiting lists for math classes at the start of last semester.

Ron Jackson, vice-president of student services, said the shortage of courses is forcing students to take longer to complete their degrees.

To combat the problem, Oxnard will add 26 classes next semester, many of them in the basics.

“This is significant exponential growth,” said Cathy Garnica, a public information officer.

Despite the problems with course offerings, the Oxnard campus has slowly increased the number of transfers to four-year colleges by aggressively helping students apply to universities through its Transfer Center, started in 1986.

In the 1993-94 school year, 202 Oxnard students transferred to four-year institutions. But in one semester this year, 234 students transferred and that number is expected to reach 300 by the end of the year, according to Gilbert Ramirez, a transfer coordinator.

These signs of growth don’t change the fact that Oxnard is still the district’s smallest college, Schneider said. But they do mean that it’s finally living up to its full potential.

“I think we’re becoming a mature campus, growing out of the stepchild label and moving into adulthood.”