School District Fined for Class Size Violation

The state has fined the Ventura Unified School District $281,000 for slightly exceeding allowable class sizes in the first through third grades, a district official said Wednesday.

Ventura Unified administrators will appeal the penalty, levied in June, and expect to be paid back, said Joseph Richards, assistant superintendent of business.

Lynn Piccoli, financial officer for the state Department of Education, said she has not seen Ventura Unified’s request for a waiver. But the school district has one year to appeal the fine, Piccoli said.

The penalty was levied after the district filed a routine enrollment report that showed the average districtwide class size for the lower grades in the last school year was 30.1 students per classroom, Piccoli said.

Maximum enrollment allowed by the state for those grades is 30, she said. Piccoli agreed with Richards that it is very likely the fine will be waived because the state gives districts wide latitude for correcting the problem, she said. No other county school district was fined during the 1994-1995 school year.

Last year, for instance, four Ventura County school districts were assessed similar fines and all eventually had the penalties rescinded, Piccoli said. Ventura Unified was also among the four assessed last year, she said.

Richards said his staff reviewed the data in the enrollment report after being notified of the fine and discovered some minor discrepancies that pushed class totals over the legal limit.

Those errors have been corrected and a revised report will be submitted to the state Department of Education in coming weeks, he said.

“We went back and went through the date with a fine-tooth comb,” Richards said. “I figured we could find 0.1% if we looked hard enough and we did.”

The state Education Code allows that enrollment in individual classrooms may rise as high as 32 students per room. But when averaged districtwide, class size in grades one through three may not go over 30 pupils, according to the Education Code.

Richards said his staff is aware of the problem and is constantly monitoring enrollment to keep it within state limits.

“We will be managing this very closely this year to make sure we are not in that penalty phase,” Richard said.

The district’s problem in the 1993-94 school year was also very slight and was again corrected after recomputing the number, Richards said. Besides Ventura Unified, Oxnard Elementary, Mesa Union Elementary and Briggs Elementary districts were also assessed that year, Piccoli said.

But all the districts were reimbursed after receiving waivers or filing revised reports, she said.

“I always advised districts to go back into their data and make sure they compiled and reported it correctly.”

Waivers are granted if school districts can show that unavoidable factors, such as space availability and travel distance for students, led to the violation, said Gerald Kilbert, an analyst in the state’s School Business Services Division.

Richards said that overcrowding is not a significant problem in the district’s 17 elementary schools. Portable classrooms are installed to take up extra students, particularly in the city’s fast-growing eastern end, he said.

Long-term solutions to overcrowding include building more schools and hiring more teachers. But those answers would require a vast commitment of money, he said.

“It’s a funding issue,” he said. “We need more teachers as well as facilities.”