ELECTIONS / PLEASANT VALLEY SCHOOLS BOND MEASURE : In Its 4th Try, District Focuses on Getting Out More Voters : The $55-million proposal to build and upgrade facilities lost by just 101 ballots in June. Officials believe they can succeed this time without changing opponents’ minds.

He may not be aware of it, but Jim Morandi is among the registered voters that Pleasant Valley School District is targeting this fall in its fourth attempt in four years to pass a $55-million bond measure.

The district needs just 101 more “yes” votes on Nov. 7 than were cast in the June election to reach the required two-thirds majority to pass the measure that would enable the growing district to fix dilapidated schools and build three new ones.

Morandi, a 29-year-old software developer, lives in Camarillo Springs, a cluster of houses and condominiums in several gated communities at the base of the Conejo Grade. The community voted 60% in favor of the measure in June--the lowest approval rate of any precinct.

Although he is single and has no children, Morandi said he supports education. However, Morandi neglected to vote for the measure in June simply because he said he “skimmed” over it in the voter’s pamphlet.

“I’m all for giving money to the schools,” he said. “I think schools are our future.”

It’s people like Morandi that school officials are attempting to reach.

“We’re really trying to get people to understand how important their vote is,” said Trustee Jan McDonald.

The measure has achieved progressively greater support each time it has appeared on the ballot.

In June, 1991, 59.9% of the city’s voters favored approval. In November, 1991, the figure edged up to 64.4%. Some 65.7% of voters cast “yes” votes in June. But the necessary two-thirds majority has proved an elusive goal.

“We were the highest of the losers in the state and that’s really frustrating,” said Associate Supt. Howard Hamilton.

School district officials say they have identified at least 350 people in favor of the bond issue who did not vote for one reason or another. If those affirmative votes had landed in the ballot box four months ago, the measure would have passed. So close is the district to winning passage that this time around, volunteer campaign workers aren’t even bothering to try to change opponents’ minds.

In “this election, for the get-out-the-vote [effort], we’re looking for absentee ballots and to make sure people vote by mail,” said Elaine Petterson, a member of Citizens For Better Schools, which is spearheading the campaign. “We’re focusing on people who are for it. We’re focusing on people who forgot to vote. . . . That’s our push, frankly.”

If that assumption is correct, more people forgot to vote in Camarillo Springs than anywhere else.

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After three failed attempts to pass what this fall is known as Measure M, school district officials believe the need for the money is well-established in the minds of the district’s 37,879 voters.

Camarillo, incorporated in 1964, is young and affluent. The same can’t be said for the 7,000-pupil Pleasant Valley School District.

The district, which teaches children in kindergarten through eighth grade, celebrated its 125th anniversary in 1993. Its schools aren’t quite that ancient, but most date back to the 1960s. Back then, the district constructed one school a year--on average--to accommodate an annual enrollment increase of 200 students.

Superficially, most of the district’s 14 schools look fine, Hamilton said.

“It’s the things you don’t see until the heaters break down or the bathrooms give out” that are the real problems, he said.

In 1988, heaters broke down at four schools during a cold snap. Portable toilets are sometimes brought in when a school’s plumbing fails.

“All of our children take water bottles to school because we don’t want our kids drinking out of the drinking fountains because of the plumbing,” said Camarillo Springs resident Kimbra Gascon, a mother of two children.

In 1990, a 20-year master plan projected enrollment would reach 10,000 by the year 2009.

District officials say three new schools, costing about $10 million each, will be needed to accommodate those students. At the rate Camarillo is growing, there isn’t much time before housing developments gobble up most of the existing land that would be needed for those schools.

“If we don’t get the land now, we won’t get it,” Hamilton said.

Part of the bond measure would pay off the more than $3.5 million borrowed to build Tierra Linda School. Completed last year, the 37,847-square-foot school is already essentially full at 718 students. The remainder of the bond revenue would be tapped to renovate existing schools. Each school has a detailed list of needed improvements ranging from leaky roofs to crumbling playgrounds.

The district also sees an opportunity to wire schools for the kind of technological access no one envisioned 30 years ago. For instance, only one district school has Internet access, Hamilton said.

Cost to property owners to repay the education bonds would be about $25 a year or $2.10 a month per $100,000 in assessed valuation.

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Fast-growing east Camarillo--which has only three schools, although a third of the district’s students reside there--overwhelmingly backed the measure last June.

“In the east they know the pressure because kids are being bused all over the place,” Hamilton said. “Where we’ve missed is in pockets of west Camarillo.”

Nowhere has the district missed more than in Camarillo Springs. Yet the unique nature of the community makes it difficult to get the message across.

A mix of retirees and young renters lives in the gated communities of Camarillo Springs, which is accessible only by a freeway off-ramp.

Senior citizens generally live in the homes of Camarillo Springs Country Club Village, which abuts the public Camarillo Springs golf course. Single-family homes and condominiums compose a more upscale development nearby.

“It’s hard in gated communities to walk around and talk to people,” Hamilton said. “We haven’t gone out and blitzed the area. We haven’t made any special effort.”

Just what makes the relatively isolated community different from the district’s other 21 voting precincts is difficult to ascertain.

Conventional wisdom has some people pointing the finger at retirees, a voting group historically reluctant to pay for schools. But 75% of the voters in the Leisure Village retirement complex on the east side of town backed the bond measure in June.

Still, Country Club Village resident and retiree Kitty Starkey said residents of the mobile home park are generally less affluent than those in Leisure Village. Many of her neighbors are in their 70s and 80s, she said.

“They probably feel like they’ve already paid for schools,” Starkey said. “There are so many people on fixed incomes they probably would vote against it.”

Former Camarillo Springs resident Dave Awrey, 40, has a different theory. People in Camarillo Springs have fewer community ties, the property consultant said.

“If they’re young they tend to be more yuppie-ish and into their own little program and tend not to join civic organizations and get into the community,” he said. “They tend to be in their own little world.”

There’s some truth to that, said UC Berkeley graduate student Mary Gail Snyder. She is the co-author of a forthcoming book tentatively titled “Fortress America,” an analysis of gated communities and what they mean for communities.

People who live in gated developments aren’t much different from the rest of the populace, Snyder said. But gated communities, which often furnish such services as police-like private security and parks, enable residents to withdraw more from participation in society.

“They have even less need of the public sphere than the rest of us, which makes it easier for them to vote ‘no’ on bond measures,” Snyder said. “We’ve seen withdrawal from many other forms of engagement. . . . Why should schools be any different?”

The comments of some in Camarillo Springs add credence to that view.

“I like to see kids get a good education,” said retiree and Irena Avenue resident Phyllis Domingo, who concedes that she is no longer a regular voter. “[But] it’s late in life and I just can’t be bothered with that anymore.”

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Against such a backdrop it’s perhaps not surprising that those campaigning for Measure M are taking what they freely admit is a calculated risk by zeroing in on recalcitrant voters.

Petterson, involved for the first time in the campaign, admits the measure’s June defeat shook her complacency.

“I was certain it would pass [the last time],” she said. “I just thought I had to get involved this time around to make sure it did pass.”

Citizens For Better Schools, which boasts more participation than ever, is also spending more money than it has in the past. Children are bringing more brochures home from school. The group has paid to print absentee voter ballots. A pamphlet timed to arrive at homes the day before the election tries a little teacher humor: “The dog ate my ballot” is one of the listed excuses for not voting. It also admonishes, “This time . . . No excuses!”

“We’re not having to try and convince people to vote for it,” said district spokeswoman Sherry Jean Cole. “The votes seem to be there, it’s just making sure [people] get out and vote.”