District May Need to Find Funding for More Schools : Growth: But Oxnard educators say chances of a bond measure receiving the two-thirds vote needed to pass might prove difficult.

Even as workers break ground for the last of three elementary schools funded by a 1988 bond measure, Oxnard district officials say they may need another borrowing and building program.

“If we continue growing at the same rate that we have, we will need more schools,” Oxnard School District Supt. Bernard Korenstein said.

Korenstein said he expects the new Norman R. Brekke School, scheduled to open in August, 1997, to exceed capacity within a year.

This school year alone, he said, the number of students enrolled in the district increased by nearly 400, bringing the total to 13,600.

The district created 17 new classrooms to accommodate the additional students. Because of a lack of space in regular schools, five classrooms for kindergartners were placed at Elm School, the district’s intercession school.

“The city is growing faster than we can build schools,” Korenstein said, adding that he expects the strawberry fields around the Brekke School site to be replaced by housing projects within a few years.

But with Camarillo voters rejecting a $55-million bond measure for school expansion in the Pleasant Valley School District earlier this month, the chances of an Oxnard measure receiving the two-thirds vote it needs to pass may be difficult, Korenstein said.

“We may have no choice,” he said. “But there are only two ways to pay for new schools. One is with government money which we don’t have, the other is with property tax money.”

Although 70.9% of the voters in Oxnard approved the $40-million bond measure in 1988, it was not without some previous failures, Korenstein said.

In 1962, voters rejected a $4-million bond measure, and in 1973 and 1975 two other measures fell short of the two-thirds vote, Korenstein said.

“It’s always hard to obtain two-thirds of the votes and we were successful [the third time] because we made clear to the voters that we had no other venues to house the growing number of students in the district,” Korenstein said.

Indeed, responding to a growing enrollment, the district began year-round education in 1976. Because the district operates 12 months instead of nine, year-round education schools can increase capacity up to 33% a year.

The $40-million bond measure financed the construction of Emilie Ritchen School, which opened in 1993, and Frank Intermediate School, which began serving seventh- and eighth-graders in the fall of 1994.

Also, the district used part of the money to add six classrooms to Rose Avenue School and to open the Nueva Vista School--the district’s alternative education school, which serves about 37 students.

Korenstein said he expects that Brekke School will fill as fast as Ritchen School did. When Ritchen School opened, it had 700 students; today it has more than 1,000.

The $9-million Brekke School, named for the district’s former superintendent, is designed to accommodate 900 students.

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FYI

The groundbreaking ceremony for Brekke School, on the northeast side of Oxnard, is scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday. Construction is expected to begin in early March.