Plan to Ease Crowding Pleases Few : Education: Some see Ventura’s proposal to redraw boundaries and cap admissions as the only way to address spiraling growth at some schools.

Parents and teachers on Wednesday had mixed reactions to a plan by Ventura educators to redraw some attendance boundaries and cap admissions at popular schools in a bid to control spiraling student growth.

“They want to change boundaries again?” asked Marilee Allen, whose two children attend Buena High School.

“Didn’t we just do that four years ago? And it turned out to be a joke,” she said. “A lot of people did a lot of research and then nothing happened. Nothing changed.”

But Stephen Magoon, who teaches math at Buena, said something has to be done. The school, with an enrollment of 2,275, is bursting with too many students, he said.

“It’s just kind of a powder keg ready to explode,” Magoon said. “I see the majority of my colleagues extremely on edge and agitated about it. Class sizes are way too big.”

Indeed, instead of balancing student levels at Ventura and Buena high schools, the districtwide realignment in 1992 has had the opposite effect. Enrollment at Buena is growing while Ventura’s is shrinking, because of the perception throughout the city that Buena’s curriculum is academically superior.

Buena High, which was constructed in the 1960s, now has nearly 600 more students than the much older Ventura High campus, which was built more than 65 years ago.

Enrollment is also mushrooming at Balboa and Anacapa middle schools and Sheridan Way, E. P. Foster, Serra and Saticoy elementary schools. Overall, district enrollment grew by 833 students over the past two years, a gain of 6%.

Ventura Unified School District leaders on Tuesday unveiled a series of proposals they say are needed to deal with the growth. They include closing admissions at schools where enrollment has reached a set cap--even if students being turned away must attend schools outside their neighborhoods.

Details of how an enrollment cap would work--including who is turned away and whether siblings would qualify for automatic admission--will be worked out over the next month, officials said.

Trustees are also looking at assigning students from any future residential tracts on the city’s east side to Ventura High School and providing free busing to Ventura as an incentive for east-end students.

The most controversial proposal, however, involves redrawing some attendance boundaries. Likely candidates for remapping are Buena and Balboa, school officials said.

Despite their skepticism, Allen and several other parents said they are willing to hear school officials out because they, too, are concerned about overcrowding.

At Buena, some teachers have more than 40 students per class, Allen said.

“I see my children’s education suffering terribly,” she said. “The problem child gets attention. The bright students get attention. But all those kids in the middle get lost.”

When the district approved a plan redrawing attendance lines for all 23 Ventura schools four years ago, officials said it would balance enrollments and take care of future growth for at least a decade.

The realignment also established a “feeder” system, in which a student attending a particular elementary school could expect to go to the same middle and high school as his or her neighborhood friends.

The feeder-school concept has worked well. But some parents said the goal of balancing enrollments was doomed from the start.

Instead of accepting the recommendations of the school district staff and a parents committee, the school board voted unanimously in March 1992 to include the Ondulando area of eastern Ventura in Buena’s attendance area.

That added at least 160 students to Buena’s enrollment, said Kathe Klabaugh, a Buena High parent who was closely involved with a citizens committee that made recommendations on the boundary changes.

“I think they screwed up four years ago,” Klabaugh said. “They had their chance to set it straight and they didn’t do it.”

John Walker, the trustee who made the motion to include the hillside neighborhood in Buena’s district, said he now regrets that decision. It was based on the erroneous assumption that Buena could handle as many as 2,600 students. Officials now say the school’s capacity is closer to 2,100, Walker said.

The school board also could not forecast the explosion in admissions, he said.

“There is always going to be criticism,” Walker said. “But you have to remember, we don’t have a crystal ball.”

Allen agrees that the school board should not take all the blame. Ventura city officials have approved vast housing tracts in the eastern part of the city that are generating scores of new students, she said.

“I’ve watched this ocean of houses grow out there and it just doesn’t make any sense,” Allen said. “They take the building permit money, but no one has addressed the school situation.”

Indeed, the long-term solution is probably to build a new high school and possibly a middle school on the city’s eastern edge, parents and school officials say. But with no money for building, that option is not currently available.

In the meantime, the school board and district leaders need to take a different tack to address the problem, said Magoon, the Buena math teacher. They shouldn’t bother to hold additional public hearings and form citizen committees to solicit public opinion, he said.

It is clear that more residents want their children to attend Buena than Ventura and will go to great lengths to achieve that, Magoon said. The school board should be the voice of reason.

“I think the school board is just going to have to bite the bullet and do the right thing.”