Plan to Reroute Students Criticized

Outraged or merely irritated, Ventura students and their parents criticized officials Friday for proposing to change secondary school boundaries instead of building new schools to deal with spiraling enrollment.

While acknowledging the need to relieve overcrowding, parents said a proposal to shift 460 students from Buena High and Balboa Middle to west side schools is a stop-gap move that severs friendships and fails to solve problems caused by growth on Ventura’s eastern end.

“I think it’s terrible,” said Jordan Vine, an eighth-grader at Balboa Middle School. “I’ve been looking forward to going to Buena forever. All my friends are going there.”

Parents said the school board should push for a third high school and another middle school on the east end of the city instead of realigning boundaries for the second time in four years to accommodate students from thousands of new housing units already built or planned there.

“An east-end high school seems to be the answer,” said Richard Baldwin, a resident of the hillside Skyline tract with two sons who would be transferred from Buena to cross-town Ventura High under the plan. “This problem is not going to go away. As long as we keep building houses on the east end, it’s just going to get worse.”

Some parents are so upset they are planning to circulate petitions urging school board members to scrap the plan when they consider it Tuesday in preparation for a final vote Feb. 27.

But a majority of the five-member board is leaning in favor of the plan outlined for the first time by district administrators at a meeting Thursday night. They agree with the goal of balancing the 2,300 students at Buena with the 1,750 at Ventura High and shifting some of Balboa’s 1,200 students to the 800-student Cabrillo Middle School.

“They’ve done an excellent job in terms of the recommendation,” trustee Jim Wells said. “Of course, the families who are affected are not going to agree with that.”

Trustees John Walker and Cliff Rodrigues also spoke favorably of the plan. But all three said they would carefully consider comments at three hearings before the final vote.

Board President Velma Lomax was out of town and trustee Diane Harriman could not be reached for comment Friday.

Under the new plan, Buena students would be reassigned to Ventura High from three areas: the hillside communities of Skyline, Clearpoint, Ondulando and Hidden Valley; residential tracts between Foothill and Telegraph roads bounded by Tyler and Petit avenues, and a neighborhood south of Ventura College and east of the Buenaventura Mall.

Middle school students living in the tracts between Foothill and Telegraph roads would also be reassigned from Balboa to Cabrillo Middle School near downtown Ventura.

In other efforts to limit enrollment at Balboa and Buena, the district would ban out-of-district transfers to those campuses and cancel a rule that now allows brothers and sisters of current students to enroll.

Only those students now in the 11th grade would be allowed to finish at Buena under the plan, which would take effect in September. All affected middle school students would also have to move in the fall, officials said.

Boundaries for elementary schools would not change, though portable classrooms may be added where needed, officials said.

Concerned that their children would be bused miles from neighborhood schools, many parents said they will fight the boundary changes.

“The main reason we bought here was so our children would be going to Buena High School,” said Cheryl Dawes, who bought a house in the Pacific Breeze tract at Kimball Avenue and Loma Vista Road. “My son goes to Balboa. He’s just established friends, and now we have to start all over again.”

Beginning this weekend, Dawes said she will meet with neighbors and circulate a petition to stop the redistricting. “We’ll do whatever it takes,” she said.

Already, more than half of the district’s 15,000 students live east of Victoria Avenue, but both district high schools are west of Victoria Avenue.

“I’ve escaped this time, but as a concerned parent I really feel we have to have a real hard look at building another high school and middle school,” said parent Marilee Allen, a board member of Buena High’s Parent-Teacher-Student Assn.

Baldwin said district trustees are abdicating their responsibility by not pushing hard for a third high school.

Rodrigues said, however, that a sour economy has discouraged sale of school construction bonds for years, citing the Camarillo elementary district’s four failed bond measures since 1991.

“Yeah, sure, maybe things should have been done, but we just need to look forward now,” Rodrigues said. In March, the district will begin to examine long-term solutions, including building new schools, he said.

Baldwin said he is also frustrated by the district’s lack of leadership, and believes his family might have been better off if officials had followed through with their 1991 plan to send hillside children to Ventura High.

“We live right up the hill from Buena,” he said, “but at least, our kids would be stabilized by now.”

As director of Ventura County’s anti-smog agency, Baldwin said the extra trips bother him as a professional as well. “I have to drive more miles to get my kids to school, which will create more pollution, which I’m responsible for cleaning up.”

District officials say the new plan holds busing and parental commutes to a minimum while achieving the district primary goal of a balanced enrollment.

Other parents greeted the proposed boundary changes with equanimity.

“It will take some adjustment because our families are used to going to local neighborhood schools,” said Anne Wittlin, PTA president at Juanamaria School, where students would graduate to Cabrillo Middle School, not Balboa. “We’re not happy about it, but if that’s the district’s new policy, that’s what we have to do.”

But Kathy Sharp, also a Juanamaria PTA board member, said she wants to know why her 30-year-old neighborhood--only two miles from Buena High and Balboa Middle School but six miles from Ventura High and even farther from Cabrillo Middle School--is being hit with a busing mandate.

Sharp, the mother of four children, is concerned that school enrollment boundaries have become a moving target, not something parents can count on in planning their children’s future.

“They keep changing their minds back and forth,” she said. “My oldest daughter was sent to Cabrillo. Then four years ago they changed their minds so both of my sons went to Balboa. Now my youngest daughter will end up back at Cabrillo.

“You get to know a school and the teachers, then they all the sudden shift it back again,” she said.

Pam Carter, co-president of the Balboa PTA, said the district’s new plan is essentially a continuation of the 1991-92 effort, and should have been approved then. Much of today’s confusion would have been avoided if trustees had not bowed to pressure, she said.

“The hillside was supposed to go to Ventura High back then,” Carter said. “There was a public outcry, and [the board] decided that money talks, so instead of moving people on the hillside, they moved the ones in Montalvo.”

Carter said the need for funneling students out of Balboa High and Buena Middle School is beyond doubt. Although remaining in the Buena enrollment area, Carter said her eighth-grade son will enroll at Ventura High voluntarily next fall to avoid overcrowded classrooms.

“They have a wonderful faculty and administration at Buena,” she said. “But there are just too many children for them to do the type of job they should be doing.”

Buena teacher Tori Sepulveda said the district has no choice but to better balance secondary school enrollments. Twenty-eight seats are crowded into her classroom, but she started the year with 42 students in one class.

“It worked its way down to 34 or 35, but we’re still talking about more students than there are seats for,” she said.

*

Catherine Saillant is a correspondent and Daryl Kelley is a Times staff writer.

FYI

Ventura residents will have three opportunities to ask questions or voice concerns on proposed changes to the city’s school attendance areas. The public hearings are as follows:

* 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Cabrillo Middle School cafeteria

* 7 p.m. Feb. 20

Ventura High School auditorium

* 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27 (board vote scheduled on the issue)

Ventura High School auditorium