$57-Million School Bond OKd for Ballot to Build High School in Oxnard

After dropping a similar proposal a year ago, school trustees decided Wednesday to ask voters in November to approve a $57-million bond measure to build a new high school.

The Oxnard Union High School District board last June scrapped a plan to put a $45-million bond measure on the November 1995 ballot after a survey concluded that not enough voters would support that measure.

Since then, enrollment at the district’s six high schools has continued to climb, worsening a districtwide overcrowding problem.

Trustees and district officials said they need to break ground on a state-donated site in Oxnard soon to avoid having to adopt unpopular measures to accommodate the swelling ranks of students.

“The need for the bond measure is there,” trustee Jean Daily-Underwood said before the meeting. “We feel that now is the time to go ahead with it. Hopefully, the public will be willing to approve it.”

Ventura County voters have been sparing with their votes for local bond measures for schools. Only four of the last 12 attempts in the county have won the two-thirds voter majority needed, and none of those were in the past five years.

Oxnard’s last try was rejected in 1992.

But trustees and school district officials hope that the residents of Oxnard, Camarillo and Port Hueneme who vote on the issue will embrace it this time.

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The district’s six high schools--Oxnard, Camarillo, Rio Mesa, Channel Islands, Hueneme and Frontier--together will house 1,600 more students next year than the facilities were built to handle, officials say. With those students alone, officials say they could open a new high school if they had the bricks and mortar.

“The need for another school is extreme,” Richard Canady, assistant superintendent for business services, said before the meeting.

Trustee Nancy Koch said that if this measure fails in November, the district may have to implement a double session system. Under that program, half of the district’s more than 12,000 students would attend school in the morning and the remainder would take classes in the afternoon.

“We have done a pretty good job of putting portable [classrooms] on most of the campuses,” Koch said before the meeting. “There is really no room to do that any more.”

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The new Oxnard High School, which opened last fall on Gonzales Road near Victoria Avenue, does nothing to ease overcrowding because it merely replaces an old campus.

The state has reimbursed the district for the $9-million purchase of the proposed new school site, also on Gonzales Road but near Oxnard Boulevard.

Now the district hopes that voters will pass the $57-million bond measure, which would cost residents an average of $9 to $10 yearly for 40 years per $100,000 of assessed value on their property. The newest measure would also pay for improvements to school libraries and career centers and for major repairs to facilities.

The district would borrow the money from creditors issuing the bonds and repay them from the increased property tax revenues over a 40-year period, Canady said.