Ventura Educators to Form Panel to Address Overcrowding

Seeking to ease overcrowding in the city’s schools, educators Tuesday announced plans to form a special panel to develop long-term solutions to the problem.

Ventura Unified School District trustees voted in February to send about 185 students at overcrowded Buena High to less-packed Ventura High, a move that sparked fierce protests from parents and students.

After the unpopular vote, a special steering committee--made up of district trustees and Ventura City Council members--was created to come up with ways to address the continuing enrollment surge in eastern Ventura schools.

District officials said Tuesday they are close to appointing 20 to 22 people to a larger group, which would be expected to draft proposals by the end of the year.

“The major thing that we are going to be looking at is making sure that our schools are in synchronization with the city’s growth plan, so that we will be able to accommodate our students as the city grows,” trustee John Walker, a steering committee member, said before the meeting.

Walker said some of the options the panel will study include building a third high school in Ventura. The district could consider making a new high school as large as the city’s existing two campuses or build a smaller magnet school, Walker said.

But district officials have said such construction would most likely require a bond measure, the sale of school property or another difficult financing alternative.

The panel created to study such options--along with overcrowding in the city’s 17 elementary and four middle schools--will include school district officials, representatives from city government, officials from the Chamber of Commerce, teachers and parents.

“We will talk about a plan that will hopefully solve all the schools’ [overcrowding] problems,” said Joseph Richards Jr., assistant superintendent for business services and a steering committee member.

Richards said the new panel will also study how $771 million in new state funds--designed to cut the size of kindergarten through third-grade classes to no more than 20 pupils each--will affect districtwide overcrowding. District officials have not yet decided how they will put the class size reduction plan into place.

But school officials estimate they would have to hire 24 teachers and find an equal number of additional classrooms to trim classes to 20 students in just the first-grade classes. Even with the new state money, the district could have to ante up as much as $224,000 to make the program work, officials said. To help the panel get started, the district has hired Rob Corley, a Ventura-based school planning consultant, to serve as the panel’s facilitator.

Panel members will be selected by the current steering committee, which also includes Ventura Mayor Jack Tingstrom, City Councilman Ray Di Guilio and Trustee Jim Wells.

Walker said Tuesday he regrets that the board was forced to send students to Ventura High instead of nearby Buena High, saying the trustees had no choice.

“If we wouldn’t have done it, Buena would have opened [in September] with over 2,400 students for this fall,” Walker said.

Citing district enrollment statistics, Walker said Buena was built to accommodate only 2,187 students. Ventura High, which was built for 2,120 students, has only 1,796 students, Walker said.