Panel Seeks Solutions to School Crowding

Launching several months of brainstorming, a special committee met for the first time Thursday night to find ways to ease overcrowding in city schools that could include building a new high school campus and requiring students to attend classes year-round.

Stocked with everybody from Ventura Mayor Jack Tingstrom to local parents and teachers, the 24-member panel of civic leaders and residents was formed to develop long-term proposals for creating more classroom space for Ventura’s nearly 17,000 students.

The committee’s inaugural meeting at the Doubletree Hotel comes after Ventura Unified School District trustees decided in an unpopular vote in February to send about 185 students at overcrowded Buena High to under-enrolled Ventura High in the fall.

Although Buena High School is facing one of the biggest space crunches in the district, Supt. Joe Spirito said committee members will also be expected to come up with recommendations by December to help remedy packed conditions in Ventura’s 17 elementary and four middle schools.

“This is going to be a hot group,” Spirito said before the meeting. “They are really going to make some tough decisions and good recommendations. This is not a Mickey Mouse operation.”

District officials said that student enrollment has grown from 15,000 to the present 17,000 in a three-year period, with numbers expected to climb steadily in the future. Ventura’s elementary schools last year were on average 98% full, while Ventura High School was at 85% capacity. Buena High, in contrast, had about 1/10th more students than the 2,187 it was built to handle.

“The district will actually run out of space before the kids who are now in kindergarten graduate [from high school],” said Rob Corley, the Ventura-based school facilities expert the district hired to run committee meetings.

Spirito said some possible recommendations might include building a third high school or new middle school in the city’s east end, where schools have reported a large surge in enrollment.

But district officials have said that building a new high school campus would most likely require a bond measure, the sale of school property or another difficult financing alternative to generate the estimated $40 million needed.

To accommodate a growing number of students, Spirito said the committee will also probably study reopening three elementary schools that were closed several years ago, because they were either not earthquake safe or had low enrollment. The shuttered schools are Avenue, Santa Ana and Washington.

In addition to considering the sale of district-owned land to pay for constructing a new high school, the panel will weigh placing schools on a year-round, “multitrack” schedule. Under such a schedule, students would attend classes in four shifts, creating 25% more classroom space districtwide because only 75% of the district’s students would be attending school at the same time.

Finally, committee members will also look at how a $771-million state initiative to cut the size of kindergarten through third-grade classes to no more than 20 pupils each will further strain facilities.

“That affects us dramatically,” said Pat Chandler, assistant superintendent for educational services.

District trustees agreed July 30 to consider hiring as many as 25 new teachers to reduce the student-teacher ratio in the first grade as an initial step. But they must also find the same number of classrooms--space the district does not currently have available.

Ventura voters passed a slow-growth measure in November that bars builders from developing in greenbelt areas. But the city continues to grow in other neighborhoods, and committee members said Thursday that no new school has been built in Ventura since Portola Elementary was erected in 1978 and that school facilities are on average more than 42 years old.

As committee members struggle to come up with the best solutions for housing Ventura’s students, Corley said that they will be asked to consider all available options.

“There is nothing on or off the table,” Corley said.