School Overwhelmed by Transfers : Ventura High Gets More Than Twice the Number Expected

Students and parents protested, but administrators said it had to be done.

So 187 Buena High School students were transferred to Ventura High this year to ease overcrowding at the east-end school.

But when the west-side campus opened this fall, those students arrived, along with an additional 200. “We went, ‘Whoa, where did they all come from?’ ” Supt. Joseph Spirito said.

As administrators scrambled to locate more than 400 desks and several dozen teachers to accommodate the increased enrollment, they began to realize that many Buena transferees had not come alone.

Their Buena friends, boyfriends, girlfriends and cousins came to keep them company, Spirito and school counselors said.

“It was like a chain reaction,” said Amber Jones, 15, a sophomore who was required to transfer to Ventura High School. “Some of my friends came, and other friends came with them, and other people came with those friends.”

Administrators estimate that of the 200 unexpected new enrollees, 60 to 100 were Buena students. The other unanticipated students are thought to have moved here from outside the district.

The jump in the number of Buena students on campus came after a highly contentious decision that the Ventura Unified School District board made in late February that incensed many parents and brought some students to tears. The trustees voted to redraw attendance boundaries, sending nearly 200 Buena students across town to balance out the overcrowded east-end campus.

As a result, Ventura High School, which was underenrolled last year, is slightly above capacity this fall. Buena, on the other hand, once overcrowded by 600, is now slightly below capacity.

To help the new Buena students have a smooth transition, Ventura High School administrators met with parents last spring before the transfers occurred and invited the new students to a special orientation this fall.

“We had staff, student leaders, a tour of the school and lunch provided to make them feel as quickly as possible at home,” Ventura High Principal Henry Robertson said.

When the board announced its decision to transfer Buena students, many of them did not want to come alone.

Students such as Nicole Corte opted to make the transfer to stay with old buddies. As she talked on the school lawn during a lunch break recently, she was surrounded by friends who joined her in the move. One put her arms across Nicole’s shoulders.

“There were four of us who came together,” said Nicole, a 16-year-old junior.

Like many, Nicole was originally angry at the trustees’ decision to redraw the attendance boundaries. “I went to all those board meetings and said, ‘What do you think you guys are doing?’ ” she said. But having spent a while at her new campus, she has formed a new sentiment:

“I like it here better. I was getting tired of the cliques at Buena. . . . There were too many people there who thought they were too cool for everyone else.”

At Ventura, she says, she can wear whatever she wants without automatically getting labeled as a “druggie,” “preppy” or “weird.”

Allen McCleery, 15, a Buena transfer, said his mother once wrote an angry letter to the board, saying something like, “I’ve had it up to here with the likes of you,” about the redrawing of attendance boundaries. Although he said he was originally “kind of mad,” he reports that “it’s OK now.”

The original redistricting plan called for shifting more students, but it was eventually toned down to spare incoming juniors.

Under the new plan, Buena students reassigned to Ventura came from three areas: the hillside communities of Skyline, Clearpoint, Ondulando and Hidden Valley; the neighborhoods between Foothill and Telegraph roads and Tyler and Petit avenues; and an area south of Ventura College and east of Buenaventura Mall.

Since mid-September, Spirito has visited Ventura High School frequently to listen to students who once expressed their dissatisfaction with the transfers during heated board meetings.

“What I’m hearing is that, ‘I love the school, the kids are friendly and nice, but if I had the chance to go back, I would,’ ” he said. He estimates that “for every 10 kids, two are very unhappy and want to go back.”

That’s not the case with transferee Janet Golebiewski, who planned to attend Friday night’s big game between her old school and her new one.

“I hope they won’t call me a traitor, but actually I kind of don’t care because Ventura’s better,” said Janet, a junior, who prepared for the game with a V for Ventura High painted on one cheek and an animal footprint, representing the school’s cougar mascot, smeared on the other.

No students will be transferred back, but administrators have ordered a stop to all inter-district and intra-district high school transfers to keep the enrollment from shifting further, Spirito said. The superintendent and trustees plan to continue discussions with a long-range planning committee to determine how to deal with school crowding.