2 Schools Will Always Know Which Way the Wind Blows

And now the weather coming straight to you from . . . De Anza Middle School? Or Emilie Ritchen elementary?

The two Ventura County campuses will soon be equipped to measure and relay up-to-the-minute weather conditions such as temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure. Television viewers may also glimpse the two campuses in the background of KNBC weather segments.

Of the 800 schools that applied earlier this year, De Anza in Ventura and Emilie Ritchen School in Oxnard were two of 50 campuses in Southern California recently selected by Channel 4 as weather station sites.

“I can’t wait for it to be up and going,” said De Anza Assistant Principal Thomas Temprano, who helped apply for the grant in January. “For one, I’ll be able to know what the weather is like all the time, and the other thing is it’s a connection where this school gets on the World Wide Web.”

Once the two schools finish wiring the first classrooms for the Internet, which they both expect to have done in two to three weeks, they will be mounting free weather equipment onto their school rooftops.

Local weather freaks who need the weather conditions pronto can soon access information from the two schools faster then they can get it from the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

The Oxnard station typically updates its information every hour. But on the NBC4 Weather Net site at https://www.knbc4la.com/home.html, Ventura and Oxnard weather information from the two school rooftops will be relayed onto the Internet site in real time. The web page includes 1,600 weather stations across the nation, plus a few in New Zealand and Australia.

“I think a lot of us will be calling De Anza instead of Oxnard,” teacher Jim Hughes said with a laugh. Hughes teaches at De Anza’s exploratory lab, where students learn about meteorology, among other subjects.

Pictures of the schools will also make brief television appearances. NBC weatherman Fritz Coleman, who will occasionally bring up weather information from the school sites, will feature a picture of a school in the background during his Channel 4 weather segments.

Schools selected for the grant were chosen for their favorable geographic location and their proposed use for the weather equipment in class, as well as their need for the educational material. The students will not have to do anything to process the information, but can use the equipment for classroom activities.

“We’re very excited because it will be a wonderful way to strengthen student motivation in science and math, and we’ll be able to be connected to the weather stations all over the world and as far away as New Zealand,” said Emilie Ritchen Principal Carolyn Banks.

The school recently formed a weather committee made up of technology experts who will help create a weather curriculum for the school’s sixth-grade science class.

De Anza already includes meteorology studies in its laboratory, but can use the more sophisticated equipment to enhance the program.

When De Anza school administrators, who recently received access to the Internet in their main office, first sent out their application through the Net they weren’t really sure whether KNBC had received it.

“We sent it out, we didn’t know if it got there,” Assistant Principal Temprano said. “It was out there in cyberspace. It was a leap of cyberfaith.”

February passed with no letter, phone calls or announcements via e-mail letting them know they had won. School administrators figured some other lucky schools received the equipment.

Then on a day teacher Hughes remembers so clearly, March 14, he was watching the Channel 4 news in the morning. They were announcing the winners. First, schools starting with the As scrolled by, then the Bs and Cs, then De Anza Middle School.

“I did a double-take, ran around the house and woke up my wife,” Hughes said.

Since then, the campus has been overflowing with school pride. As seventh-grader Jessica Hernandez, an aspiring weather forecaster, put it: “It will be neat having kids knowing about the weather and being posted on the news and having people say De Anza can do that and has the equipment to do that.”

Other students say the program could help erase the negative image that comes with the school’s location on Ventura Avenue, one of the city’s more rundown neighborhoods.

“It helps to give the school a better name, because people hear [the school] is on the Avenue and say, ‘Oh I’m not sending my kids there because there are fights and gangs,’ ” said eighth-grader Joshua Lewis.

Seven other schools in Ventura County missed out on the chance for a weather station, but won KNBC weather software that teaches students lessons measuring wind velocity, charting rainfall levels and understanding moisture and precipitation.

In Ventura, software winners include Montalvo, Sheridan Way and Blanche Reynolds schools. The Oxnard recipients were E.O. Green, Frank Intermediate and Lemonwood schools. And Briggs School in Santa Paula also won software.