School Ready to Open--and Close Door on Name Dispute

With a battle over the naming of Oxnard School District’s 18th and newest campus behind them, school officials were hard at work Tuesday getting the Norman R. Brekke School ready to open its doors.

The first of 810 youngsters expected to attend will arrive today. As the elementary school students file through the entrance of their new east Oxnard campus, they may notice a cluster of tiles containing the embossed signature of Norman R. Brekke, the district’s former superintendent, whom the school has been named after.

With the Spanish-style buildings now open, some educators urged residents to put the past behind them and direct their focus on helping students to excel in the classroom.

“The nuts and bolts of the school-naming was a community issue that needed to be resolved, but that was a temporary issue,” Norman R. Brekke School Principal Anthony Zubia said Tuesday. “The real issue is the education of the children here, whether the name of the school is Norman Brekke or some other name.”

The attention focusing on the naming of the 13-acre campus--situated on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard off Rose Avenue--began in May. Latino activists Juan Soria and Tila Estrada urged trustees to overturn a previous board’s decision to name the campus after Brekke.

Soria contended that Brekke, then the assistant superintendent, had thwarted efforts to integrate the district’s schools during the 1970s. But Soria, who spearheaded the opposition, died of a heart attack in early June.

What followed later that month was a heated board meeting in which Brekke supporters and critics alike came out in full force to debate the issue. In the end, trustees compromised, agreeing to keep the name Brekke while naming a future campus after Soria.

Although the past may still hang over them, teachers moved forward Tuesday preparing to hold classes in the salmon-and-beige-colored school, which is covered by a terra cotta-hued roof. They expect 200 students to arrive at the year-round campus today and begin filling the school’s 29 classrooms. Students in the year-round school’s remaining three groups will arrive later this summer.

“Everyone’s kind of flailing about trying to make this work,” first-grade teacher Sandra Kelble said Tuesday.

With her curly brown hair slightly frazzled and small beads of perspiration on her forehead, Kelble lugged dozens of boxes filled with instructional materials and stacked them against shelves along the wall.

She then filled a yellow tray full of materials for her students: soybean-based crayons along with rulers and scissors. She planned to stay for hours to have everything ready for her 20 students.

“I mean, not being prepared isn’t an option,” she said.

To Kelble, the naming of the school is a done deal, but she believes the matter may hold lessons for future trustees.

“I don’t think [the previous board] went into it thinking the community would be upset,” she said. “Maybe in the future, they could think about it more before coming up with a name.”

At the $14-million campus--half of the funding coming from a $40-million 1988 bond measure and the rest from city funds and developer and mitigation fees--Zubia plans to concentrate on positive matters.

At the school, surrounded by recently harvested strawberry fields, Zubia expects to teach students about the good side of Brekke, his drive for excellence, his patience, his love of good penmanship.

“It’s like George Washington, you look at the man as the symbol,” Zubia said. “What you want to do with kids is to present the ideal concept of Norman Brekke.”