Tech, Trade Focus Seen for New Campus

To best serve a career-oriented student body, Ventura County’s proposed four-year university will have a strong focus on technology and international trade, Cal State Channel Islands President Handel Evans told about 80 teachers, parents and school officials Monday night at a forum on education.

“There’s a new national agenda,” Evans said. “Our agenda is the global marketplace. . . . The way in which our whole economy is turning is globally, to the outside.”

Many of the students who attend Ventura County’s first four-year university, Evans said, will be full-time workers supporting families. They will be seeking skills to help them compete in a constantly changing, technology-driven job market, he said.

“Your children and grandchildren can expect to change their careers” two or three times, Evans told audience members. “Education has to respond to that.”

Technology and the best ways to teach students high-tech skills were major themes at the community meeting, sponsored by the Los Angeles Times at the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools offices.

But a panel of five local educators touched on a wide range of issues in the 90-minute session, covering everything from the county’s efforts to bolster bilingual education to the importance of parental involvement in public schools. Audience members submitted questions to panelists during a question-and-answer session.

Among the issues addressed:

* Defending a system that has come under criticism, Jennifer Robles, the bilingual program coordinator for the Ventura Unified School District, said schools best serve students who come from non-English speaking homes by teaching them in both English and their native languages. There are more than 26,000 such students in Ventura County, Robles said.

Studies show students who master multiple languages are able to analyze situations from numerous perspectives, she said. But parents need to be patient, because it typically takes non-English speaking students five to seven years before they can read English textbooks without difficulty, she said.

* Joseph Spirito, Ventura district superintendent, also struck a high-tech theme, advocating a strong math curriculum. However, he said a widening income gap between rich and poor families is a problem that schools alone cannot solve.

“What we have is comfort and affluence, side by side with deprivation and poverty--even in Ventura County,” Spirito said.

* Betty Roark, a Parent Teacher Assn. president from Moorpark, called on local parents to get more involved in issues such as school safety.

* Asked why American students seem to lag far behind Asian students in math and science skills, Ventura County Supt. of Schools Charles Weis argued that schools in this country often give hasty treatment to subject matters that require lengthy immersion.

“The American curriculum is an inch deep and a mile wide,” Weis said. “We don’t spend a lot of time on the topics. In September, we review--we review what wasn’t learned the year before.”

Times Ventura County Editorial Page Editor Doug Adrianson, who moderated Monday’s forum, said the newspaper plans a series of community meetings on issues important to local residents.

“Many of the most important issues of our time relate to education, one way or another,” Adrianson said.