Resounding Questions . . .

Among Ventura County’s top news stories of 1998, two will profoundly shape our future and could help provide answers to questions being asked all over the nation:

* Is there a way to control urban sprawl while continuing to provide housing, jobs and economic opportunity for a growing population?

* What is the most effective way for children from non-English-speaking homes to catch up in English class without falling behind in everything else?

Both of these issues sparked expensive, fiercely fought initiative campaigns and both will only grow in significance and influence in the years ahead. In each case, Ventura County will serve as a real-life laboratory with observers watching intently from far and wide.

The Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiative, passed by a large margin in November, transferred the power to approve many new developments from elected officials to the voting public. Related measures drew urban growth boundaries, beyond which most development is forbidden, around the cities of Camarillo, Oxnard, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. Ventura passed a similar law in 1995; Moorpark will vote on its own version this month.

The land-use measures were billed as a way to “save the farms,” although most farmers opposed them. Now that they are the law, reality will begin to confirm or refute the claims of those who championed or fought them.

What sacrifices will be required in return for preserving the vast green spaces that separate our cities? How will our economy, our lifestyle, our political processes be affected?

It will take years for all the aftershocks of SOAR to play out. The best way to ensure that these measures work as intended is for the voting public to remain as passionately involved in matters of land-use policy as they were during the campaign. Having taken the power to direct development from the elected officials, the voters now have the responsibility to do a better job.

Similarly, the fight over bilingual education did not end on election day. It merely shifted to a different--and trickier--battlefield.

In June voters passed Proposition 227, which sharply limited bilingual education. In response, some Ventura County school districts moved aggressively to replace their old programs, in which students with poor English skills were initially taught in other languages, with new ones as prescribed by the ballot initiative. Other districts in the county took advantage of a provision that allows parents to request that their children continue to receive instruction in their native language, usually Spanish.

In some districts, including heavily Latino ones in Fillmore and Santa Paula, practically no parents requested bilingual instruction for their children. Yet in half a dozen districts in the Ventura and Oxnard area, parents of 60% to 95% of the children who are not fluent in English asked to resume bilingual education after a mandatory 30-day trial run in a “sheltered English immersion” program.

Such disparity of compliance with the voters’ mandate has done little to heal the wounds left by the emotional debate over Proposition 227. But we believe the situation offers an excellent opportunity to provide the sort of scientific research that was all too lacking during the campaign.

As the Latino population continues to grow throughout California and a number of other states, it would be profoundly helpful to have some solid data comparing the results of different strategies for educating children starting out with a language disadvantage. Ventura County could take the lead in providing that data, and it should.

We encourage the county superintendent of schools to commission an impartial outside body, perhaps a university, to devise and administer tests to compare the results achieved in Ventura County districts that have similar demographics and economic mixes but have chosen opposite approaches to bilingual education. State or federal funding should be available to take advantage of the natural laboratory.

In both of these issues, the events of 1998 will echo for many years--both in Ventura County and far beyond.