To Some, Old School Offers History Lesson

When a tiny school district in Santa Paula barely managed to pass a $2.5-million construction bond two years ago, educators and parents thought they could soon tear down and replace an old elementary school the state had declared unsafe.

Now, however, the Briggs School District must clear an unexpected hurdle. The 1913 Olivelands School, it turns out, was among Ventura County’s first segregated schools--one that should be kept whole, historic preservationists argue, as a reminder of an era that many would sooner forget.

In principle, the conflict doesn’t differ much from the familiar face-offs between developers revving up bulldozers and residents struggling to save a timeworn farmhouse or a grand old oak. In this case, however, the aim is not to save a cherished piece of the past, but to highlight the institutional prejudice of a bygone day.

“This is a unique opportunity to not exactly make amends, but certainly to be honest about our past,” said Kim Hocking, a Ventura County planner who serves as a staff member for the county’s cultural heritage board.

Perched on a rise above a sea of lemon trees, the Olivelands School was started by the Limoneira citrus operation for the children of its Mexican farm workers. As increasing numbers of workers from Mexico arrived to tend California’s fields, many other communities also established “Mexican schools,” which often were run by administrators unashamed to declare nonwhites intellectually inferior.

Hocking has urged the cultural heritage board, which makes recommendations to county supervisors on places of historic interest, to reject the district’s plans for razing Olivelands and installing a parking lot in its place.

While Olivelands has not been declared a landmark, it meets the standards for landmark designation, and, consequently, falls under the cultural heritage board’s jurisdiction, Hocking said.

He has suggested the building be moved, turned into a museum devoted to the local Latino community, or used for storage or offices when the new school goes up on an adjacent playing field.

But to Carol Vines, superintendent of the two-school, 460-student Briggs district, such alternatives, while perhaps high-minded, are also impractical.

“The building has been declared structurally unsound and the state made us abandon it,” she said, pointing out that the school’s 200 kindergarten through third-grade students now attend classes in portable units rented from the state. “We can’t leave it there. It’s not safe.”

The building’s concrete foundation is so badly deteriorated that it “could be wiped away by hand,” according to a district report. State inspectors have found defects so serious that restoring the school would cost more than the $3.2 million it would take to build a new one, Vines said.

Saving the building would mean reducing the size of the proposed parking lot--and that too would pose safety risks, according to parents active at Olivelands.

“When parents and buses are dropping off kids at the same time, it can get very dangerous,” said Laura Galvan, whose son graduated from Olivelands last month. “There’s a great need for a larger parking lot, with a designated area for parent drop-offs.”

Galvan campaigned for the 1999 bond measure, which passed by seven votes.

The district has offered to compile a photographic record of the old school and to erect a plaque describing its history. But that isn’t enough, said Hocking, who likened the reason for saving Olivelands to the reason for preserving Manzanar, the World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans in Central California.

Olivelands was built as a two-room schoolhouse and enlarged in 1924 by Roy C. Wilson, a prominent Santa Paula architect.

“The foreman’s kids and the kids in the rest of the neighborhood went to the Briggs School,” said Judy Triem, a local historian who advises the cultural heritage board.

Triem said she knows of no earlier segregated school in Ventura County. Olivelands was certainly the first set up by a company for the children of its Mexican laborers, she said.

“It will be too bad if it ends up having to come down,” she said.

Legal segregation in California dwindled with the onset of World War II and ended with a 1946 federal court ruling in a suit against the Westminster school district. Until then, it thrived in many communities.

“It was accepted as a way to deal with what was claimed to be a bilingual problem--when, in my opinion, it was racism,” Simi Valley historian Patricia Havens said.

In Simi Valley, Havens said, Spanish-surnamed children--regardless of their proficiency with English--were once educated in bungalows on the grounds of a school that excluded them from mainstream classes.

“Even now, there’s a smoldering resentment about it,” Havens said.