Oxnard Campus’ Supreme Tribute

When the Oxnard School District dubbed its newest site Thurgood Marshall School, it did far more than just put the former Supreme Court justice’s name on the front of the building.

Marshall’s words adorn the walls, benches, playgrounds and walkways of the northwest Oxnard elementary school. A mural of black-and-white photographs, from the major civil rights cases Marshall argued as a lawyer, covers a wall in the front office. Story times will be held in the library’s Marshall Room, which will hold civil rights books and -- educators hope -- memorabilia from the jurist’s life.

The school, which will serve kindergartners through sixth-graders, will be dedicated at 10 a.m. Saturday.

When the first students arrive Wednesday, they will become the Bulldogs, a tribute to one nickname Marshall’s tenacious spirit earned him. The school mascot is “Goody,” a moniker that stuck with Marshall from boyhood through his tenure as the first African American justice on the nation’s top court, said Principal Ernie Morrison. For school colors, Morrison chose cardinal red, white, blue and gray, the same ones used by Howard University in Washington, D.C., where Marshall earned his law degree.

“It’s my intention that everyone will know the story of Thurgood Marshall,” Morrison said.

Morrison, the district’s only African American principal, attended segregated schools in Virginia and considers Marshall a personal hero. While white students were given new textbooks, he had to pay for his or use those discarded by the all-white schools. To escape segregation, Morrison’s family moved to California in 1953, when he was 11.

Things began changing the following year, when Marshall, representing the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, persuaded the Supreme Court to declare segregation unconstitutional in public schools in his most famous case, Brown vs. Board of Education.

Oxnard trustees had initially dubbed their 19th school La Colonia Elementary, but changed their minds in 1998 after black community leaders lobbied to name it after a prominent African American. It’s the first school named for an African American in the district, where 3% of the students are black, said Assistant Supt. Sandra Rosales.

Marshall is the only new public school opening this year in Ventura County, according to the Ventura County superintendent of schools office. In 2002, Sycamore Canyon Elementary opened in Newbury Park and La Mariposa Elementary opened in Camarillo.

It’s been six years since the rapidly growing Oxnard district opened its last new site, Brekke School. The district was 19.3% over capacity last year, and Marshall will help reduce that to 17.6%, Rosales said. Marshall, which was built to hold up to 1,000 students, will start with 530 this year. The district, which operates on a multitrack, year-round schedule because of crowding, is negotiating to buy sites for two more elementary schools and a junior high, Morrison said.

“Right now we’re just looking at a little bit of breathing room,” said Morrison, formerly the principal of Lemonwood Elementary School. “We can’t build them fast enough to keep up with the population.”

Marshall, located on Gonzales Road, will draw kids from an adjacent luxury home development as well as from the city’s beach and harbor communities, Morrison said.

At 50,000 square feet, the school is larger than average, said project manager Jason Johnson of Rollins Consulting Inc. Clusters of classrooms open into a central courtyard, marking a move away from the interior hallways used in the district’s last three schools, Morrison said.

There are curved and slanted walls and reverse-slanted roofs that allow natural light into classrooms.

The $20-million school, paid for with local bonds, also marks a couple of technological firsts for the district, Morrison said. It has a computerized cafeteria program that keeps track of what students should pay for meals and when supplies need to be ordered. And the school will get a video system to enable students to produce news programs that schoolmates can watch from their classrooms.

Marshall was built on farmland, and strawberries still grow across the street.

To protect students from pesticides used at the farm, the district left a buffer zone of more than 600 feet between the strawberry plants and the buildings, well beyond the 100 to 300 feet recommended by the Ventura County agricultural commissioner, said Salvador Godoy, the district’s facilities director.

Across the street and less than a block away from Marshall is Oxnard High School. While there are concerns about high school students causing problems at the campus, Morrison sees benefits from the proximity.

“We have a dream of a class for training young people there to be classroom assistants,” Morrison said.

He also wants the teens to work with his students during physical education classes and sports programs.

“The other principal and I have the attitude that it is one learning community just separated by a crosswalk,” Morrison said.