Ground Broken for Grade School in Ventura

VENTURA —  Barely a year after passing an $81-million bond, Ventura’s school district broke ground on a $7.9-million elementary school Tuesday and approved the site for a new magnet high school.

The new kindergarten to fifth-grade school, to be called Citrus Glen, will have a permanent building; the new magnet school will start as a collection of portable classrooms.

Citrus Glen, which will accommodate a growing enrollment in the city’s east end, will open in September 1999 with about 500 students. Situated near Henderson Road and Petit Avenue, the school will have room for 650 youngsters.

The magnet school, as yet unnamed, will eventually have up to 900 students who want to specialize in communications and technology.

After breaking ground for Citrus Glen earlier in the day, the Ventura Unified School District board unanimously agreed to place the magnet school on about 10 acres that the district owns on Day Road.

Pat Chandler, assistant superintendent of educational services, said there was no debate among board members before the vote, but a few questions were raised on the type of portable buildings to be used.

“We made it pretty clear to them we would be coming back to the board with details” about the buildings and the curriculum, Chandler said.

She also said research would be done on other possible sites for the magnet school “if the need arises.” A dramatic jump in population is one reason the board might consider another site for the magnet school, she said.

When it opens in the fall of 2000, the magnet school is projected to attract 300 students and relieve overcrowding at Buena and Ventura high schools. Ventura Unified Supt. Joseph Spirito said he hopes 900 students will choose to enroll in the school by 2002, but he predicted reaching full capacity will be a challenge.

“How do I entice 900 kids?” Spirito asked before Tuesday’s meeting. Persuading students and their parents that the magnet program is too good to pass up, he said, and meeting the same extracurricular needs that a regular high school offers are key to filling the magnet program.

“Good magnet high schools across the country, some of them have parents camping out to get their kids in,” Spirito said. “I’d love to see that happen here.”

In addition to selling parents and students on the magnet program, Spirito said he has to persuade Buena and Ventura high schools that the magnet school won’t rob them of their better students.

Spirito said the district will hire an outside marketing firm to develop a plan for selling the new technology program to the community.

With only 300 of Ventura Unified’s 4,400 high school students projected to enroll in the first year and the possibility that few others will enroll thereafter, Spirito recommended that the district begin with portable buildings--10 or 12--before constructing a permanent school.

The permanent school is expected to be built on the Day Road property, a site across from Ventura College that houses the district’s warehouse and a special education program.

A majority of committee members who weighed several models for the magnet school supported creation of a stand-alone school, as opposed to an academy within one or both of Ventura’s high schools.

Pam Carter, who served on the committee that supported creation of a stand-alone magnet school, said building a permanent school now would better attract students.

“Their [district trustees’ and administrators’] main concern all through our magnet meetings was building a school and having a school that the kids would want to go to,” Carter said.

“You kept hearing the analogy, ‘We don’t want to throw a party and have nobody come.’ ” But now that a portable campus is under consideration, Carter believes the magnet school will be a hard sell.

“High school kids are very territorial,” Carter said. “I just think it would be very difficult for them to form any sort of allegiance” to a temporary school.

Although Spirito is aware of the opposition to portable classrooms, he said he would rather have a few years with trailers full of students than end up with an empty permanent building because the magnet program was unpopular.

In selling voters on the bond, the district priced the new magnet school at $15 million. Installing leased portables could cost as little as $60,000, Spirito estimated. The remaining money earmarked for the magnet school would be spent if a permanent school were built.

The district does have the land for another full-size high school, but it does not anticipate having enough students to justify the $40-million cost of a new school. Plus, Spirito said, money for a new, larger school wasn’t included in the wish list used to lobby for the bond’s approval.

A small- to medium-sized magnet school would siphon 300 to 400 students from Buena and Ventura high schools, which are approaching capacity.

But a drawback to having the smaller school, Spirito said, is that a few hundred students would not be enough to support all of the extracurricular activities that high school students want. To get around this problem, which would make the magnet campus less attractive, students at the specialized school would most likely participate in sports, clubs and other activities at either Buena or Ventura highs.

With Tuesday night’s board approval of the magnet school’s site, planning begins on installation of the portable classrooms and creation of the technology and communications curriculum. Eventually, the magnet school may also offer courses in health fields.

The magnet school’s focus is the result of surveys distributed to Ventura Unified parents and students, said Patricia Chandler, assistant superintendent for educational services. Planning for the school will involve focus groups and continued study of other schools’ offerings.

“What we found in our research from looking at other schools with magnet programs is you find something people want to take, you start out small, and you put together a dynamite program and it sells itself,” Chandler said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Ventura Unified trustees appointed Elke Fedde, former principal at Lincoln Elementary, as the first principal at Citrus Glen. The board had initially named Cabrillo Middle School’s principal, Kris Bergstrom, to the post, but Bergstrom was named director of curriculum and instruction.

Until the board can officially approve its appointments at its next meeting, Spirito transferred Mound Elementary Principal Ken Coffey to Cabrillo. Richard Kirby was appointed principal of Mound Elementary after heading Loma Vista Elementary. Linda DuBois, an assistant principal at Cabrillo, will head Elmhurst Elementary. Valerie Chrisman, now head of the foreign language department at Ventura High, was named principal of Lincoln Elementary.

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Times Community News reporter Holly Wolcott contributed to this story.