Ventura Ends Transfers for Most Students Outside City

VENTURA — With the city’s two high schools already squeezed for space, Ventura school trustees have decided to send most of the high school transfer students from outside the city back to their home communities starting in September.

Currently, 83 students from Santa Paula, Ojai, Oxnard and neighborhoods beyond the city boundaries attend Ventura’s high schools. Many have attended schools in Ventura since the elementary grades.

But under a school board decision reached Tuesday night, the 70 transfer students beginning the ninth through 11th grades this fall will no longer be welcome. The remaining 13 seniors will be unaffected.

And to keep future enrollment numbers down, trustees decided to ban all new transfers involving out-of-town students, effective immediately.

Transfer students now enrolled in kindergarten through seventh grade will be allowed to remain in Ventura schools next year, but this provides little solace for twins Ian and Jacob Campbell, who are eighth-graders at Cabrillo Middle School.

“I thought they shouldn’t allow new kids in, but we’ve been here since ‘88,” said Ian in the school’s parking lot. “They just kick you out without warning and you have to go to Oxnard where you have fewer friends.”

For more than eight years, the boys have attended schools in Ventura and returned to their Oxnard home at the end of the day. Their parents, who work at a surf shop in Ventura, appreciated the convenience and were attracted by the academic reputation of the city’s schools.

It’s all so unfair, said the brothers, who attended Blanche Reynolds School and planned to go to Ventura High School this fall.

“We live here,” said Lise Campbell, the boys’ mother, from their Oxnard home, “but the kids’ lives are in Ventura. . . . If all their friends were going to Oxnard, that would be fine, but that’s not what’s going to happen.”

Trustees said their decisions to deny most high school transfers and to prohibit all future transfers by out-of-town students were not easy to make. But they agreed that students who reside in Ventura had to take precedence over those who did not.

“It pained me to make this decision,” board President Velma Lomax said, “but because we’re so overcrowded, we have to look at it like this, if we don’t have any room for those in our district, are we doing the right thing allowing those out of the district to be here?”

Until a new high school can be built as part of the district’s long-range plan to deal with overcrowding, such short-term measures must be taken, trustees said.

Using projections for next year’s enrollment, district officials estimate it would require at least two extra classrooms to accommodate the anticipated growth at a cost that ranges from $40,000 to $120,000 per classroom. But trustees say it’s not just an issue of money, but also of space.

Building new classrooms at the schools means more students on campus, which would mean crowded hallways and less space near the lockers, school officials said.

But for the parents and children involved, the trustees’ decision generated strong reactions, such as those who cited a district decision to change the high school attendance boundaries in February. Nearly 200 students were moved from Buena High School to Ventura High, their less-crowded rival across town, placing students in a new environment.

For eighth-grader Chris Schwarze of Oxnard, who attends Cabrillo Middle School, the reality has already set in. His parents have contacted Oxnard school officials to determine that he will be attending Rio Mesa High School next semester.

‘I wanted to go to Ventura High School, because all my friends are there and for the good sports, so it’s sort of sad when I heard I couldn’t go,” said Chris, 14. “I think [the decision is] kind of dumb, because most of us who transferred are straight-A students and we’re not doing anything bad by coming over here.”