School Loyalty Pushes Families to Extremes

VENTURA — Juan Reyna’s workload is a bit heavier these days. An attendance administrator who verifies that Ventura students are going to the right schools, Reyna has spent much of the past year checking to see that Buena High School students really belong there.

After last year’s controversial redistricting, Reyna is pursuing 50 to 70 active cases in which he suspects the students should really be going across town to Ventura High.

He won’t discuss his methods. But parents recount seeing the dark-haired man sitting in his silver Porsche watching to see if a student really lives at an east Ventura address. Or following the student home from school. Or knocking on doors at 6 a.m.

“Instead of these guys going after gang members, they are going after the football players, cheerleaders and basketball players, they are going after the good students that want to be in school,” said one parent, who asked not to be named. “They treat you like you’re a criminal, you’re the bad guy and they’re hellbent to get you.”

Not that some parents haven’t taken drastic methods to keep their children at the east end high school.

One family moved out of its hillside home and into a rented apartment to stay within the attendance zone. Another couple temporarily separated, with the mother and teenage boy moving farther east to stay at Buena.

Still others sold their homes. And a number of parents sent their children to live with legal guardians who have homes within the district.

“Some people might feel these people beat the system; I don’t feel that way,” said Carla Mulford, whose son was transferred to Ventura this year. “I feel these parents in their hearts have done what is right for their child and as a family unit.”

But it comes with a price: families are separated, and their children can’t return home even on weekends without violating the school district’s rules.

“For people affected by the boundary change, they are definitely upset to this day . . . ,” said Dustan Howard, a Buena parent who opposed the board’s plan and found a legal guardian so his daughter could stay a Bulldog. “It’s not something their affected by every once in awhile. Our families are all affected by their decision every day.”

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The trouble started when Ventura Unified School District trustees voted last February to change the school boundaries for this school year. Nearly 200 incoming freshman and sophomore students from the overcrowded Buena campus would be transferred to cross-town rival Ventura High, a move that outraged numerous parents and had students in tears.

For a variety of reasons--Buena’s proximity to their hillside neighborhoods, the school ties and friendships the students had developed--parents said they wanted their kids to stay at the east end school.

“We go to the football, basketball games and give money. It’s part of life,” said one mother, who described the redistricting as a slap in the face. “My sister, husband’s brother, everybody we knew, everybody in our immediate family went, so we would never have bought a house in an area where our kids couldn’t have gone to Buena, never.”

But at the time, Ventura was almost 400 students below capacity, while Buena housed 113 students more than the building was built to handle. Hallways at Buena were so packed between classes that getting a book out of a locker became an ordeal. Trustees visited the schools and decided immediate action was needed, citing that the crowding situation was a potential safety hazard.

They voted to transfer students from the hillside communities of Ondulando, Clearpoint, Skyline and Hidden Valley as well as one neighborhood east of Buena and another south of Ventura College. Many students would pass by Buena on the bus ride to their new high school.

Buena parents urged trustees to look into measures, such as adding more classrooms or expanding the campus with developers’ fees. The move was too abrupt and would affect their children both academically and emotionally, they said.

The school board agreed not to transfer juniors or seniors to a new school. But it drew the line at letting siblings go to Buena just because their brothers and sisters attended and refused to make exceptions for athletes or student leaders.

Several parents filed individual appeals, but of the 37 heard since March, only one student has been allowed to remain at Buena, and that was because of an error on the district’s part.

“Some say, ‘By gosh, you’re very cruel,’ ” trustee Jim Wells said. “But we govern by principle. If we deviate from that, then we’re back to Square One.

“Let’s suppose I let one student stay because they’re heavily, let’s say, in sports, let one student stay because of their proximity, then we have to let a student stay because of checkers. . . . Pretty soon we have all the students staying for whatever reasons.”

Several months after the board voted on the boundary changes, parents met with the five trustees to try to have the decision overturned. The board didn’t budge.

Some Buena parents changed tactics.

The majority of parents, as upset as they were, ended up sending their children to Ventura, which lies about four miles west of Buena.

In the fall, about 187 students became Cougars at Ventura High School. Though some students felt conflicting loyalties and the loss of old friends, many admitted in interviews last fall that they actually liked the new school better.

By the time of the October football showdown between Buena and Ventura, some had developed new loyalties and began cheering for the Cougars.

A small percentage of parents, however, managed to keep their teenagers at Buena by resorting to other means. It’s unclear how large their numbers are because the district has no official records. And parents are not eager to draw attention to what they had to do.

Many parents interviewed for this story asked that their identities not be revealed for fear that the district could make life for their teenagers difficult. Others said they don’t want the wrath of Ventura High parents, who may interpret their love for Buena as a put-down of the rival school.

“Parents from Ventura High School would single them out, saying, ‘Oh there goes so and so, who’s too good to come to Ventura and thinks Ventura High School is an inferior school,’ ” Howard said.

Ventura High has typically registered lower test scores than Buena and is drawn from a more ethnically diverse and lower-income population.

In addition, speaking out might put the district officials on their heels at a time when the students are already being scrutinized.

“Everybody has been hassled by the school district,” Howard said. “It’s amazing how they can affect lifestyle, thoughts, goals and dreams for the kids. . . . They don’t want the district harassing them any further, because they do believe they have the power to make their life miserable for them.”

To keep their teenagers in Buena some parents took rather dramatic steps, which have exacted both a financial and emotional toll. The district knows of several cases in which parents from upscale hillside homes have moved into apartments, paying rent money that may have gone toward college tuition.

“There are people spending thousands of dollars a month on apartments,” said Richard Morrison of the school district’s Child Welfare and Attendance Department.

The boundary change literally left one family split in half, when the mother and son moved into an apartment within the Buena boundaries and the father and younger child remained in their home.

When contacted by The Times, the parents said they worked very hard to get their situation resolved and are happy with the living arrangement. They declined to be interviewed for fear of drawing attention to their child.

In several instances, families sold their homes and moved a block or two away into another home to live within the district boundaries.

“We hemmed and we hawed about it and, by the summer, we sold the house,” said one parent, who asked not to be named. “A lot would have never considered selling their house, but I couldn’t consider giving guardianship. This is what we were comfortable with doing.”

Unable to afford the price of a move or of paying for an apartment, many parents have resorted to a less pricey but often emotionally difficult move: obtaining a legal guardian for their teenager. If the papers are approved, the teen is required to live at the guardian’s home within the attendance boundaries, which means the youth is separated from his or her family.

One parent reported that the family sold its car and held garage sales in order to amass enough money for an attorney to draw up guardianship papers, which cost more than $1,200.

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The guardian situations have created some of the stickiest problems between parents and district officials.

Some parents said they didn’t realize that by having their teen live with a guardian--maybe an aunt, friend or grandparent--the child would have to stay there seven days a week.

The sacrifice they made, they say, is pulling their family apart.

“How can they tell someone where they can live or sleep on a Saturday night,” said one parent whose teen is under the guardianship of a relative. “Does that mean she can’t sleep at their parents’ on Saturday or if the [guardian] is out of town she can’t stay here.”

If the child spends the night at a friend’s house, the parent wondered, will the district send the teenager to Ventura after all the sacrifices the family has made?

Morrison said administrators must strictly enforce guardianship rules to ensure that parents aren’t abusing the system.

“Some parents will say ‘I have a right to visit my child, my child has a right to visit me. . . .’ ” Morrison said. “But then it comes to what do we mean by visiting: Staying overnight? And how many nights? And, ‘Oh, the child is sick.’ If the child goes to the real parents when they’re sick, then who are the real parents?

“Then you begin to think the guardianship is a hoax.”

But he said students caught living in an address different from the one they claim--or at their parents’ rather than their guardian’s home--receive notices asking them to verify their address or drop out of Buena. Parents can appeal to the school board, but have met little success there.

To some parents, the district’s methods of investigating students strike them as rather like Big Brother.

“They can hunt you night and day,” said one parent whose child is being watched by officials, who suspect the student is not always living with the guardian. “I know what criminals feel like when they’re on the lam. When I leave the house, I feel like someone is watching me and that the phone is tapped.”

The feeling of being watched doesn’t come from nowhere. Officials from the Child Welfare and Attendance Department employ a variety of means to catch students in the act of coming out of a house in the wrong attendance area.

In addition to having a hotline, where people in the community can report tips about Buena students living in the wrong boundary area, district officials also visit the Ventura neighborhoods.

In his Porsche, school administrator Reyna drives through the Ventura streets almost every day. Positioned several houses down, he has staked out homes, watching which address a student leaves or returns to.

Officials need proof of wrongdoing. This may mean one official staking out the home where the student is supposed to be and another finding the student where he or she is actually living, said Morrison, who is Reyna’s supervisor.

If the investigations didn’t affect the students, it might almost be comical, said one parent, “like Pink Panther in a trench coat, sneaking up and saying, ‘Ahhhhhh, we have a child in the house’ .”

Though parents may interpret their actions as callous and intrusive, school officials said the need to enforce the boundary decision has become even more important in Ventura lately.

“I think it’s more so this time around because our schools are impacted, so we’re making a real effort to make sure all the kids are going to school where they are supposed to,” said Reyna, who has been verifying student addresses in the district for the last 10 years. “I don’t think it was as important when the schools had space and the students weren’t being displaced.”

When students from a neighboring community come to a school, it’s going to impact someone at the Ventura schools, he said.

The city’s schools are 98% full, with several schools housing more students than they were built for. After the high school redistricting, Buena is at 95% of capacity and Ventura at 101%.

It won’t win him the Mr. Popularity vote, but for Reyna, monitoring the students is an important job that has to get done. “Sometimes it is very difficult because parents and students have made ties and there are loyalties and if they are no longer living in the attendance areas, I’m part of the process of asking them to go to another school,” he said.

“I think the majority understand it’s not a personality thing, that I’m just doing my job, but oftentimes it doesn’t make it any more palatable.”

Parents argue the school board should have dealt with the overcrowding before it reached crisis proportions. Nearly a year after the redistricting, the board recently released its plan to look into a bond measure to finance schools and to deal with crowding until the year 2010. The plan calls for building a third high school.

“Normally, when cities plan their growth, they advance their planning 10 to 15 years in advance, so this should have come as no surprise that this issue was coming down the pipe,” said Keith Wintermute, whose daughter remained at Buena only because she was a high school junior.

“It seemed to the parents involved to be a sudden and fairly drastic decision. Suddenly they have this crisis. Suddenly they have too many students and something had to be done immediately and in one semester.”