Enrollment at County Schools Rising : Education: Ventura Unified District gets 400 more students than expected. Officials rush to hire more teachers.

Enrollment in many Ventura County school districts has increased this fall, catching some administrators off guard as they scramble to hire part-time teachers for the overflow of students.

School officials in Camarillo, Ojai, Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Oak Park and Oxnard all report enrollment increases this year, ranging from a few dozen additional students to several hundred.

The biggest boom, however, has occurred in the Ventura Unified School District.

After a two-year decline in enrollment, the district was flooded with 400 more students than expected on the first day of class.

Ventura administrators had projected that 11,800 students in kindergarten through the 12th grade would begin classes when schools on a traditional calendar reopened last week. Instead, 12,200 showed up.

As a result, teachers on some secondary-level campuses are faced with up to 41 students in academic classes and up to 49 students for physical education.

“They’re very cooperative, it’s just that I have to move so fast,” said Balboa Middle School teacher Barbara Morris, who taught a finger-painting project to 39 sixth-graders on Thursday.

“I know when they leave here,” she said, “I’m going to flop down someplace and be exhausted for awhile.”

Ventura officials have already begun interviewing for two new teaching positions at Portola School, which has 60 more children than expected, and one new instructor for Will Rogers School, where enrollment is 33 above projections. They expect to hire within a few days.

Portola Principal Phyllis Robertson said 28 of her new students formerly attended private school. Most of the rest, she said, moved here from out of state or transferred from other schools in the city and county.

Other principals are reporting that many new students live in apartments. And school officials think that some of the children’s families lived in the San Fernando Valley before the January earthquake.

“We may be getting some of the overflow from the Valley because so many apartments are uninhabitable,” said Georgeann Brown, district director of budget and finance.

In other local cities, the higher enrollments came as less of a surprise. Officials in Thousand Oaks, Ojai and Oxnard had all predicted slight increases based on census data, new home sales and the previous year’s class sizes.

As of Tuesday, the Oxnard Elementary School District counted 13,145 students, up from 12,880 at the same time last year.

Administrator Kathy Cooper said the district typically enrolls 300 to 400 new students each year.

In Thousand Oaks, enrollment in the Conejo Valley Unified School District stood at close to 17,600 this week, about 200 more students than last year. To handle the increase, temporary teachers will be hired at two elementary schools.

“We’ve been pretty steady for the last couple of years, but now we’re going to edge back up a couple hundred,” Supt. Jerry Gross said. “We think that housing sales have picked up.”

And in Oak Park, enrollment in the county’s smallest district has crept up to 2,739, about 75 students above projections and 200 above last year’s roster.

“People are being attracted by the school district and we’ve got more move-ins,” Assistant Supt. Stan Mantooth said.

Simi Valley is the only district with a sharp drop in enrollment. About 360 fewer students showed up for class than last fall.

Administrators with the Simi Valley Unified School District blame the decline on a loss of local jobs, particularly in aerospace, and the displacement of many families because of earthquake damage to their homes.

Don Gaudioso, principal of Valley View Junior High, said almost all schools with substantial drops are in the city’s east end, where earthquake damage was heaviest.

“There were a lot of apartments and mobile homes that were severely damaged,” he said. “People who were renting really had no ties to the community and so they moved out.”