Educators cope with public, private school closures

Shutting down a school is like denying someone their basic, human necessities, according to Gary Krumdieck.

“It’s always sad whenever a school closes, whether it’s public or private,” he says. “It’s one less opportunity for students to learn and grow in their education.”

As summertime begins and the academic year ends, it won’t be vacation time for educators across Ventura County, like Krumdieck, principal of St. John’s Lutheran School in Oxnard. Local administrators are grappling with the closures of some of their schools, leaving some public districts and private schools with uncertain futures.

In the past month, it was announced that three schools in Ventura County would not reopen for the fall semester in September, tied to a weakened economy and falling enrollment numbers.

The private, K-8 St. Paul’s Parish Day School will close after nearly 40 years in Ventura, along with two public schools in the Conejo Valley Unified School District: Meadows and University schools, both in Thousand Oaks.

“Between the declining enrollment and the economy, we were just unable to provide services to our families at a cost they could afford,” says Vicki Cloninger, St. Paul’s principal.

Now 175 students, Cloninger said enrollment at her elementary school was at its highest sometime in the mid-1990s, fluctuated up and down over the years, but had been mostly on a slow, steady decline since then.

The largest group of displaced St. Paul’s students will attend St. John’s in Oxnard. The addition of 20 kids to its current 186-student enrollment nearly maxes out one school that has managed to stay open.

St. Paul’s becomes the next private school in Ventura to join the likes of Temple Christian and Grace Lutheran schools, which both shut their doors within the last decade.

“In the last few years, private schools have been closing. It’s getting rougher,” Krumdieck said. “I just haven’t seen it quite at this number.”

Even St. John’s, with generally healthy revenues culled from diocese and church financial support, in addition to tuitions, tries to stretch its means as best it can in order to pay for overhead.

“We know nobody has an extra dime” for tuition, Krumdieck says.

“A lot of people don’t have the money. They’re being laid off,” says Edward Perrera, headmaster of Mary Law School in Oxnard.

Perrera says Mary Law’s preschool enrollment has suffered because many parents don’t consider it a bare necessity when financial times are tough.

“Preschool is not an essential,” he says. “Eventually, with the economics, it will turn. But we don’t know if it will happen in one week, three weeks or three years.”

Cloninger says it’s a cyclical process, indicative of parents who opt to send their kids to public schools in bad economic times, with resurgences in private education only when finances improve.

Mario Contini, superintendent of Conejo Valley schools, concurs.

“With the economy as bad as it is, a lot of kids in private schools are going back to public. We’ve seen that,” he said.

In some cases, the situation is reversed. Other private institutions like the Thacher School in Ojai have witnessed a slight upward shift in their enrollment figures.

There were four more students attending Thacher in 2008-2009, said Acting Head of School Peter Robinson — 172, up from 168 last year.

The shaky financial ground state officials have placed public education on could be one explanation why many parents are still opting for private education for their kids, says Robinson.

“Concerns people have over declining per capita spending on the public school system certainly may encourage them (parents) to look for better alternatives,” he said.

“Everyone feels the effect of the economy,” Robinson continued. “Everyone has to respond to it.”

The public education front’s experience is evidenced by Conejo’s closure of its Meadows and University elementary school campuses.

“Obviously, the closures were based on the fact that our student population over the past few years decreased by about 1,600 kids at the elementary level,” Contini says.

In September, Meadows will reopen as the MATES (Meadows Arts and Technology Elementary School) charter school under jurisdiction of the county board of education. University becomes a child-care/preschool center.

Securing plans for the now-defunct elementary schools buffered the decision made by board of education trustees, who had briefly considered closing a third school to offset the financial impacts caused by the start of a charter campus.

Contini estimates the Conejo Valley district stood to save more than $900,000 if Meadows didn’t go charter. With the charter school, the district gains a lesser, yet no less substantial, $600,000 in operational revenue.

“It was, in essence, taking away the fiscal benefit of closing a school,” he said.

The Conejo Valley district this year also managed to consolidate the number of potential layoffs of staff members — 39, down from 160 — due to added federal stimulus funding, said Contini.

Several teachers have managed to avoid layoffs and find transfers over to the charter school, and to an earth sciences school opening in Newbury Park, said Contini.

But where Conejo officials managed to avoid shuttering both schools completely, St. Paul’s in Ventura may take some time before a new tenant, or a new purpose altogether, is found for the now-former school. According to Principal Cloninger, future

plans for the campus are still in the works. As of now, the building will remain vacant in the fall.

Above all, Cloninger says, the final decision to close a school, however necessary, is not an easy task.

“It never is. Children like the school they go to; parents like it. It’s never a popular decision,” she said. “But sometimes, the financial aspects of running a business …. It’s like closing a restaurant. Sometimes you don’t want to close, but you have to.”   

paul@vcreporter.com