Editorial: Ojai confronts a crisis in its schools
It would be difficult to overstate the distress that the venerable Ojai Unified School District finds itself in today. A state review in January found the district to be at high risk of insolvency, and the county superintendent this month advised that the district will be unable to meet all of its payroll obligations.
In response, the district initiated $3.8 million in budget cuts, an action that included abandoning the district office, closing two of the four elementary schools and relocating the standalone junior high onto the high school campus starting in the fall.
Amid all this stress, the superintendent was ousted by a newly elected majority of the school board, and then an interim superintendent quit after four days on the job. That was followed by the resignation of two board members. Today, the district has no superintendent and is governed by the three remaining board members who each have spent only four months in office.
At this point, there are two directions the community can go. It can engage in finger-pointing, be overtaken by chaos and ultimately wait for the state to step in and take over control. Or it can come together, engage in a sober and open process to fill the vacant leadership positions, and then jointly commit to making this slimmed-down district work under local control.
To be sure, mistakes were made that led to this crisis. The district was very slow to come to terms with the fact that it was rapidly losing students. Over the last couple of decades, enrollment has plummeted from about 4,200 students down to about 2,200 today. Yet the district continued to operate underutilized school campuses, inflating its costs for facilities and staff.
In that regard, there should be an instructive lesson here for other Ventura County school districts, large and small, that have also seen significant enrollment declines in recent years. In a county with an aging population and a housing market that continues to price out young families, that trend is almost certain to continue.
While closing schools are among the most difficult and controversial decisions any school district must make, school officials must constantly assess whether they have right-sized their facilities to stay within their budgets while also meeting the educational needs of students.
Going forward in Ojai, the reality is that there is no one left to blame. No one is left on the board whose term predates this crisis, and the top administrative post is vacant. As unsettling as it seemed, perhaps it is a good thing the two veteran board members decided to resign. The slate is clean. All that matters now is where the district goes from here.
A first step will be to fill those vacant positions on the board. The remaining board members can either call for special elections or appoint successors. The terms for the two vacancies both expire in 2024, so whether they are selected by appointment or by special election the individuals who fill those seats will stand for election next year.
However the board proceeds, its process should be fully public. As is evident from social media posts, there are a great many suspicions and fears that attend this upheaval in the local schools. A frank and open selection process will dampen those, and also help to focus the community on the tough choices it now confronts.
The people of the bucolic valley that was the film vision of Shangri-La have often come together to confront crises — wildfires that rage down the hillsides toward town, mudflows and rock slides that isolate remote neighborhoods during fierce rainstorms. This is a crisis of a far different sort, but reacting to it will also require a communal, cooperative response.
One of the valley’s great assets is imperiled. It’s time for the community to come together to fix it.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Editorial: Ojai confronts a crisis in its schools
