5 Schools Will Get $261,000 to Redesign Learning Process : Education: They are among 138 in California chosen to develop experimental programs. New approaches include interdisciplinary classes and 'real world' projects.

By JAMES MAIELLA Jr

Sept. 25, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Five Ventura County schools will share more than $261,000 in state grant money this school year with the mission to dramatically redesign their institutions and the way students are taught.

The five are among 138 grant winners in California chosen to become working models of experimental education programs. An initial $13 million has been provided statewide to launch the effort to reshape educational methods that some state and local officials say have outlasted their effectiveness.

Oxnard High School will receive $116,400, the largest grant in the county, to revamp curricula for its 2,200 students. The Fred Williams School in the Hueneme Elementary School District will receive $59,500; the Medea Creek Middle School, $40,510, and Oak Park High School, $36,400, both in the Oak Park Unified School District; and the Summit Elementary School in Ojai, $8,750.

One new approach will be setting up interdisciplinary classes with four or five teachers assigned to a group of students, educators said. Other techniques to be tested will include more practical, “real world” projects and replacing multiple-choice testing with essay and lab-based tests.

“Schools are based on a theory of learning that was the latest thing about 100 years ago and that we know now doesn’t correspond very well to the way our brains function,” said Merrill Vargo, special projects director for the state Department of Education.

“Kids in a natural setting learn things at a million miles an hour, and yet we put them in a classroom setting and teach them through repetition. Any child will tell you that school is crashingly boring, and boring is not a trivial complaint. If you’re bored, you are not learning,” Vargo said.

Sponsored by state Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara), the five-year program was originally budgeted at $24.5 million annually and was scrapped by Gov. Pete Wilson during budget negotiations.

But Wilson agreed on Wednesday to commit $13 million to the program for half of this fiscal year, from Jan. 1 to June 30. If funding is included in next year’s budget, the amount will double.

Education officials expect the restructuring to be fully funded at $24.5 million for four years starting in July, 1993.

Some local grant winners have complained about receiving half the money they expected this year. They said the plans presented in their grant proposals must be revised and scaled back because of the funding they are being denied.

“The premise was, projects will be funded or not funded. Not partially funded,” said Oxnard High School Principal Rick Rezinas. “I would personally have preferred that fewer schools be funded than to cut the funding of all the schools and none of them will be able to do it right.”

Hart, who devised the program with the help of the California Business Roundtable, said he understands frustration over the lack of money. But he said the schools awarded grants should be satisfied that they were included.

“There are no guarantees in this business,” Hart said. “When you’re working in the state of California, with the economy in a free fall and red ink everywhere, there are no guarantees.”

Hart also rejected the idea of cutting the program back by awarding fewer grants but fully funding the schools that were selected. “We have 8,000 schools out there, and we want to try and make as much of a difference as we can,” he said. “There are too many kids that are failing, too many kids that are falling through the cracks.”

Despite complaints over financing, educators at the chosen schools agree that fundamental changes in instruction are long overdue.

“What we’ve been doing, I think, just isn’t going to work for the future,” said Carol Holly, principal of Summit Elementary School. “For instance, we’ve been spending six or seven years of math teaching them to do everything that a $5 calculator can do. We want to teach them not only to manipulate numbers, but to understand what they’re doing.”

Holly said her school will use the grant money to try to restructure its program to include more team teaching, grouping students by achievement instead of innate ability and to focus on more practical learning.

Laurel Ann Ford, principal of Medea Creek Middle School, said it appears that schools were “designed for failure” in a variety of ways. “They were designed to be appropriate for certain kinds of kids who could sit still and absorb through reading,” she said. “But we’re finding that not every child can learn in that environment and that the world is changing.”

Ford said the grant will support the division of each of the three grades in her school into two levels, one dedicated to more conventional education and one allowing for out-of-school projects and more advanced work.

“We want to get them to love learning,” she said. “We’re going to give them the chance to let them be in the real world and let them see the effects of something they did.”

At Oxnard High, Rezinas and other educators plan to merge the school’s four grades into two divisions with an emphasis on interdisciplinary teaching. They also plan to have projects for students to participate in off school grounds that reinforce classroom lessons with practical experience.

Rezinas said some classes will be taught by four teachers at a time, each with a different specialty. Students will spend part of the day in a homeroom with students of all grade levels, so that older students will have a chance to educate and influence younger ones.