Livable Communities Newsletter

Volume 16 / Number 61 / February 2022

Your Livable Communities Newsletter

Ventura County's Tale of Two Cities:

There is a saying in the medical field that states: Give me your zip code and I will tell you how healthy you are. A zip code may also predict financial health and safety. The challenge is to understand what the data is telling us and what we can do with it to make an impact.

What about the Kids?

Using State of the Region report data, the Livable Communities Newsletter addresses how the level of your education will determine your earnings for the rest of your life. However, the quality of this education is critical, and two of the biggest obstacles to a good education are what has been labeled "Misery Index" for Selected Ventura County School Districts and the per-pupil spending in the various districts.

Let us know what you think at Info@CivicAlliance.org

Thanks,

Stacy Roscoe

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Ventura County's Tale of Two Cities:

There is a saying in the medical field that states: Give me your zip code and I will tell you how healthy you are. A zip code may also predict financial health and safety.

In the 2021 State of the Region Report distributed by the Ventura County Civic Alliance there is data that can validate these projections based on zip code.

The challenge is to understand what the data is telling us and what we can do with it to make a impact. Sometimes the data is very different than we would have guessed. For example, I wonder how many of us would have predicted the following comparison between Ventura and Moorpark?

Ventura Moorpark

Population 109,910 36,372

Average Household Income $100,000 $140,000

Owner Occupied Housing 54% 77%

Median Housing Price $769,000 $810,000

Apartment Rents $2,286 $2,544

Homeless 531 0

City Violent Crime Rate 29.4 3.1

City Property Crime Rate 6.3 0.5

Domestic Violence 13.42% 4.44%

Life Expectancy 81.5 82.9

Specifically, what is Moorpark doing to enable such strong numbers for income, home ownership, managing homelessness and deterring violent crime, property crime, and domestic violence, while improving life expectancy? Data is just data unless we do something with it! (The graphs providing this data are in the Appendix at end of this newsletter.)

What about the Kids?

Again, using State of the Region Report data, we want to address important current data in the report:

The first graph gives us a "drop the mic" moment. Once the graph is understood, there is nothing more to say than "Your level of education will determine your earnings for the rest of your life - Get educated!!!"

The quality of this education is critical, and one of the biggest obstacles to a good education is what has been labeled "Misery Index" for Selected Ventura County School Districts (2021).

WHAT IS THE MEASURE? The measure is an index made up of six socioeconomic indicators from 2021, applied to the 18 elementary and unified school districts in Ventura County. The indicators are the poverty rate among children under 6; the percentage of women-led households with children under 6 who live below the federal poverty line; the percentage of people who speak English “less than very well”; the percentage of students classified as English language learners; the percentage of adults 25 and older without a high school diploma; and the percentage of students eligible for free or discounted meals at school. The percentages are added together and weighted equally; a higher number indicates greater socioeconomic challenges.

WHY IS THE MEASURE IMPORTANT? Not all schools face the same task in educating their students. In some areas, children have more to worry about than their studies; they are learning English, or thinking about whether their families can afford enough food. These factors challenge educators as well as students, and the state recognizes this by making extra funding available for schools with large numbers of these pupils.

HOW ARE WE DOING? There are huge differences in these indicators among school districts in Ventura County. The Briggs Elementary School District and Santa Paula Unified ranked highest on the index, meaning they had the most socioeconomic challenges. The Oxnard and Hueneme elementary school districts tied for third. Every district that scored high on the index is located in the Santa Clara River Valley or on the southern Oxnard Plain — Ventura County’s two main agricultural areas, where the workforce is concentrated in low-paying farm jobs. At the other end of the spectrum, the Oak Park Unified School District scored lowest, followed by Santa Clara Elementary, a single-school district east of Santa Paula. Other districts with low scores on the Misery Index were in the Conejo Valley, the Camarillo area and Simi Valley. The differences among these areas in the individual measures that make up the index are striking. In Oak Park, just 1.6% of adults lack a high school diploma; in Santa Paula 36.4% of adults did not graduate from high school. In Ojai, 2.3% of young children live below the poverty line; in Port Hueneme, 24.1% do. In Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula and Fillmore more than 80% of students qualify for free or discounted meals. In Oak Park, 8.5% of students qualify.

However, help is happening in the form of Annual Per-Pupil Spending.

Because of greater needs in some districts, in 2013/14, the state started a system that aims to direct money to the districts that need it most. In the past, state funding was broadly even, and sometimes districts in affluent communities actually received more money than those in less wealthy areas. Oak Park Unified’s per-pupil funding in 2009/10 was higher than that of districts in Oxnard and Fillmore. Under the revised system, extra money goes to districts with lower-income families and more English learners. As a result, schools in Oxnard, Santa Paula, Port Hueneme and Fillmore get significantly more funding per student than those in Moorpark, Oak Park or Thousand Oaks. In 2013/14, the funding gap was only 14.7%, while in 2019/20 the top district in funding had 38% more per-student revenue than the bottom district.