CLASSICAL MUSIC : Ojai Outreach : The annual festival is ‘on a roll,’ says its president, as the board launches an endowment drive and programs at schools.

Last year at this time, supporters of the annual Ojai Festival were wondering if their tradition could survive under the weight of $150,000 in debts.

This year, after a pair of major donations and the best-attended festival in the event’s 45-year history, the organization’s budget shows a modest surplus. Despite lacking a staff administrator, board members have landed top-notch talent--conductor Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic--for the 1992 festival May 29-31.

In a year when many arts groups and nonprofit organizations are fighting for survival, the Ojai event seems to be flourishing. And now, festival board members are broadening their agenda and launching a campaign to bolster music education in local public schools.

“We’re on a roll,” says Joan Kemper, president of the festival board. “We must continue to do a marvelous festival and present the best music we can to the community. But we can’t just rest on our laurels and do nothing else the other 11 months of the year. We must do outreach, we must do multicultural things, and education.”

There are other things to do, as well. Christopher Hunt, the consulting director recruited to pull the 1991 festival together, has gone on to other projects, and a board search committee is still looking for a successor. (Ara Guzelimian, an Ojai board member and the artistic administrator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, helped arrange next year’s performers.) The festival’s paid staff, which usually numbers four, now amounts to one full-time clerical person and two half-time consultants.

Nevertheless, Kemper and her board colleague have a hat-full of innovations in mind.

On Dec. 10, the Ojai Festival will sponsor a day of free school performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic brass ensemble. The musicians will set up in the auditorium of Matilija Junior High School, play two morning programs for Ojai public school children in grades four through six, then return after lunch with two more free shows for students from the Ojai Valley’s many private schools.

In addition, Kemper has resurrected an old idea of the Ventura County Symphony’s and is laying plans for a mobile music van to visit schools. The van would include a stereo to play classical music and a handful of volunteers to display and demonstrate instruments.

The plans are still vague, and festival volunteers are looking for a van, but Kemper calls the program vital, given the limited funding that arts education gets in public schools these days. To support the effort, Kemper says, she’s hoping to win donations from beyond the festival’s usual circle of serious music supporters.

On still another front, the festival has undertaken its first endowment drive. The goal is $1.5 million, a sum that would throw off enough annual interest to smooth the organization’s fiscal operations during its many income-free months. Dr. Richard S. Gould, chairman of the festival endowment committee, opened the campaign this fall with a $10,000 personal donation.

“Even though it’s a time of diminishing cultural support, Ojai seems to want to guard its treasure,” Gould says. “We’re looking at between $250,000 and $300,000 verbally committed in the last two weeks.”

Among the most recent donors: the venerated potter Beatrice Wood, who lives a few miles outside of town and has pledged to donate $15,000 worth of her work.

This sense of momentum began with two key donations shortly before this year’s event, at a time when board members were thinking about selling off the festival headquarters building to cut their debt. Instead, the gifts came in: $130,000 in stock from one supporter, a commercial lot in town from another. Festival officials say they’re in the midst of selling the property for about $140,000. Both donors requested anonymity.

“You can’t expect those gifts every year,” Kemper says. She notes that the three-day event now costs about $450,000 a year to run, with no advertising budget. But she also refuses to be pessimistic.

“I just have no patience with these doomsayers saying, ‘Oh, the economy is terrible,’ ” she says. “If we just sit around and complain about it, it’s not going to get any better.”