Busing Begins in Agoura Hills : Crowding Casts Shadow on Start of Classes

When four sixth-graders climbed aboard a school bus Thursday at Chesebro Road and Balkins Drive, they quietly launched more than a school year.

The students and many others from Agoura Hills are the first to be bused under a controversial plan to relieve crowding in the Las Virgenes Unified School District in western Los Angeles County. Instead of attending Lindero Canyon Middle School, where classes are filled to capacity, the students were taken about six miles to Calabasas, where A. E. Wright Middle School has room to spare.

As the school year begins, many districts in rapidly growing communities of the Santa Clarita Valley, Ventura County and the western edge of Los Angeles County are searching for ways to accommodate more students.

Not Popular With All

The solution in Las Virgenes was not universally popular. Agoura Hills parents complained for months about plans, approved earlier this year by the Board of Education, to shift attendance boundary lines and bus about 50 Sumac Elementary School graduates living east of Kanan Road to Wright. Originally, they were to attend Lindero Canyon.

Parents argued that sending Sumac graduates to Wright would disrupt their children’s friendships and ruin neighborhood camaraderie. Parents also said they feared that the 5 1/2- to 6-mile trip along the Ventura Freeway would be dangerous.

But those concerns seemed miles away for sixth-grader Denim Millay as she waited for the bus Thursday. She was looking forward to her first day at Wright.

“At first, we thought going to Wright instead of Lindero Canyon was dumb,” Denim said, firmly. “But after we saw the school, we knew it would be OK.”

“Yeah, Wright definitely has a better P. E. program than Lindero,” sixth-grader Kevin Ford added.

The shift of boundaries and added portable classrooms at some elementary schools will give the Las Virgenes district ample classroom space for the estimated 8,500 students expected this year. About 8,300 students enrolled in the district last year.

In Ventura County, all but one school district reported an increase in students. The exception was Conejo Valley Unified School District, where first-day enrollment of 17,621 was 20 below last year.

Ventura County school districts reporting increased enrollment were: Pleasant Valley, with 5,738 students, up from 5,604 last year; Simi Valley Unified, with 17,941 enrolled, compared with 17,716 in 1986; and Oxnard Union High School, with 10,590 students, an increase from 10,255 last year.

In the Santa Clarita Valley, all school districts that opened this week reported enrollment increases.

Leading the pack was Castaic Union, with a 16% increase. This week, 988 students enrolled in the the district, which has a single campus for kindergarten through eighth grades. Last year, the enrollment was 850.

Saugus Increase

Saugus Union district reported 4,659 students on the first day of classes, an increase from 4,434 last year. Sulphur Springs Union enrolled 2,698 students this week, up from 2,510 students last year.

First-day enrollment figures for the William S. Hart Union High School District, which serves the entire Santa Clarita Valley, were not available. However, a spokesman for the district said attendance figures would not be significantly higher than last year’s 9,350.

Classes begin today in the Newhall School District, Monday in the Burbank district and Wednesday in the Los Angeles Unified district.