SIMI VALLEY : Task Force to Study Reorganized Schools

A new task force will study a plan to create middle schools and four-year high schools in Simi Valley, school board members agreed Tuesday night.

The group will review a plan adopted last year by the school board but postponed until the Simi Valley Unified School District could afford more guidance counselors and teachers.

The plan calls for replacing the district’s four junior high schools, which have the seventh through ninth grades, with middle schools including the sixth through eighth grades. Ninth-graders would be moved to high school.

Led by Assistant Supt. Susan Parks, the task force will include school, union and PTA representatives and community members. The panel will update the costs of the plan, consider alternatives and develop a time line to be given to the school board in November. “We have already made the decision, it’s just a matter of financing,” said board President Judy Barry. “There are other ways of doing it that might be less expensive.”

Barry said the task force may want to explore several options, including the possibility of a seven-period school day instead of six and keeping sixth-grade students in self-contained classrooms during the first year of middle schools.

The earliest the plan would be implemented would be next fall, she said.

Citing high costs, the school board tabled an $880,000 plan in 1989. A scaled-down $454,000 plan was approved last year, but was criticized by board members because it limited each middle school to one guidance counselor and eliminated one of the two assistant principals proposed for each school.