East County Issue / Busing :...

Michael Dapper, Member, Parents for Better Schools

Personally, I would like to see no children bused, but this is not a cut-and-dried issue. The school district has achieved a good level of integration through busing, but it is also spending $500,000 more than its state allotment for busing. Our objective in suggesting the changes was to convince the school board that there is a better way to integrate the schools than busing everyone all over town. We hope to get a neighborhood school plan from this, but it has never been our objective to get that at the cost of integration. Busing has also created a safety issue in Moorpark, both at the schools and with all the cross-town traffic. The primary example is California 118, which becomes very dangerous when the buses pick the kids up from school. I am very surprised that there has not been an accident or a child hit. The congestion at Peach Hill Elementary School is also the result of busing. Without busing, parents could drive in to pick up their kids and there would be far less congestion on the street.

Teresa Cortes, Member, district committee that drew up current boundaries

I think we should stick with the configuration we have set up now. If we have neighborhood schools, we’re just putting our kids in a circle, where no one will get in and no one will get out. We’re talking about setting up schools where our kids will be learning nothing but discrimination. There wouldn’t be an opportunity for them to learn from other cultures. I want my kids to have the opportunity to learn from other cultures and other communities. If they can’t do that, how are they going to be more open-minded about other people? Parents who support neighborhood schools are looking out for their own convenience. We don’t have to get up early to drive the kids to school. We can drive them up the street instead, still wearing our bathrobes, maybe have a little coffee and talk with our friends. But it’s the kids’ future, not mine, I have to worry about. It took us many months to work on the configurations we have now, and we didn’t do it based on what is convenient. We worked hard to have the integration rate we have now.

Sam K. Nainoa, Board member, Moorpark Unified School District

We definitely need to continue busing students. We currently bus about 40% of our youngsters. Moorpark’s unique layout and the city’s demographics both lend themselves to busing. I don’t think it is feasible to work with a neighborhood school concept, especially considering that the ethnic content of the city is 30% Mexican-American. If we had a neighborhood school concept, it would in essence become a segregated district. The group proposing this has not addressed the segregation issue, other than to say there would be a magnet school downtown. You have to prove to me how a magnet school will provide a racially balanced district. And even then, who is going to go to that school? Who is going to commit to going to a downtown magnet school when what they want is a neighborhood school? The end result of this is that the downtown kids--predominantly Mexican-Americans--are the ones impacted, because they are the ones who are always going to be bused. And that’s not fair.

Tom Baldwin, Board president, Moorpark Unified School District

It is incumbent on the school board to do everything it can to decrease the busing in the district. We’re using one dollar of every six we spend on busing, and that’s not teaching Johnny to read. That’s money we can’t spend in the classroom. As a board, we need to do everything we can to trim that money back and get it into the classroom, teaching students to read and write and all the things we are supposed to do in a school. However, I would never support any plan that would segregate our schools, nor do I know anybody in our schools who would want to do that. You can use busing to integrate the schools, which we are currently doing, or you can use a magnet school concept. If we put the magnet school downtown, where the largely Hispanic students live, it will attract the white students because that’s where the best students and teachers will be. The board is studying to see if this project will work, and I think it will.

Faye Berriman, Member, Parents for Better Schools

About 47% of the children in Moorpark are bused, and that is just too high. We want to reduce busing for all children, regardless of race, and the way we think it can happen is by going to a kindergarten through fifth-grade configuration at all the elementary schools. If we did that, Moorpark could offer a better education, without spending more money. Integration is a concern to many people, and it is a concern of mine too. But the people who are saying that our group is racist because we want to reduce the amount of busing going on are not being fair. We don’t want to eliminate all the busing. We just want to reduce the number of children being bused. We also want to offer a school downtown that offers a better curriculum, that will draw students from across the district. About 30% of the students at the magnet school would be Hispanic, and they would primarily come from the downtown area. Right now, 100% of the downtown students are bused, so this would already cut the amount of busing.