MOORPARK : Opening Delayed for New Middle School

Moorpark school officials say construction delays have forced the district to abandon plans to open its new middle school by fall and that the facility may not be ready for students until late 1993 at the earliest.

“We had a target date of opening next September, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to make it,” school board President Tom Baldwin said this week.

“We had to rebid the thing, and it cost us a couple months. It was going to be tight anyway.”

The building delay for the $14-million school under construction on Peach Hill Road just east of Spring Road was caused by a dispute with one of the contractors originally hired for the job, Baldwin said.

Because of the dispute over the scope of the work called for in the district’s bid proposal, school officials decided to put part of the project out for a new bid.

“We couldn’t come to an agreement on just what it was we wanted them to do,” Baldwin said.

The difficulty now, Baldwin said, is how to open the school in the middle of the next school year without severely disrupting the education taking place at the district’s other middle school, Chaparral Middle School.

Both Chaparral and the new middle school will handle all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students in the district.

“I don’t want to wait another school year to open the school,” Baldwin said.

“As soon as it’s ready for occupancy, I want it to open.”

Baldwin said one alternative would be for the district to split the roughly 1,300 to 1,400 students expected to report to Chaparral next fall into two academic groups, so that when the new school comes on line half of them can report to a different building but attend the same classes with the same teachers.