Moorpark Schools Committee’s Proposed Changes Under Fire : Education: Board members say the recommendations of their appointed panel are disappointing. Group has met for more than a year.

A committee charged with finding ways to improve Moorpark’s elementary schools is under fire from school board members, who say the group’s preliminary recommendations are disappointing and lack ambition.

“They did a lot not to come up with anything,” board member Tom Baldwin said in response to the tentative slate of changes backed by the board-appointed Committee for Effective Schools. “I’m disappointed that they couldn’t show a little more originality and ingenuity in their recommendations.”

The group of 27 parents, teachers, school staff members and district administrators has been meeting for more than a year in its attempt to improve the district’s elementary schools. It is scheduled to hold two public meetings before completing its list of recommendations Oct. 19 and then presenting them to the school board Oct. 26.

The committee’s preliminary recommendations include:

* The district should allow parents and faculty advisory councils to play a greater role in making decisions at each school.

* Teachers should be encouraged to teach more than one grade level, either by mixing grades in a single classroom or by teaching different grades in different years.

* The district should improve its communications with community residents by assigning the responsibility for public relations to a specific person or group, who would produce press releases and a district brochure.

* The district should encourage each school to develop and promote its own unique identity and allow parents--within certain limitations--to choose the specific school their children will attend.

The committee stopped short of providing a specific outline for the creation of “magnet” schools or of suggesting any change in the configuration of the district’s five elementary schools--two of the key reasons the group was impaneled in September, 1992.

“There’s nothing wrong with any of these ideas, I just don’t believe they go far enough,” said Baldwin, a strong advocate of magnet schools, which specialize in specific academic areas. “I really think that we need to offer the parents real choices, not just each school having its own identity. What does that mean?”

Board member Clint Harper shared Baldwin’s concern.

“I was hoping that this committee would come up with a stronger, more specific list of recommendations,” Harper said. “I had been led to believe . . . that there would be more explicit and perhaps more novel recommendations coming from the committee.”

But committee Chairman David B. Pollock Monday defended the group’s list of tentative suggestions.

“There’s nothing that we can do as a committee that will change the district overnight,” he said. “We can just point in one direction and say, ‘That’s where we think you ought to go.’ ”

Pollock said the group studied possible changes in the district’s configuration but found no clear way to improve the current structure.

“We ran the numbers, we studied the situation and we determined that, given the nature of the community, that was not possible,” Pollack said.

The committee’s first public forum to discuss its preliminary findings is scheduled for Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Chaparral Middle School auditorium, 280 Poindexter Ave. A second forum will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the district’s boardroom at 30 Flory Ave.

Committee members are expected to complete their recommendations at Tuesday’s meeting, Pollock said.