SIMI VALLEY : Students to Be Surveyed on Safety

As part of an effort to improve safety at Simi Valley schools, district officials are planning to survey students on the presence of weapons, drugs, sexual harassment and racial conflict on campus.

The anonymous survey will also ask students if their school grounds are well-kept, if disciplinary rules are fair, and if they feel comfortable talking with teachers about problems.

Administrators with the Simi Valley Unified School District hope to distribute the questionnaire to all students in the fourth through 12th grades. Employees will also be surveyed on campus safety.

The Simi Valley school board is expected to review the questions in the survey at its meeting Tuesday.

Administrator Ann Eklund said the results will be used to identify the biggest safety concerns of students and staff members. On Wednesday, a draft copy of the survey was previewed by a committee of parents, district employees and city officials. The committee, formed to review campus safety after the Feb. 1 fatal stabbing of 14-year-old Chad Hubbard, has been charged with developing short- and long-term plans for ensuring that students are safe at school.

Committee member Jerry Garon, a physical education and science teacher at Hillside Junior High, said he believes that the questions on the survey are relevant, including those that ask students to identify their ethnic backgrounds. “We need to know if people of different backgrounds are treated differently or feel that they are treated differently,” he said.

In the meantime, school officials say the stabbing has prompted more students to turn their fellow classmates in for bringing knives, guns and other weapons to campus.

Twenty-seven expulsion hearings have been held since Feb. 10, and five more are scheduled. During the first half of the year, 19 students were targeted for expulsion.

In all, expulsion hearings for the 1993-94 school year have climbed to 51, contrasted with 23 during the 1992-93 school year and 17 the previous year, officials said.