Angry Residents Plan to Protest New School Building : Newbury Park: The district and neighbors of Cypress Elementary will discuss a two-story structure already under construction.

The last thing Newbury Park resident Arthur Minazzoli wants to see out his back door is a two-story building, blocking his view of school playing fields and the distant foothills.

And that is precisely what Minazzoli and a handful of neighbors plan to tell the Conejo Valley school board at an emergency district meeting this morning.

“The building is going to be 16 feet from our back wall,” an angry Minazzoli said Thursday. “It’s not just the idea of the view, it’s how they handled it. Nobody here was notified.”

The Conejo Valley Unified School District has already begun construction on a $1.7-million cafeteria and multipurpose room on the adjacent Cypress Elementary School campus.

Nearby homeowners say they never knew a 35,000-square-foot building was to be constructed until a group of engineers started poking around near their back yards.

Minazzoli and his neighbor, Dean Weissman, protested to the Thousand Oaks City Council in late June, prompting the city’s request for a meeting between the homeowners and the school board.

School officials have recommended that the project move ahead, but the school board can stop construction.

The new building would accommodate student assemblies and replace makeshift indoor eating areas with a larger cafeteria. During the winter, students must eat in their classrooms because the existing facility is not large enough.

District officials say the new facilities are badly needed and should be built despite complaints from neighbors.

“We’ve said that we are willing to work together as far as landscaping is concerned,” Assistant Supt. Sarah Hart said. “But the neighbors’ request is that the building be moved. The building was designed to fit in that location. If you tried to move it to another location it would not work.”

Moving the proposed star-shaped stucco building elsewhere on campus would cost about $500,000, Hart said.

District officials said that if construction moves ahead, it will be completed next April.

Parents at Cypress have raised money for nearly a decade to help pay for the new cafeteria.

“There are certain things we cannot do at the school without a large room,” booster club Chairwoman Terri Marshall said. “It’s beneficial to the children in enhancing their education.”

But some residents think the district has steamrollered the community, misleading homeowners about its size and appearance.

“We feel a little suckered and a little abused,” said nearby resident David Chambers, whose son is a fifth-grader at Cypress. “I think if the parents had been given a choice between it and these guys being subjected to a 20-foot wall, we would have said, ‘Forget it.’ ”

Weissman agreed.

“They should have notified us a long time ago so we could have been involved,” he said. “We would like to be good neighbors and we would like to see it reciprocated.”