Plan to Shut Down School Shocks Parents : Simi Valley: Board would choose one of three elementary campuses to close and transfer pupils. Residents say officials acted without notifying them.

Considering the dramatic step of combining campuses with low enrollment, the Simi Valley school board will vote Tuesday on whether to pursue closing an elementary school next fall to save money.

If the plan is approved, school officials will evaluate three central Simi Valley elementary campuses--Mountain View, Sycamore and Simi--to determine which of them could be most easily shut down.

“We have too many facilities, but not enough kids,” said Robert Chall, principal at Sycamore Elementary, which lies in a corridor of low enrollment.

By closing one school and eliminating an administrator’s position, the move could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, officials said.

“It’s something that in our financial constraints we have discussed for a couple of years,” Trustee Carla Kurachi said. “It is very traumatic for a community to have the closure of any school, but it gets to a point . . . where you have to make cuts. And unfortunately we have had to make drastic cuts in this district.”

The Simi Valley Unified School District is facing a projected $3-million deficit. Last year, the school made up a deficit of more than $2 million.

“You have to be cost-effective,” Kurachi said. “At what point do we say, ‘It is not cost effective to keep a school open’?”

But the proposal has shocked and infuriated some Simi Valley parents, a group of whom sharply criticized the board at its last meeting for quietly initiating the process without notifying them.

“I thought that was pretty crummy,” said Laurel Murphy, a parent. “We pay these people’s salaries.”

The proposal was suggested at a school board retreat in January and is listed among 16 restructuring goals to be approved Tuesday night.

Other objectives for this school year include creating a four-year high school and closing a junior high to make room for a technology-based and performing arts high school.

Kurachi denied that the board had tried to hide the school-closing proposal from parents. Discussion of shutting down an elementary school has been churning for years and most recently has been talked about in meetings open to the public.

“People are more than welcome to come to a board retreat,” she said.

But some school officials said they were unaware of the board’s plan to study closing an elementary school.

“We didn’t know anything about it until the beginning of the month,” Simi Elementary Principal Barbara Patten said.

Since then, however, news has spread like wildfire through the residential area where the elementary campuses are lined up between Sycamore Drive and Sequoia Avenue south of the Simi Valley Freeway. Parents there are furiously forming community groups to save their schools, they said.

The three schools have been targeted because they lie in an area with little growth, where enrollment has declined in past years, school officials said.

Sycamore has about 370 students, Simi has just 300 and Mountain View has 420 students enrolled this school year, while other city schools have as many as 600 elementary students.

But parents say there has to be a better solution, a way to cut costs without moving children out of their neighborhood schools. Some cite unique qualities about their schools that should warrant keeping them open.

Parents of children at Sycamore, for example, say the school’s progressive special-education program would be difficult to move, and traumatic for its disabled students.

Simi Elementary is an educational landmark, the oldest school in Simi Valley. Based on that fact alone, the site should be spared, parents there say.

About two dozen parents at Sycamore have launched a petition drive in their neighborhood to fight the possible closure.

“They would like to lay petitions before the school board to let them know we are the people who voted for them and we would like to keep our school open,” Murphy said.

Many parents said they plan to address the issue at Tuesday night’s board meeting, which starts an hour earlier than usual, at 6:30 p.m. Kurachi and board President Diane Collins will be available to answer questions from parents from 6 to 6:30.

If the board approves moving ahead with an evaluation of school closure, a committee of teachers, parents and administrators at each school will assess the campus’ use and enrollment, officials said.

Using the reports, a district committee will make a closure recommendation in late March. The school board will vote on the issue in April, officials said.