Board Nears Vote on Fate of Sycamore Elementary : Simi Valley: Trustees say the choice on whether to close the school will be their toughest decision. Two ask for a delay until a D.A.’s review is done.

The Simi Valley school board is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a highly criticized plan to shut down a local elementary school because of dwindling enrollment and budget constraints.

Longtime school trustees say it is the most gut-wrenching decision they have faced--and the climate of discontent among parents has not made casting a vote any easier.

Prompted by a parent complaint, the district attorney’s office is reviewing an allegation that the school board violated state law when it first voted in February to consider closing Sycamore Elementary School.

Trustees Carla Kurachi and Debbie Sandland said they plan to ask the board to table its vote until the district attorney’s review is complete.

“I’d like just to be on firm ground,” Kurachi said. “Certainly if there was a violation, it wasn’t done intentionally.”

The district attorney’s inquiry is the most recent episode in an emotionally charged issue that has played out in a series of meetings and public forums in the past month.

As the issue has inched closer to a vote, anger has reached a crescendo.

At a public forum earlier this month, Simi Valley police were called to monitor about 200 irate parents who came to protest the proposed closure of Sycamore.

Some parents have spoken privately of launching a recall effort. In the fifth hour of a marathon meeting last month, one parent told trustees: “What I really should do is be like Dirty Harry and blow you all away.”

The statement startled school officials, who later contacted Simi Valley police about the threat.

But parents say they are the ones who are under attack and facing the emotional trauma of possibly having to relocate their children to other schools if the recommendation to close Sycamore is approved.

“You guys just can’t do that to these kids,” parent Shelly Highsmith pleaded at a public forum last week. “You will just rip their little hearts out.”

If the closure is approved, Sycamore students will be transferred to Atherwood, Justin, Garden Grove and Simi elementary schools next fall.

Parents have begged and bullied in their efforts to get board members to find another way to cut costs, but officials contend that the district’s financial situation is so dire, they may have no choice.

Enrollment districtwide has plunged by 279 students since last year, a decline attributed in part to the loss of families that moved away after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, officials said.

At the rate of $3,085 per student that the district receives in state funding, the loss will amount to about $860,000 this school year.

Recent budget projections show a $1.8-million deficit for the 1996-97 school year and a $6-million deficit for the next year. The $6-million shortfall would place the district in violation of state law, which requires school districts to maintain a 3% reserve.

School trustees say they must balance a $2.7-deficit for the next school year, or risk intervention by the Ventura County superintendent of schools office.

Closing Sycamore, a small pink-and-white school with only 376 students, will save the cash-strapped district about $200,000 a year and bring in about $100,000 annually if the school buildings are leased, officials say.

“We are looking at every possible area so we can cut our deficit,” Kurachi told a crowd of about 100 hostile parents at a recent public forum. “But when the alternative is bankruptcy, you need to look at everything.”

But parents question that justification. They say the board intends to eliminate an elementary school to clear the way for a proposed magnet performing arts high school.

But board members say the plan to open a new magnet high school by fall 1996 is unrelated to the proposed school closure, which was based solely on low enrollment.

Parents are also angry that the decision to consider closing a school was made at a board retreat in January that few people attended or even knew about.

“The thing that still gets me and haunts me is that we were not there when the goal of closing a school was made,” parent Gary Murphy said.

Trustee Judy Barry said the bitterness and hostility surrounding this issue is the worst she has seen in her two terms on the school board.

“Every time we go through some sort of budget cut we get the people who are going to be affected speaking--that part is nothing new,” Barry said.

“But this one has been very different,” she said. “People are not listening to the information that has been given to them. They are passing out inaccurate information. It is just stirring up the pot.”

One point trustees and parents agree on is the impact that the debate has had on the community.

“What we are losing in the long run I don’t think it’s worth it,” parent Colleen Duncan said. “I just see us getting deeper and deeper into this and it is just getting worse and worse.”