Parents Rally Against Plan for Magnet School : Simi Valley: Group seeks to prevent conversion of Sequoia Junior High into a campus for technology and the performing arts.

Brandishing protest signs, a videotape and a supportive survey of high school teachers, hundreds of parents from across Simi Valley rallied Tuesday night to oppose a plan to convert Sequoia Junior High School into a magnet high school specializing in technology and the performing arts.

Suzi Bird, an organizer of the “Save Our Sequoia” campaign, said the group hoped to use Tuesday’s school board meeting to demonstrate that even those without direct ties to Sequoia oppose the change.

Among the opponents were Dan Shuster and Jim Wilber, two Royal High School teachers who surveyed 84 of their colleagues at Royal and Simi high schools. Sixty teachers said the school district did “very poorly” in informing the public and district employees about the proposed plan, and 62 said that creating a magnet school was either “not at all” or “very little” in the best interests of the Simi Valley Unified School District.

Shuster said about a dozen teachers favored the idea. They echoed the sentiments of top school district administrators, who have expressed excitement about the educational possibilities of the magnet school, while also defending it as a necessary step on the path to moving Simi Valley ninth-graders from junior high schools to high schools.

Shuster, a soft-spoken computer and math teacher who said he was initially excited about plans for a magnet school, said performing arts and technology teachers were upset about being shut out of planning for the magnet school.

“The board or the district never came to the teachers and asked, ‘What do you think?’ ” he said in an interview before the meeting. “It’s almost like they were just being stepped on.”

In addition, Shuster told the board that while many teachers support an eventual transition to four-year high schools, they worry that the proposed magnet school, to open in the fall of 1996, would be too expensive and that there would not be enough students interested in enrolling.

Parents expressed similar concerns.

“We need our books and our supplies replenished,” Lana Partington, the mother of a Sequoia seventh-grader, said in an interview before the meeting. “Before we go ahead and implement a vast change, we need to take care of our existing high schools.”

Bird said the video that parents planned to show at the meeting included school board President Diane Collins saying that the proposed magnet school is intended for students who do not plan to attend college. The tape also includes Collins denying making those remarks, Bird said.

“It just shows the community that we aren’t getting the truth,” Bird said.

More than 200 people crowded the auditorium at Berylwood School and spilled outside for the meeting Tuesday night. About 25 gathered outside before the meeting, holding signs and chanting, “Listen to the people” and “Lower class size.”

The meeting was billed as a forum for public comment, but some board members could not resist responding. Trustee Judy Barry told Sequoia backers: “I think there is a misconception. We are not planning on closing a school. We are planning on changing the structure of our schools.”

But Trustee Debbie Sandland said: “We are going to be closing a school,” with the elimination of junior high classes at the site. Her comment drew cheers from the audience.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the issue at its June 12 meeting.