Majority of Simi Valley Trustees Appear to Favor School Conversion

The last time the Simi Valley school board faced students, teachers and parents angry that their school was going to be closed, it backed down.

This time, though, with a vote set for Monday on a plan to include ninth-graders in Simi Valley’s high schools through conversion of Sequoia Junior High School into a magnet high school, the majority of the Simi Valley Unified School District board members appear to be standing firm against fierce community opposition.

Back in April, the issue was money: A proposal to cut costs by closing Sycamore elementary school was abandoned. This time, though, trustees say the matter is about making sure that students--especially the district’s 1,360 ninth-graders--are in the right school at the right time.

“That was for financial reasons. This is for educational reasons,” Trustee Carla Kurachi said. “It’s a harder issue to back down from.”

The scores of speakers who have opposed the plan at two recent school board meetings have focused their opposition on the absence of details about the proposed performing arts and technology magnet school and on the designation of Sequoia Junior High as the site. Only a few say they are against a transition to four-year high schools.

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Even Suzi Bird, who has spent hours organizing the “Save Our Sequoia” campaign, doing everything from painting protest signs to meeting with lawyers, said she also believes ninth-graders should be in high schools.

Bird, however, said she does not agree that closing the best junior high school in the district is the correct way to go about it.

Bird, the mother of a Sequoia eighth-grader, said the S.O.S. group is now exploring legal options to stop the board from going ahead with plans to change Sequoia.

“It may look like we’re laying low, but we’re not,” Bird said. “There’s a lot of us working through the night on a lot of stuff. They’ll definitely hear from us Monday night.”

Other opponents of the Sequoia change have written to the U. S. Department of Education in an attempt to eliminate the district from consideration for a $10-million grant that would fund technology, including technology at the proposed magnet school.

Still, the widespread support for four-year high schools has emboldened school board members, who see Monday’s vote on designating Sequoia as the magnet high school site to open in the fall of 1996 as a crucial step on the path to four-year high schools. Only by opening a third high school on an existing junior high school site can they affordably create the space to move ninth-graders out of junior highs and into high schools, they say.

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“My main goal, educationally 100%, is that we have to get the ninth-graders on the high school campuses,” Trustee Judy Barry said. “The magnet school is a way to achieve that. I really don’t know any other way to do it.”

Board President Diane Collins said moving ninth-graders to high school will give them more chances to take elective courses and to compete in sports. She said the move also may reduce the district’s dropout rate and the number of ninth-graders who are expelled from the district.

“Ninth-grade students don’t really treat that year as part of high school, and that’s a significant problem,” Collins said.

Board members are also paying attention to other school districts across the state and the nation, where four-year high schools are the norm.

Ninth-graders are simply better off in high school, Kurachi said. “That’s where they belong. Emotionally they belong there, academically they belong there.”

Even Trustee Debbie Sandland, a harsh critic of the plan to convert Sequoia, said she is not opposed to four-year high schools.

But Sandland said the district should focus its efforts on other priorities instead of poring its efforts into a magnet high school. She fondly remembers her years in the late 1960s as a ninth-grader at a Simi Valley junior high school. “I had a very good experience as a ninth-grader,” Sandland said. “I was proud to be a ninth-grader and I did well.”

Sandland, who led the opposition to closing Sycamore, has so far been alone on the board in her campaign against the idea of closing Sequoia as a junior high.

“We have no clear vision, we have no cost analysis, and we haven’t ascertained the will of the community,” Sandland said. “I think this whole plan is going to fall flat on its face if we don’t slow down.”

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School district administrators said there are solid educational reasons for the move to four-year high schools.

“We get kids going to Apollo [continuation school] in ninth grade. We know that a lot of kids go into 10th grade behind in credits,” Leslie Crunelle, director of secondary education, said.

Under the district’s plan, Simi Valley High School and Royal High School, along with the converted Sequoia, would accept ninth-graders for the first time in September, 1996. The district’s other junior high schools--Hillside, Sinaloa and Valley View--would then begin to provide two years of instruction.

After its proposed conversion, Sequoia would provide instruction for eight-, ninth- and 10th-graders the first year, ninth- through 11th-graders in its second year and ninth- through 12th-graders during the school year beginning in September, 1998.

Supt. Mary Beth Wolford said additional details of the new high school will become clearer over the next year, after a survey of parents’ interest.

“The first and most important consideration is moving toward a four-year high school program,” she said.

In the meantime, amid all the parental concern on the best interests of students, some warn that the whole fight is hurting their education, at least in the short term.

“Lately, most of our class time has been devoted to discuss our reconfiguration,” eighth-grader Brian Ortiz, 14, told the school board.

In addition to the talk in school, the late-night school board meetings have also taken their toll, and some people are eager for the debate to conclude, however the vote turns out.