Simi School Board OKs Conversion of Sequoia to High School : Education: Despite opposition from supporters of the junior high, the panel votes to turn the campus into a technology and performing-arts magnet.

Despite the protest of parents, teachers and students, the Simi Valley school board voted Monday night to convert Sequoia Junior High into the city’s third public high school, making room for ninth-graders on high school campuses.

The vote came after weeks of pleas from Sequoia supporters who wanted their school to be left intact. After listening to Sequoia backers again Monday, however, the majority of trustees said their desire to switch to four-year high schools outweighed doubts about community support for changing Sequoia to a technology-and-performing-arts magnet high school.

“I believe that there has to be a way to get to a four-year grouping of students on a high school campus, and I can’t see any other way to go,” Trustee Norm Walker said.

Walker joined Trustees Judy Barry, Diane Collins and Carla Kurachi in voting for the change. Trustee Debbie Sandland voted against it.

In a last-ditch effort to stop the plan, Save Our Sequoia leader Suzi Bird told Simi Valley Unified School District trustees that approving the conversion of Sequoia without first completing an environmental review would violate state law. She said the third high school would create traffic and would require new buildings that would harm the environment.

The board voted anyway, clearing the way for an intense planning process in which school officials, parents and teachers would develop the program for the new high school while also preparing to move ninth-graders from the district’s junior high schools to the high schools in September, 1996.

Much of the planning will be completed by October, when the district will survey parent interest in the technology-and-performing-arts high school, which would be phased in over three years. If there is not enough interest, the concept of the high school might be changed, and some students might be forced to go there instead of being allowed to sign up for it, district officials said.

Board members who voted with the majority said the ninth-graders will be better off in high school, with more classes to choose from and the chance to play on high school athletic teams.

Explaining her vote against the proposal, Sandland echoed Sequoia parents who said that there was too little information available about the cost and curriculum of the magnet school. She said the district should devote its resources to improving its existing programs rather than shifting students from place to place and starting a new high school.

Sandland also complained that the proposal for the new high school, which would draw students from across the district, strays from the tradition of having students attend schools in their own neighborhoods.

“It just breaks my heart that they would displace 1,400 staff and students from their neighborhood schools,” Sandland said.