Fate of Old Moorpark High School Is Elementary

Starting just after dawn Monday, demolition crews began ripping carpets and tile from the floors of Moorpark’s old, mothballed high school on Casey Road, the first step in tearing down the empty building so a new elementary school can take its place.

But even as demolition begins, school district officials still haven’t decided what kind of education the new, $6.5-million school should offer.

They want the school to be a magnet, drawing students from throughout the city. But should it focus on communications or the arts? Should it be a “fundamental” school, where the curriculum sticks with the three R’s? For that matter, what grade levels should it house, kindergarten through third? Or through fifth grade?

The answers will come in part from a community survey that school district officials hope to begin before Christmas. The timing is crucial if the district hopes to stick to its goal of opening the new, unnamed school at the start of the next school year.

“The sooner the better,” said school board member Tom Baldwin. “We’re chomping at the bit on this.”

Some of the particulars are already set. The building will have more than 30 classrooms, laid out in the same basic floor plan as Arroyo West School on Country Hill Road. District officials have submitted the school’s design to the Office of the State Architect for approval.

Baldwin said the school will probably include a district-sponsored day-care program that will let working parents drop off children before the school day begins and pick up them up late in the afternoon.

Beyond those basic details, however, the school’s mission and programs are still taking shape. The project--tight timetable and all--excites school district officials, because it isn’t everyday they get to design a school from the ground up.

“We’re just dreaming now,” Baldwin said.

The ideas proposed so far include:

* A teaching academy within the school. The district would bring high school students interested in teaching into the new school, using them to tutor groups of children and reduce class sizes.

* Keeping groups of children together, with the same instructor, for several years. Flory School Principal Teri Williams, who has been named principal of the new school, said the change could help teachers and students.

“You learn what the students are all about, learn the expectations of the parents,” she said. “You learn it the first year, and you’re ready to hit the ground running the second year.”

* A greater emphasis on technology, with individual classrooms wired to the Internet.

* A program that keeps children in the same school from kindergarten through fifth grade. None of Moorpark’s five elementary schools keeps its students for more than three years, leading to complaints from some parents.

“A lot of the parents have said, ‘Gosh, we go from one school to the next school to the next,’ ” said school board member Greg Barker.

Several school board members said they also would like to see educational programs, in such areas as music or drama, that will make good use of the 400-seat auditorium, the only part of the old high school that will be incorporated into the elementary school.

In contrast to the excitement about the new building, the destruction of the old high school saddened some of its graduates. The building was closed in 1988 after the district built a modern replacement at another site.

Patti Reuter graduated from the school in 1972, about 27 years after her father. She remembered it as a small, intimate place.

“You could get to be friends with the teachers and more of the students, because there weren’t so many of us,” she said.

Reuter probably will not stop by the building to watch it torn down, saying the thought of it hurt. “I grew up with it--all the football games and everything,” she said. “You get used to the place.”