Distant Neighbors : Moorpark College Isolated From Home

Sitting in Adam James’ restaurant, you’d never guess that Moorpark is a college town. Although Lamppost Pizza in downtown Moorpark lies just a few miles from Moorpark College, few of the school’s 12,000 students eat there or at the other restaurants that line Los Angeles Avenue.

“We don’t get many students at all,” James said. “They aren’t coming down here.”

Sitting in the school’s year-old Performing Arts Center, on the other hand, you might wonder if any Moorpark residents not taking classes, teaching or working at the college come there at all. Plays and concerts often draw few people from the city, despite the center’s pristine acoustics, high-caliber productions and ticket prices that rarely top $10.

“We know for most of these people, we’re not on their cultural circuit,” college spokeswoman Jeanne Bailey said. “You don’t really need a college to meet your cultural needs anymore.”

Nearly 30 years after the school opened, some local business leaders and college officials agree that Moorpark College remains in some ways isolated from its namesake city.

The school is an important educational resource, sending professors into local elementary schools for science demonstrations and giving 60% of Moorpark High School graduates their first taste of college education.

And yet, though the college is Moorpark’s second-largest employer, business leaders say it has little economic impact on the city except as an aid in luring businesses to town.

Whereas Ventura College and Oxnard College draw many students and faculty from their home cities, most Moorpark College students and employees come from elsewhere--Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks or the San Fernando Valley. They spend their money at home, not in Moorpark.

“It’s a commuter college,” Deputy City Manager Richard Hare said. “If it had dormitories with people living in there, then you’d have students eating in the restaurants and shopping in town.”

Moorpark College President James Walker agreed that while the school has a significant effect on Ventura County, providing education to people from throughout the area, its direct economic impact on Moorpark is relatively light.

“If you’re talking about the city of Moorpark, yes, you’re right on,” he said.

But college officials hope the school’s 30th anniversary this year will give them the perfect opportunity to change the relationship of the school and the town.

“It’s extremely important for me to make people more aware of what a fantastic resource they have,” Walker said. “It’s a big job, but it’s certainly doable.”

Only 2 Roads Connect Campus to Downtown

The college has always been physically removed from much of Moorpark. It occupies a spur of the city connected to the downtown by just two roads: a surface street and a freeway. When the school opened on Sept. 11, 1967, it sat alone in a rolling, rural landscape, without a home in sight.

“It was out in the sticks,” said Gerry Olsen, a retired Moorpark College spokesman who started working for the Ventura Community College District in 1967.

As the school and the city grew, with houses eventually encircling the campus, Moorpark College became a key feature of the city’s educational system.

Moorpark High School counselor Andi Mallen regularly sees the majority of her school’s graduates start college across town. In contrast, only about 24% of each Moorpark High graduating class goes immediately to four-year schools.

Most of the students who choose Moorpark College plan on transferring to a university after a year or two, Mallen said. For those students, and their parents, the school’s closeness to home and low tuition make it a convenient and cheap steppingstone.

Peggy Weak’s two sons have not finished high school yet, but she has already decided to send them to Moorpark College for their first few semesters. Just one year apart in school, they will attend college at the same time, straining Weak’s salary as a second-grade teacher at Peach Hill School. Fortunately, Moorpark College’s $13-per-unit price is within Weak’s grasp.

“They’re a year apart, I’m a widow and a teacher, and they’re going there,” Weak said. “It’s a good place to explore without spending too much money.”

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But Weak also has faith in the educational benefits of community colleges. She attended El Camino Community College in Torrance before transferring to San Jose State University with all her credits intact.

“I think some people who haven’t been in that system have a real snobbish attitude toward it, and they’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve seen too many kids go to four-year universities and flunk out.”

Mallen said Moorpark College has a solid reputation. “Going to Moorpark College is not a stigma,” she said. “When I grew up in the [San Fernando] Valley, we knew who went to Pierce College, and we knew why. They went there because they didn’t have another choice. Now it’s not like that.”

Moorpark College’s influence on the city’s educational system reaches well beyond its campus. At the start of this school year, college and Moorpark High School teachers created a new Health Science Academy at the high school, a program in which students learn about medicine while studying such basic subjects as math and English.

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Next school year, Moorpark College professors will teach academy students about medical terminology and careers. If those students choose to attend Moorpark College, they will receive credit for some of their classes.

Based on the academy’s success, the high school and college also may create a program for students interested in communications, Mallen said.

The college’s influence touches even local elementary schools. Students at Arroyo West School tour the college’s laser lab to learn about energy, administrator Jackie Welter said. Sometimes physics professor and school board member Clint Harper brings a small laser to the school. And groups of Arroyo West students sometimes visit the college observatory, even if the stars aren’t out for their daytime trips.

The tours and demonstrations make real the sometimes abstract lessons of science classes. “[The students] get much more in-depth information, and they get to see it at work,” Welter said. “It’s an experience I simply cannot provide. I don’t have the equipment here.”

Kindergarten students at Campus Canyon School visit the college’s teaching zoo to study animals.

Principal Linda Bowe said the college, just a block away from her school, is a vital part of her students’ education.

“They grow up thinking this is the way it is, like, ‘Doesn’t everybody have a college?’ ” she said.

And yet, while Moorpark students use the school, many of the community’s other residents don’t.

Like any college, the school’s athletic and artistic programs generate a constant stream of events: football and basketball games, concerts, plays and dance recitals.

But those events--even in entertainment-starved Moorpark, which for years lacked a movie theater--often draw relatively few people from the city.

Unlike Ventura residents, who follow Ventura College’s state champion basketball teams with devotion and pride, Moorpark residents often ignore the cultural or athletic events the college has to offer.

“It’s amazing to me that a community college that has so many resources can be so overlooked,” said Gary Austin, vice president of Messenger Investment Co. and a member of the Moorpark College Foundation’s board.

On a recent Saturday night, Los Robles Master Chorale played the Performing Arts Center, singing music that spanned five centuries and a half-dozen countries. About 120 people listened in the 400-seat auditorium, which is still spotlessly new except for the well-scuffed stage.

Light Turnouts for Chorale Concerts

Many in the audience knew someone in the chorale and had come from other cities for the concert. Thousand Oaks residents said the building had better acoustics than their far-larger Civic Arts Plaza. Some wondered why they had not come to see shows at the center before.

“I’m hoping they can get the word out that this is here,” said Melanie McCoy, a composer living in Simi Valley. She too had a personal connection to the concert--the chorale had performed some of her work in the past.

The sometimes light turnout for concerts did not surprise McCoy.

“One of the problems you have in Simi, Moorpark or Camarillo is these are commuter communities,” she said. “By the time you get home, you often don’t want to go anywhere.”

Les Wieder, chairman of the school’s performing arts department, has been working to change that. Stacks of blue and white envelopes covered his desk one afternoon as he prepared the latest mailing to advertise an upcoming musical.

At 1 year and 1 month old, the center is booked solid. It runs about 80 performances each year, a mix of concerts, dance recitals, musicals and plays. Theater seems the biggest draw so far, with between 50% and 75% of seats taken during a typical performance, Wieder said.

To advertise, the center sends press releases to local newspapers, puts out fliers around campus and keeps a mailing list of those interested in the arts. Wieder hopes the center’s varied offerings will help build a following in town.

“There’s just so many dollars for entertainment, so we try to offer a whole palette,” he said. “We can provide classical music, theater, at a very good price.”

The school’s athletic department fares better. Football games draw between 1,000 and 2,000 spectators, Athletic Director John Keever said. In contrast, Ventura College football averages 500 spectators per game. Moorpark basketball pulls in fewer people, usually 400 to 500 per game, contrasted with 1,600 at Ventura.

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Many of those cheering in the stands, however, are relatives of the players, with some students and town residents attending as well, Keever said. That mix is common for community colleges, he said.

The department has tried to entice more spectators from the community through theme nights. On “youth basketball” nights, for instance, players in the city’s teen and children’s basketball leagues get into college games for free if they wear their jerseys.

“We’re trying to do more and more of that, develop a community spirit and bring more people from Moorpark to the games,” Keever said. “We’re kind of set off here. Sometimes people don’t even know we’re here, and that’s part of the problem.”

The college’s geographic isolation cuts both ways. If Moorpark residents sometimes ignore the college’s offerings, Moorpark College students often take the same attitude toward the town.

“I was here last semester, and I think maybe one time I went downtown,” said Heather Heidt, 19.

Many Students Attend From Outside the City

Like most Moorpark College students, Heidt lives somewhere else, in her case Agoura. Although Moorpark High School sent 128 new graduates to the college in 1996, that number was dwarfed by the 437 coming from Conejo Valley high schools and 527 from Simi Valley.

And since none of the students live on the campus--the college has no dorms--they don’t hang around after class, Heidt said.

“The majority of people, they’re here, and they leave,” she said.

Even lunch fails to drive students into downtown Moorpark. Karson Shadley, 18, of Thousand Oaks said he eats in the cafeteria.

“I stay here,” he said. “It’s up on the hillside, and there’s nothing around unless you go to Simi. . . . I don’t really know what’s in Moorpark.”

The school’s bookstore contributed $26,645 in sales tax to the city during 1996, according to store records. But for other items, students say they shop elsewhere.

Just as the students tend to come from other communities, so do the school’s faculty and staff members. Of the college’s 289 full-time employees, just 38 live in Moorpark, college district spokeswoman Barbara Buttner said. Figures for the school’s approximately 160 part-time employees were not available.

In comparison, the other two schools in the Ventura County Community College District are demographically well-rooted in their cities.

While just 13% of Moorpark College’s full-time employees come from Moorpark, 33% of Ventura College’s full-time faculty and staff live in Ventura. At Oxnard College, the percentage is even higher--41%.

Both Ventura and Oxnard colleges also draw more students from their communities’ high schools than does Moorpark College. Ventura College accepted 456 graduates from Ventura high schools this school year, and Oxnard College took 430 from Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

And yet, even if Moorpark College staff members and students tend to live, eat and shop in other cities, some people are betting they could be enticed to spend their money in Moorpark if new stores and restaurants are built closer to the school.

Messenger Investment Co., which hopes to build 3,221 homes north of the campus, has plans for a commercial center about a block from the college. Messenger Vice President Austin said the center will cater to residents of the proposed Hidden Creek Ranch as well as college students.

“It will give them an alternative a lot closer to campus,” he said. “It will be a place where people can literally walk from class and get something to eat.”

The nearest shops and eateries to the school now are about a mile distant, down Campus Park Drive. Although students provide steady business to the restaurants and market in the Varsity Park Plaza, at the corner of Princeton Avenue, many of the center’s storefronts are vacant.

A financial impact study of the Messenger project, however, concluded that the students and faculty combined could generate about $94 million in retail sales each year. Much of the money would be spent outside Moorpark, the study conceded, but the school’s enrollment could still support about 450,000 square feet of shops and restaurants.

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If Austin sees the school as a market waiting to be tapped, he also views it as a way to lure home buyers into the Messenger tracts, should the project win city approval.

“The fact that someone could be living in Hidden Creek Ranch, bike for five minutes and take a class--yes, I think that’s a real asset to the project,” he said.

Jamshid Damooei, professor of economics at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, also cautioned that the school has economic benefits not immediately apparent from looking at salaries and retail sales.

Community colleges, he said, allow people the opportunity to pick up new skills or change careers in response to shifts in the job market. That helps area residents cope through layoffs during recessions or make themselves more marketable and productive in better economic times.

“They get this training, and they become more productive people,” Damooei said. “It’s very difficult to quantify, but it’s very important to the economy.”

Moorpark Mayor Pat Hunter says another indirect economic benefit to the city is that the college helps lure new businesses to town.

“Companies like Special Devices, companies like Amgen in Thousand Oaks, when they look at expansion or relocation, they look at a lot of different resources,” Hunter said. “What resources are available to their work force? By having Moorpark College, that’s one additional resource.”

President Walker also said that although the school does not have much of a direct economic impact on Moorpark, it does have a positive effect on the larger economy of eastern Ventura County. Unlike its sister schools, he said, the college draws from a whole region instead of primarily one city.

“Ventura College is in the city of Ventura, Oxnard College, the city of Oxnard,” Walker said. “We’re here serving three cities.”

Walker and other school officials are trying to raise their school’s public profile. They recently hosted a Moorpark Chamber of Commerce mixer and have selected someone to represent them on the chamber board.

In February, Walker invited civic, business and education leaders from throughout eastern Ventura County to meet the president of the proposed Cal State University Channel Islands. The meeting, held at the college, was one in an occasional series of round-table talks designed to stimulate public discussion of important issues while promoting awareness of the school.

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College officials also plan to take out half-page ads in local newspapers announcing the upcoming 30th anniversary. A two-day celebration, for which students will be asked to wear ‘60s fashions, is planned for April.

Moorpark College students, however, need no public relations blitz to understand the school’s worth.

For Charles Nussrallah of Simi Valley, the college has given him a chance at finding a new career after his last one ended.

Nussrallah, 50, used to repair printing equipment. But a back injury in 1993 made the work impossible. “I really didn’t know what i was going to do,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t go back to doing what I was doing.”

Now, Nussrallah studies earth sciences--geology, physics and meteorology--with an eye toward teaching high school science.

“My feeling is that Moorpark, aside from being quite affordable, is an academically sound school,” he said.

When asked what he would have done without the school nearby, Nussrallah said, “I honestly don’t know.”