Popular Adult School Draws Ire of Neighbors

THOUSAND OAKS — Tucked away in a residential area on Old Farm Road is an adult school where legal immigrants learn English, company executives learn computer skills and residents learn everything from cooking to fly fishing.

Last year, nearly 12,000 students took classes at the Conejo Valley Adult School and its classrooms around Thousand Oaks.

But that success has made the school a target--for neighbors tired of the traffic caused by its students and, most recently, for parents looking to relieve the city’s overcrowded elementary schools.

“Any business that takes Mastercard and takes in $150,000 a year in profit shouldn’t take taxpayer money,” said Terry Graves, an adult school neighbor on Waverly Heights Drive, who admits he is sick of the traffic and “the strangers who endanger our children and our horses.”

He added that the programs “could be moved into a more industrial area. The classes they offer could be taken at a junior college for almost nothing. And students would get an associate of arts degree there. The adult school is redundant and inferior to what a junior college offers.”

But the Conejo Valley Unified School District, pleased with the money the school brings in and the constituency it serves, has no plans to shut down the school.

Supt. Jerry Gross said the district would sorely miss the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual rent from the school, an amount of money that is especially crucial now, after voters’ rejection of a $97-million bond measure in November.

What’s more, he said, there are not enough children who live in that area to open up an elementary school.

“The kids are not where that school is and the busing to get there . . . and the redistricting it would take for all other schools would be crazy,” Gross said.

That is little solace to residents who have been griping for nearly a decade about the car congestion that adult school students bring to Waverly Heights Drive, Montgomery Road and a couple of other side streets that snake up to the former Waverly Elementary School.

Fielding calls for years, the City Council jumped even deeper into the issue this summer, erecting a temporary barricade to block an entrance into the school in an effort to to appease neighbors.

But pressure to close the adult school has mounted in recent months as the school district looks for solutions to increasingly crowded elementary campuses.

A growing student population, combined with the need for more classroom space to accommodate smaller classes, has filled many schools to their limits.

Some residents have suggested opening one of the district’s three closed elementary-school sites, including the adult school’s main site at Waverly Elementary, to find space for the additional students.

“If we don’t have enough total room at all the schools in the district, then I don’t know why we don’t look at reopening our closed schools and turn them into elementary schools,” said Donna Van Rijn, a mother of two Madrona Elementary School children.

Trustee Elaine McKearn said she wouldn’t go so far as to close down the whole adult school, but would like to use 10 of its classrooms for a magnet K-8 school, where children could learn music and art.

“This would help the overcrowding problem a bit,” she said. “If we offered a school that could accommodate all a family’s children at one site, I don’t think we’d have a problem selling it.”

Dave Woodruff, principal of the adult school, said calls for closing the school ignore the residents served by its classes.

For instance, the school offers free courses in English as a Second Language, citizenship, high school diploma equivalency and literacy. Woodruff said, “If we close the school down, then we won’t have all the programs that we offer now. . . . If that happened, the reaction from the clients here would be overwhelming. . . . There would be a huge outcry.”

Woodruff also stressed that half of the “extra” programs--cooking, CPR and computer-assisted drafting courses--are “pay-as-you-go.” All of that cash is turned back into buying equipment or upgrading the school, which functions as a nonprofit organization.

The money garnered from paid classes is especially helpful because the school takes in about 20% more students than the state will pay for, Woodruff said.

The school operates on a budget of more than $3 million a year. Half is generated through paid courses. The remainder comes from federal and state money, which is filtered through the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Of that, the adult school pays the district’s general fund about $465,000 a year. This money does not make the district a profit, said Assistant Supt. Gary Mortimer. Rather the cash is put right back into the school’s capital improvements and maintenance needs.

Beyond the need for the adult school, district officials dispute whether Thousand Oaks really needs to open any of its shuttered elementary campuses.

The district now has more than 19,000 students. Gross said there is room for 22,000 children at the 26 campuses, as long as portables can be “strategically placed” and some geographical boundaries are juggled to move children from overpopulated schools to sites that have more room.

Because the district has these options, reopening the adult school for children--or kicking out other programs at the district’s two other closed elementary-school sites--are probably not realistic proposals, Gross said.

Woodruff, sitting in his office proudly displaying the hundreds of courses his adult school offers, is not fazed by the current discussions about the fate of his school.

He believes that the district will find room for young students and a way to keep the adult school alive.

“I can’t waste my time on something I don’t have control over,” Woodruff said. “I’d rather use my energies trying to make the best darn adult school in California.”