Schools Connect the Dots in Seeking Ethnic Balance

MOORPARK — Projected on the wall is a map of the city, covered with colored dots.

Each red dot indicates where a Latino student lives; each green dot, a white student; and scattered pink, blue, yellow and brown dots represent students of other ethnicities.

Moorpark Unified School District trustees are examining the map so they can decide how to redraw the attendance boundary lines no later than February.

Yet as school board members study ways to balance the size and ethnicity of the student population at each elementary and middle school campus for the fall, one thing is obvious:

“It’s clear we live in a segregated community,” said Trustee Clint Harper as he stared at the maps.

Latino students make up about 30% of the district population, and whites 63%. But on the city map, the green and red dots mix as well as oil and water.

The city’s older, midtown area is a sea of red dots, for Latino students. And the southern hillside neighborhoods of Mountain Meadows and Peach Hill, and to a lesser extent the Campus Canyon area in the city’s northeast, are dominated by green dots.

Although Moorpark is segregated by where residents make their homes, school district officials are struggling to make sure that the campuses don’t look that way.

“Why don’t I want each school to look like the local neighborhood?” asked Trustee David Pollock. “We think there’s an educational benefit for kids to be exposed to different cultures and value systems so they aren’t only surrounded by the same kids they play with in their neighborhoods all the time.”

No law forces school officials to pay such careful attention to ethnic balance. But such considerations come into play especially when children of various ethnicities live in separate neighborhoods, said county schools Supt. Charles Weis.

“It’s an issue in a community that has pockets of ethnicities--pockets of all Hispanics or all blacks, because then you don’t have kids dispersed,” Weis said. “In Moorpark, they have a very definite ethnic grouping.”

Some parents question whether the balancing act is necessary if it means displacing their children from a neighborhood school.

“We feel very strongly that Mountain Meadows is where we want to send the kids, for the community, the friends, Girl Scouts and soccer,” one father told the school board.

School trustees last week began discussing what the attendance boundaries should look like for the 5,300 pupils in kindergarten to eighth grade in the 7,199-student district.

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The last major redrawing of lines was in 1991, when the school district also balanced the ethnic makeup at each campus.

After discussing the matter of redrawing attendance lines several times last spring, school trustees postponed the talks until recently, closer to the opening of Walnut Canyon Elementary School on Casey Road. The campus at the old Moorpark High School site is scheduled to open this fall.

State laws on when school districts are required to consider ethnicity when drawing school attendance boundaries have grown more vague since the 1970s, state education officials said. The laws don’t specify the balances or ethnic percentages districts need to stay within at each campus.

The only thing the state says for certain is that districts cannot draw boundary lines to segregate students, said Joanne Lowe, an attorney for the state Department of Education.

“They can’t draw lines so that one school is 90% white and one school is 90% nonwhite,” Lowe said. “You can’t do that because it violates equal protection.”

In Moorpark, which has already drawn lines to integrate students, the school district isn’t in jeopardy of violating a state law, Lowe said.

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But philosophically, school officials say that continuing to maintain a desirable ethnic balance at each campus--as the student populations shift and grow in different neighborhoods--is important to help children understand life in an increasingly multicultural society.

“Seeing a diverse population in all schools benefits our children,” Supt. Thomas Duffy said. “Our society is a diverse society. If you go to the playground or go to the parks, you will see kids of various ethnicities playing together. The schools have promoted that.”

Under the district’s own unofficial policy, set in 1993, the ethnic makeup at each campus should reflect the overall district population, plus or minus 8%.

Among the district’s students from kindergarten to 12th grade, the 4,539 whites form 63% of the population, and the 2,144 Latinos make up 30%. Students of Asian, black, Filipino and a few other ethnicities number only 516, or 7% of the district population.

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In kindergarten to fifth grade, the figure for Latino students is a percentage point higher, and for whites less than a percentage point lower.

The school board members began considering districtwide boundary changes not only because they needed to draw boundaries for the new Walnut Canyon Elementary School, but also to balance the ethnic profiles at the Mountain Meadows and Peach Hill schools.

At Peach Hill, nestled in a predominantly white neighborhood south of the Arroyo Simi, 348 Latino students form 48% of the population--17 percentage points higher than for the overall elementary population.

“We’re having a lot of growth from existing housing in the downtown area,” explained Pollock, referring to an area that is predominantly Latino.

And in Mountain Meadows, another predominantly white neighborhood, 532 white students make up 73% of the school population, which is 10 percentage points more than their representation in the overall population. There, new homes brought in more white residents, boosting the white student population, school officials said.

Spending about $25,000 for a study, the district hired a consultant from Folsom-based PHASE 1 Application Services Inc. to help redraw the boundaries, and purchased sophisticated mapping software.

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With the help of the firm’s consultant, Kenneth Reynolds, Duffy presented trustees last week with four options for drawing attendance lines.

The school district does not plan to hold a public hearing for parents’ testimony. Instead, a study session will be scheduled for January. Parents will be allowed to voice their thoughts during the public comment portion of the session.

Trustees hope to make a decision at the Jan. 27 board meeting but say they may carry the discussion into February.

And parents will be informed about where their children will attend school sometime in March, school officials said. Trustees said they have not settled on any option at this point.

“Really, what I’m concerned about is minimizing impact on the families,” Trustee Gary Cabriales said. “We’re trying to minimize the changes.”