City, Schools Should Work Together
Thousand Oaks City Council member Linda Parks will need all of her talent when she sets sail on a common-sense effort to convince officials of the Conejo Valley Unified School District to work cooperatively with the City Council in ensuring that new home construction doesn’t exceed the school system’s ability to absorb children from the new neighborhoods.
District officials have just been obliged to retreat from an ill-founded student boundary for the new Lang Ranch Elementary School. Added to this was the disclosure of its agreement early this year with the Woodridge developer that understated the impact on our schools of new children to come from the prospective Woodridge development. It was embarrassment on top of embarrassment, perceived to be aggravated by a City Council assumed to be meddling in school affairs and far exceeding its responsibility for city--not school--business.
Outgoing school district President Mildred Lynch was quoted as saying, “We’ve never needed the city before to be interested in our job, and we don’t need them now. They’ve been very intrusive recently, and I’m not interested in meeting with them.”
At the Dec. 10 district meeting, three more of the five trustees also blasted what they perceived to be the City Council’s interference in school business, some more emphatically than Mrs. Lynch.
It’s unfortunate that Mrs. Parks may not be immediately welcome as she tries to fulfill a rare unanimous mandate from the City Council. Her initiative is for the city and the school district together to review anticipated residential build-out and consider its impact on public schools prior to residential development approvals. It would follow the successful application of the same principle by school officials and city planners in Ventura.
Mrs. Parks is intelligent, dedicated and sensitive, and she is an excellent choice for this effort. It’s an idea so obvious and so important for the two major city agencies to work together while retaining their individuality, it’s incredible it has taken so long to be recognized and get off the ground.
Best wishes to Linda Parks and new district President Dolores Didio in helping make this effort work to the benefit of all of us in Thousand Oaks.
DEBBIE GREGORY
Thousand Oaks
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