School Trustees Voice Concerns Over Survey

With crowded classrooms and more students on the way, Conejo Valley school officials are struggling over how to accommodate the influx of new pupils and still create smaller class sizes in many of the early grades.

But a survey that the Conejo Valley Unified School District wanted to send to parents in early November to gauge opinions about buying portable classrooms or building new ones, adopting a year-round schedule or forcing all sixth-graders to attend middle school has two trustees concerned.

One trustee didn’t like the questionnaire’s wording and another thought that the letter didn’t offer enough alternatives.

The Times obtained a copy of the confidential document, which proposed asking parents about the best ways to continue class-size reduction efforts in kindergarten and extending the 20-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio in other elementary grades.

Supt. Jerry Gross met Tuesday with board President Mildred Lynch and trustee Elaine McKearn. They said he agreed to scrap the original draft.

Gross declined to comment on the district’s plans to gather parental input.

Although Lynch said she had some slight misgivings about the wording of the questionnaire, they were not a “big issue.” She declined to elaborate.

She added that she is sorry the survey was made public before it was ready to be sent to parents in the 19,400-student district.

“It makes it sound mysterious, but it’s not,” she said.

McKearn is the most vocal critic of the draft survey. Despite the proposed letter’s inclusion of arguments for and against each of the three options, McKearn’s major complaint is that the original questionnaire didn’t offer more options.

She composed her own version of the survey, which suggests creating a magnet or performing arts school for kindergarten through eighth grade at the site of the Conejo Valley Adult School.

Two advantages would be to “keep families intact, especially those with several children” and to “bring positive press clips about our school district in that our district goes out of its way to accommodate parents [and] students,” she wrote.

McKearn also said the district should consider reopening the former Triunfo Elementary School, which is being leased to privately run Carden Junior School of Thousand Oaks, and adding more classes through renovations at Horizon Hills Elementary School.

McKearn said she is particularly concerned about parents losing the choice of whether to send their sixth-graders either to elementary school or one of the district’s four middle schools.

Out of nearly 1,400 Conejo Valley sixth-graders, about 500 attend middle school.

Although her proposed questionnaire cites six advantages to making middle school mandatory for sixth-graders, McKearn also noted: “Students have not matured enough to handle an out-of-neighborhood school.”

Plus, she wrote, “[it would] further separate parents from their children and let teachers do more parenting than many parents desire.”

Not all parents agree with McKearn.

PTA Council President Alice Humbertson said she prefers sending sixth-graders to school with older kids.

“Sixth-graders have more in common with seventh- and eighth-graders than they do with kindergartners,” she said. “Sixth-graders [attending middle school] would also have the benefits of counselors, regular P. E. classes instead of running around the playground and art classes.”

In addition, she said parents would be better off if their sixth-graders were sent to middle school by giving adults an additional year to be involved with school activities.

In response to putting schools on a year-round schedule, teachers’ union President Susan Falk said teachers would need more information before reaching an opinion.

“I haven’t talked about it yet with the teachers,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot of teachers like it at Oxnard, though.”

Falk wants to ensure that teachers get a fair shake, especially if the board chooses to send sixth-graders to middle school. She asked whether teachers would go with the students to the middle school and how the transition would occur.

Trustees agree that they want accurate and detailed data presented to the community so that parents and others can make informed decisions.

Trustee Dorothy Beaubien, who said she had no problem with the district’s original draft, said she is eager to receive opinions from parents on how to create more space, whether it be through a newly drafted survey or public forums.

“We want to hear all of the options before we decide what’s best for the kids,” she said.