Few Parents Drawn to New School, Survey Finds

Fewer than one in 10 parents questioned said they are determined to send their children to Moorpark’s newest elementary school, but district officials say they are encouraged by the seemingly modest support.

Only 8% of the more than 2,000 parents who responded to a recent district survey said they would “definitely” enroll their child in Walnut Canyon School on Casey Road, which is set to open in September.

But it is unclear whether the results of the $12,000 survey, which has a margin of error of up to 1.02%, will bring the district any closer to its goal of balancing the student ethnicity at the new campus as well as its other seven elementary and middle schools.

“I think it’s going to be difficult to tell what kind of representation we will get from the school survey data,” said trustee David Pollock.

Moorpark Unified School District officials unveiled results of the districtwide survey at a Tuesday study session on attendance boundaries. The 17-question, written poll of 3,030 households was conducted by Los Angeles-based Godbe Research & Analysis.

The survey was designed to gauge the level of interest in attending the school and to determine which programs parents would like to see offered at Walnut Canyon. With a goal of reducing crowding at other elementary campuses, the district had hoped that a large number of parents would enroll their children in the school, which would normally serve students in the midtown section of Moorpark.

Nearly two-thirds, or 64% of parents who responded, said they would “probably” not or “definitely” not send their children to Walnut Canyon. Only 24% said they “probably” would enroll their children, and 8% said they would “definitely” enroll their children. The remaining 4% of parents did not answer this question.

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Parents’ interest in having their children attend the school increased by the end of the survey, as they received more information about possible curriculum, but the numbers did not grow significantly. Only 9% said they would “definitely” enroll their child by the survey’s end, and a total of 30% said they would “probably” enroll.

Yet district officials say that 8% of the 2,283 parents who responded would likely provide enough interest to help fill the new school.

Plans call for enrolling only 360 students during Walnut Canyon’s first year, although the campus could expand to 500 to 600 students, officials said.

“When you’re thinking about a school, when you’re thinking about a K-5, it would fill up that school quite nicely,” said Frank DePasquale, an assistant superintendent.

If enough parents were interested in voluntarily sending their children to the new campus, the district would have to force fewer students to attend through redrawing attendance boundaries for next school year. Trustees expect to make a decision about boundaries at their Feb. 24 meeting.

Parents from two neighborhoods on the city’s west side have blasted the board for the past two months for considering moving their children out of nearby neighborhood schools and putting them on buses to balance the ethnic mix of the district’s schools.

The district’s unofficial policy has been to have a school’s demographics reflect the overall district ethnic distribution by plus or minus 8%.

The district wants to balance the ethnicity of students at Mountain Meadows, which has a growing white student population, and at Peach Hills, which has an increasing number of Latino students.

The survey did not ask the ethnicity of the parents who responded. But a complete analysis, expected in several weeks, should tell officials how parents from individual schools responded.

Some parents complained that some of the survey questions were difficult to answer.

Cindy Marschik, who has children at both Flory and Campus Canyon elementary schools, said she found it difficult to say whether she would send her child to Walnut Canyon when she didn’t know what types of school programs would be offered. “I think they were evasive about what they were going to do and I think it’s because they don’t know,” she said.

Trustee Greg Barker said the survey should help the district determine what types of magnet programs or extra services would attract parents to the new school.

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Choosing from five programs that were suggested in the survey, 43% of the parents said they were “very interested” in a computer technology curriculum. Forty percent were also “very interested” in language arts and math, and 37% expressed such interest in a science program.

Most parents, however, balked at paying for additional services. Although 66% of the parents who responded said they were interested in having an extra 40 to 60 minutes of instruction for their children, most were willing to pay only $1 to $3 per day--the lowest amount suggested--for the extra instruction.

The district even asked what parents were willing to pay for busing children to Walnut Canyon if free transportation were not offered. In that case, 58% of parents said they would not send their children to Walnut Canyon, but 20% said they would pay up to $3 weekly for transportation.

“If we’re providing services not provided by the state, we have to look at charging fees for the services,” Pollock said, adding that the board was trying to gauge price sensitivity.