Parents Urge Proximity, Not Ethnic Parity

Concerned that the district’s goal of improving the ethnic balance in classrooms will force their children to attend schools across town, dozens of Moorpark parents plan to speak out against those plans when the school board meets for a study session Thursday.

The suburban ideal of neighborhood schools, where children can walk or bike to class, clashes with the district’s agenda to redraw attendance boundaries so the city’s seven elementary and middle schools are more ethnically balanced.

Officials want to ensure that the number of white and Latino students at each campus more closely reflects their percentages in the overall school district.

The dilemma is how to do both.

“On the one hand they are trying to create neighborhood schools; on the other hand they are trying to create ethnically balanced schools,” said parent Cindy Oberg. “I don’t think they can do both.”

Trustee Clint Harper wholeheartedly agrees there’s a problem.

“They’re correct,” he said.

Harper said that because Moorpark neighborhoods are so segregated--the midtown area is populated almost entirely by Latinos, while the city’s southern and northern neighborhoods are dominated by whites--drawing school boundaries solely based on distance to campus would foster segregation, which Harper said he and other trustees will not tolerate.

Parents such as Bertha Ochoa, who has children attending Flory, Arroyo West and Mountain Meadows elementary schools and Chaparral Middle School, agree with the diversity goals.

“I think it is a good idea,” Ochoa said in Spanish. “There is less racism when everyone is mixed. All blacks, all whites or all Hispanics is not a good idea.”

But parents in the Heatherglen and Buttercreek subdivisions on the west end of town and in the Peach Hills housing tract on the south say ethnically balancing schools should not be done at the expense of maintaining safe campuses or fostering neighborhood schools.

Under three of four maps the district is considering, students from the Heatherglen and Buttercreek area would no longer attend nearby Mountain Meadows and Arroyo West elementary schools but attend the new Walnut Canyon school, scheduled to open in September.

The Casey Road campus has raised safety concerns because of its proximity to California 23, on which cement trucks and gravel trailers whiz past the site to reach the gravel and quarry mines to the north.

“I think the location of the school is so geographically undesirable,” said parent Lori Motush.

During a visit to the site several weeks ago, Motush said a truck tried to avoid crashing into a group of men standing in the middle of the street and nearly rammed head-on into her car when she was with her 9-year-old daughter.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I’m not going to this school,’ and I said ‘No, baby, you’re not,’ ” Motush said.

District officials say the situation should improve when a traffic light is installed near the school intersection.

“I would not like to say it’s an ideal place to put a school and I’ve been very candid about that,” Harper said. “But it’s the place the majority of the board decided to put the school and we have to deal with it.

“The traffic on the street is a concern for me as well as the parents. The county has expanded the quarry and cement operations . . . even knowing we were putting a school there. The amount of trucks that come down the street is absolutely ridiculous.”

Other parents just say they want to keep their kids close to home.

Tamara Cusano, whose 5-year-old son attends Mountain Meadows, doesn’t want her son sent farther to Walnut Canyon. For him to walk or bike there, he would have to cross a railroad track and two state highways.

“This sounds selfish,” Cusano said. “However, I really would prefer him to go to a neighborhood school. To have the chance to go to school with kids in his own neighborhood, own community.”

Parents in the western and southern areas of the city have fired off letters to the school board, holding meetings at their homes and attending PTA meetings to discuss the boundary issue.

They’ll have another chance to express their concerns Thursday, when school trustees hold their second study session on ways to redraw district attendance boundaries. The meeting, to be held at board headquarters at Flory School, 240 Flory Ave., begins at 7:30 p.m.

A number of midtown residents wish their kids could attend a campus closer to home, said Tara Barajas, an instructional aide at Flory School who often translates for many Latino parents.

“A lot of parents don’t have transportation,” she said. “They say, ‘I’d rather [my child] be closer.’ In case of an emergency and a parent doesn’t drive and a neighbor isn’t around, what do they do? It’s too far to walk.”

Acknowledging the appeal of neighborhood schools, officials said the situation nevertheless comes back to the same issue.

“Our basic problem is that we have segregated communities and we’re trying to run an integrated school [system],” Harper said.