Parents Angered Over School Boundary Proposal

Proposed changes in elementary school attendance boundaries have parents from two Moorpark neighborhoods in an uproar.

In an emotionally charged meeting that lasted nearly five hours, more than 100 angry parents packed a Moorpark Unified School District board meeting Thursday to protest changes intended to balance campuses ethnically.

The parents, mostly from the largely white Buttercreek and Heatherglen neighborhoods, object that the plan would force their children to leave a nearby school and instead take what they view as a perilous bus ride across town.

“I urge you not to use my children as an ethnic statistic,” said Diana Fowler, who contends that integration efforts foster more racial enmity than harmony among students.

Trustees said they were surprised at the uproar over the issue, saying other boundary changes have passed with less debate. During Thursday’s meeting, parents frequently interrupted and at times even heckled board members as well as the boundary project’s consultant when they tried to speak.

Under a number of options the board is studying, children from the two neighborhoods who now attend Mountain Meadows and Arroyo West schools would be sent to the new Walnut Canyon School on Casey Road.

The school district tries to maintain ethnic balance among campuses in a city with deeply segregated neighborhoods. The midtown area is almost entirely Latino, while the southern hillside neighborhoods of Mountain Meadows, Peach Hills and--to a lesser extent--Campus Canyon are predominantly white.

Drawing school boundary lines around neighborhoods would result in racially segregated campuses, district officials say.

About 63% of district students are white and about 30% are Latino, but the numbers in the Peach Hills and Mountain Meadows elementary schools were becoming increasingly unbalanced, officials say.

At Peach Hills, 48% of students are Latino. At Mountain Meadows, white students make up 73% of the school enrollment.

At least three trustees--Clint Harper, David Pollock and Tom Baldwin--say ethnic balance is one of the highest priorities in drawing boundary lines.

Harper said he would even face a recall rather than turn back. “I don’t see it going back to segregated schools,” Harper said. “I’m not going to do it.”

Trustees said parents are already seeing advantages of integration, citing this year’s successful and close-knit Moorpark High School football team as an example.

That closeness might not have been there among the ethnically diverse team members, trustees said, if the students had not attended school together since the elementary grades.

Integration, Baldwin said, “is good for students.”

Parents objecting to the proposed changes in attendance boundaries, however, said their concern is about safety and neighborhood schools--not race.

The new school is on a street that joins California 23 at an intersection heavily used by trucks. The parents worry that gravel and cement trucks, heading downhill from mines, could hit buses turning on to Casey Road.

Parents also stressed the importance of letting children go to schools close to home.

“Schools are not a forum for political activism,” parent Steve Chrans said. “Community schools need to outweigh all other concerns.”

Some parents said they are worried about breaking friendships apart by changing attendance boundaries. Others say they believe their children will grow less friendly toward children of other ethnic groups if they are forced into busing. And some said they just want to keep the experience of walking their child to school.

The parents urged trustees to adopt two new options that district staff members unveiled at Thursday’s meeting. Both plans would keep their children in the neighborhood elementary schools of Mountain Meadows and Arroyo West, but would not ethnically balance the campuses.

Despite the concerns about Walnut Canyon, however, many parents nodded in agreement when trustees asked whether special programs, such as day-care, would make the new school more attractive.

Harper said race may be an issue for some parents, but that socioeconomic divisions may be more important among unstated objections to the new boundary plan.

“I think they have a mixture of different reasons,” Harper said. “I think some parents are worried about sending their kids to what they perceive as a poorer area of town.”

One parent accused complaining parents of being selfish. Kim Sweeney, a Peach Hills resident, said most Moorpark students are already bused to keep campuses balanced racially.

Only residents near the Mountain Meadows area, such as the Buttercreek and Heatherglen communities, have neighborhood schools throughout the elementary grades and again in high school.

“It’s ‘me’ and ‘me,’ ” said Sweeney, who is white, of the other parents’ attitudes. “But those people have been doing it for a long time.”