Moorpark Drawn to Magnet School Idea

While crews scurry to complete the Walnut Canyon School by September, school district officials are considering turning the new elementary campus into a performing arts school that could draw students from across the city.

Moorpark Unified School District officials recently visited the Dr. Juliet Thorner School in Bakersfield, a magnet school so popular that its waiting list is already filled for the next five years.

“If we can replicate what we see up there, we’ll have a gem,” Assistant Supt. Frank DePasquale said.

He and other officials have visited other magnet schools but were particularly impressed with Thorner School, where students remain after school for three hours of required programs in ballet, drama, ceramics and piano.

Such a school could provide Moorpark parents with an incentive to send their children voluntarily to the new campus on Casey Road--and thus eliminate some of the need for busing students to achieve ethnic balance.

A set of proposals to balance the district’s elementary grades has angered some parents, who don’t want their children bused away from neighborhood schools.

Bakersfield’s Thorner School has several strong points that Moorpark school officials like: a popular program, high state test scores and an ethnically diverse student body. Minority students form 54% of the kindergarten-to-sixth-grade school, with Latinos making up the largest group at 37%; 46% of the student enrollment is white.

The performing arts program began after a 1984 federal court ordered the Bakersfield School District to improve the racial balance at its schools.

But the mix of students did not occur just because some parents sent their children voluntarily to the magnet program.

“My opinion is we have the school we have today because of busing,” said Elaine Taylor, who heads the Bakersfield school’s afternoon performing arts program. “It would not be this kind of school if we did not have minority children bused in.”

The Bakersfield district receives money from the state to help integrate its campuses. Moorpark, with it’s already fairly well-integrated district, would have difficulty receiving government money for its continued integration efforts.

The question over whether a new Moorpark school would become a magnet campus is of particular interest to parents in the Heatherglen and Buttercreek neighborhoods. Under current proposals, children from those west-end communities would have to leave their neighborhood schools to attend Walnut Canyon in the fall.

The proposal comes as part of a plan to improve the ethnic balance of the district’s campuses, particularly Peach Hills School, where the student enrollment is increasingly Latino, and Mountain Meadows, where more and more students are white.

If enough parents are willing to send their children to the new campus, fewer students would be forced to leave neighborhood schools, Trustee David Pollock said.

“The more people we can get to go there voluntarily, the more we can draw the attendance areas in undeveloped areas and the fewer existing residents we need to change over,” Pollock said.

Pollock and Greg Barker raised yet another factor they must consider when talking about creating magnet schools.

Studies show some magnet schools are performing well not so much because of the program but because of the students who choose to attend them, trustees said.

“You don’t want to have a creaming effect, where you take all the best students from the ethnicities,” Barker said.

“How can we best distribute students from various socioeconomic classes throughout?” Barker asked. “And that’s the tougher question.”