Parents Want District to Pay for Computers With City Refund

A group of parents determined to get more computers for the new Wood Ranch Elementary School wants the district to seek a $500,000 refund of city fees to pay for the additional equipment.

Ron Robinson and Marybeth Jacobsen, a couple who have a 5-year-old daughter entering the school’s first kindergarten class when the school opens this fall, lead a parent committee that plans to ask the Simi Valley Unified School District board tonight to seek a refund from the city.

The group says the money could solve an important need: equipping the new school with computers, TVs and VCRs in every classroom at a cost of $140,000. They say the school district should put the difference into a technology fund to be distributed among the other schools.

Pleas from the group for that extra money have been rejected in the past by district officials who have budgeted only the standard technology allotment. This puts computers in the kindergarten and first grade, but not second through sixth grades, and requires every two classrooms to share one TV and VCR.

“In today’s education, everything is networked and wired. This generation of kids must be computer literate, or they will fall behind their peers,” Robinson said. “But this district wants to equip its new school by 1960s and 1970s standards.”

Last week, the district offered to add $50 per student, or about $30,000, to the Wood Ranch technology budget. The amount is equal to a districtwide grant every school received two years ago.

Although Wood Ranch didn’t exist at the time, district officials--after parents’ pressure for the $140,000--decided to let the new school benefit from the $30,000 grant as well and dug into an unrelated pot of money to provide it.

“The minimum we can expect to do is be fair and give Wood Ranch students the same start as every other student, and that means the $30,000 along with the regular district allotments every other school has been provided with, “ said board President Janice DiFatta.

DiFatta pointed out that other schools that wanted more computers used PTA fund-raisers to foot the bill. She recommended Wood Ranch parents do the same.

Robinson said that is not an acceptable suggestion, saying other elementary schools have had years of a head start.

“PTAs and booster clubs do not raise $140,000 overnight,” he said. “Why should kids have to wait three or four years while we sell cookies for computers? That is ridiculous. They need the technology now.”

Both contend that as homeowners in the Wood Ranch development, they have subsidized the new school because the developer inflated the prices of their homes to pay for campus. As a result, they say they are entitled to a say in how money is spent in the school’s budget.

The original Wood Ranch developer, Olympia York, promised to build an elementary school to serve the new homes it planned to construct, but went bankrupt before finishing the final phase. To get out of its obligation to build the school, Olympia York gave the remaining land--worth $7.6 million--to the school district.

When another developer, New Urban West, expressed interest in completing the last phase, a deal was made allowing the school district to sell the land to the developer and use the $7.6 million in proceeds to build the school itself.

As a landowner selling property for development, the school district was then charged $772,000 in developer fees by the city.

Robinson and Jacobsen say the city should have charged only $250,000 and they want the school district to seek a refund of the difference, which they say was negotiable.

But school and city officials are baffled by this claim.

“I’m not sure where that came from,” said district business manager Lowell Schultze. “We didn’t overpay. We were invoiced $772,000 for developer fees.”

City Manager Mike Sedell said the amount was nonnegotiable and legally owed to the city.

Besides, Councilwoman Barbara Williamson said, there is no money to refund because the district’s check went to help finance the city’s new police station.

Williamson also said there is no question about the amount of fees the school district owed the city. “We can look at loaning them money, but if they want us to forgive the development agreement, we’re not going to do that.”

No one from the school district has yet approached the city on the subject, but Robinson and Jacobsen, along with a band of other parents, plan to submit a resolution at Tuesday’s school board meeting to ask trustees to request a refund.

“We would love all our schools to have the latest technology,” Schultze said. “And maybe we can sit down with the city as two public agencies and talk about it. But I don’t think there’s any guarantee they would refund any money.”

As for finding money for computers at Wood Ranch, DiFatta said it is not the board’s role to single out one school over others, especially since Wood Ranch--although new--was never designated as a special technology school.

“The Wood Ranch parents are certainly looking out for the best interest of their kids, which is perfectly normal,” she said. But “to simply allocate funds to one school and not the others is not fair.”