Growth Is Key Issue in School Board Race

Last year, a committee of 35 city residents presented the Simi Valley school board with a 100-page report that recommended several ways to plan for growth.

This year, three members of the committee are running for the school board, dissatisfied, they say, with its lack of urgency in dealing with what many city residents see as its biggest challenge.

Growth is at the heart of any debate among the nine candidates for the Simi Valley Unified School District board, and the battle lines are clear: The board’s two incumbents say they are doing the best they can, while the seven challengers contend that they are not doing enough.

Incumbents Diane Collins and Janice DiFatta say challengers can criticize because they don’t understand the difficulty of juggling rising enrollment with dwindling state funding. Both say state lawmakers have demanded smaller class sizes, which has increased the need for more classrooms and teachers.

Eleven candidates are on the ballot for the school board’s three contested seats. Two candidates, Terrie Heinaman Hamilton and Gloria Bowman, have dropped out of the race but did so too late to be removed from the ballot.

The remaining challengers are business owner and insurance broker Curtis H. Carson, college professor Fred Clark, high school counselor Steven P. Gould, accountant Chris Hamilton, computer consultant Tim Keaney, registered nurse and former school board member Debbie Sandland, and Michael Murphy, a government relations manager for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Claims that a shortage of state money and rising enrollment have limited the board’s ability to plan for growth don’t sit well with Murphy. He led the committee that warned officials to identify the schools needing upgrades so they could get state modernization grants.

“It wasn’t important to them so they didn’t get around to it. Now the fund’s out of money, but we still have $117 million in modernization needs,” Murphy said.

Hamilton, who served on the committee with Murphy, agreed.

“The current school board used to be ineffective. Now they’re damaging to the district,” Hamilton said. “When they actually do make decisions, we never know if it’s a final decision or not.”

Other challengers criticized the board for not planning for growth quickly enough.

Clark said he was motivated to run because he doesn’t think school officials are planning correctly for long-term growth.

Clark and Gould said they would not have voted to lease three of four shuttered public schools to private-school operators. Both said those schools could have been reopened so new schools wouldn’t have to use portable classrooms.

“They shouldn’t have extended those leases. The future growth is inevitable, and in the next five to 10 years we’ll need those schools,” Gould said.

Clark and Gould also said they would have put the private schools on month-to-month leases rather than one-year terms. Neither Clark nor Gould had a concrete financial plan to fund any new schools.

In September, the school board voted to extend the leases with the private schools for another year and go month to month on the Arroyo Elementary School lease.

School officials said they receive $20,000 annually in rent from the private schools. The shuttered schools are in neighborhoods where there isn’t rapid growth, school officials said. Belwood, Arroyo, Arcane and Walnut Grove elementary schools were shut down in the 1980s because of declining enrollment.

The district will be better equipped to solve the overcrowding and school refurbishing problems when it finally completes the sale of a 36-acre property at Tapo Canyon Road and Alamo Street, across the street from the Civic Center Plaza, Collins said. The district has agreed to sell the property for $13.75 million, but the deal is still in escrow, she said.

Collins said the money from the land sale could be used to fix one or more of the closed schools, add portable classrooms, or build a new campus.

The strong economy has spurred higher enrollment in Simi Valley schools, DiFatta and Collins said, and dealing with that growth requires careful planning.

Hiring Mel Roop, the district’s assistant superintendent for facilities and property, was the right move for the board, DiFatta said.

The next board will take up the issue of potentially shifting boundary lines and moving students to other schools.

Clark and Carson both said they want to draw district boundaries to allow as many students as possible to walk to school. DiFatta said most parents prefer to drive their children to school.

School board trustees appeared to defuse one of the hotter issues in the district when they voted Sept. 26 to continue letting parents decide if their children should be enrolled in elementary school or middle school when they reach the sixth grade. That policy could change, though, depending on the election’s results, Sandland said.

“I feel very strongly that choice needs to be maintained,” Sandland said. “We can’t keep holding it over the heads of the community. We need to say the district stands for choice and that’s it, period.”

Keaney also believes the issue will resurface for another vote if DiFatta, Collins and another candidate who supports sending sixth-graders to middle schools are elected.

But all of the candidates interviewed said they want to maintain the choice policy, including DiFatta and Collins.

Sending all of the district’s sixth-graders to middle school could have a dramatic effect on school boundaries and other plans to handle growth. There are 398 sixth-grade students in the district’s three middle schools and 1,278 in its 20 elementary schools.

If all the sixth-grade students in the elementary schools were shifted to the middle schools, more middle schools would be needed, officials said. The other option would be to reopen the closed schools.