MOORPARK — 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.
