Parents Ask End to Bus Program in Moorpark : Education: Forty percent of the district’s 5,400 students participate, mainly to achieve racial balance at the schools. Group wants pupils to be able to walk to area campuses.

The busing program that puts Moorpark schools among the most racially balanced in Ventura County is under attack by a group of parents who want elementary children to be able to walk to school.

The group, called Parents for Better Schools, wants the Moorpark Unified School District to change its five elementary schools to neighborhood schools.

But most school officials and some community leaders have defended busing in the district, saying that neighborhood schools in Moorpark would be segregated schools.

The Moorpark district buses about 40% of its 5,400 students, mainly to achieve racial balance at the schools.

Bret Taylor, one of the parents’ group leaders, told the school board last week that busing is “an unpopular way to achieve integration.”

“Many people have moved to Moorpark to get away from mandatory busing,” he said.

In addition to reducing busing, the parents’ group also wants the district’s five elementary schools to house kindergarten through fifth grades. Currently, one school has kindergarten through second grades; two have kindergarten through third grade, one has third through fifth grades and one has fourth and fifth.

Taylor and about a dozen other group members appeared before the school board last week, presenting a petition signed by 1,200 residents requesting that the district revert to neighborhood elementary schools.

Changing to neighborhood elementary schools that house kindergarten through fifth grades would save the district much of the $465,000 that it spends annually on busing, the group told the board. It would also save young children the stress of having to change schools during their primary years.

The school board agreed to form a community task force to look into the issue. But Board President Tom Baldwin was the only board member to show support for changing to neighborhood schools.

Many school officials and community leaders warned that neighborhood schools would cause racial segregation.

Of the city’s five elementary schools, three are in neighborhoods that are almost all white and one is in the heavily Latino downtown neighborhood. Only the school in the Moorpark College neighborhood is in an area whose ethnic diversity roughly mirrors the 3-to-1 ratio of whites to minorities in the city.

In an emotional speech at the board meeting, Latino community leader Teresa Cortes accused the group of caring only about their own children and not the needs of the entire city.

“You’re talking about your own kids, your family,” Cortes said. “You’re not thinking” about the rest of the city’s children.

Busing, Cortes said, “is the only way we can integrate.”

Moorpark schools are now among the most integrated in Ventura County. The student population at every school is about 75% white and 25% minorities.

By comparison, Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley School District has about the same ratio of whites to minorities as Moorpark, but the district does not bus to achieve racial balance, said Ken Marshick, the district’s director of personnel.

While most of Pleasant Valley’s 13 schools have enrollments that are 25% to 35% minorities, two schools are exceptions.

At Las Colinas Elementary school, located in a mainly white area, only 14% of the students are minorities. And at El Rancho Structured School, which is in a primarily Latino neighborhood, the student population is 46% minority, Marshick said.

El Rancho provides special bilingual education programs for students with limited English skills. It also offers other special programs to attract white students from throughout the district, which limits the racial imbalance at the school, district Supt. Shirley Carpenter said.

In Moorpark, members of Parents for Better Schools said the district could create a similar magnet school in the heavily Latino downtown neighborhood to draw white students from other areas. The magnet school would help offset racial segregation that would be caused by reverting to neighborhood schools.

But school board member Pamela Castro said that, with or without a magnet school downtown, changing to neighborhood schools would result in disproportionate busing of Latino students who live downtown.

The downtown school is not big enough for all the elementary students who live in the neighborhood, Castro said. Many of these students would still have to be bused to other schools, while their counterparts in other neighborhoods would be able to walk to school.

“I want neighborhood schools,” Castro said. But “whose child are you asking to bear the burden?”