Conejo Valley Unified School District
Office of the Superintendent
At an informational meeting conducted at Sycamore Canyon on August 11, members of the CVUSD administrative staff shared a proposed recommendation to deal with an increasing student population in the elementary grades at Sycamore Canyon School. The focus of the 5-Part Plan is to creatively identify strategies to increase the enrollment capacity of the school in the elementary grades to maximize the opportunity for Dos Vientos residents to attend their home school of choice. This 5-Part Plan was introduced as an informational item and will be considered as an action item at the meeting of the CVUSD Board of Education on August 24, 2004.
1. Sustain the current practice of closing School Choice enrollment into Sycamore for families outside of the Sycamore attendance boundaries.
2. Amend policy to make Dos Vientos a choice area for families, allowing them to select Sycamore Canyon or Cypress as their elementary sites.
a. Cypress is anticipated to be under 500 A.D.A. through the next decade and any choice into this school and out of Sycamore will better balance the school enrollment figures.
b. The small size of Cypress and available land on the site will allow for some expansion of child care options which could provide an additional incentive for families to select Cypress as their home school.
3. Consider long-term options for addressing capacity issues at Sycamore (2006-07 and beyond) with assistance from study group to be formed in September 2004. This group will examine the pros and cons of expanding the capacity with additional classrooms, as well as other options including but not limited to joint use of adjacent parkland with Park District for new school classrooms in a kindergarten center concept or other TBD idea. Task force representatives will be selected from the groups listed below. Additionally, this task force will be provided with real census data from new units coming online throughout the first half of the school year. This data will provide more coherent information regarding the enrollment yields of the condos and apartments in the attendance area.
a. School administrators
b. District administration
c. School Board
d. City Council representative appointed by the City Council
e. Site Council representative appointed by the Site Council
f. Park District representative appointed by the Park District
g. PTA representative appointed by the PTA
h. Community at large as appointed by the Board of Education
4. Configure a “bridge” plan for the school year 2005-2006 which would expand capacity at the school with temporary buildings to accommodate the anticipated elementary enrollment and construct two permanent classrooms on the middle school site which, along with the construction of the gymnasium, will complete the middle school complex and meet the enrollment demands both in the short and long-term. Temporary buildings would be placed in sufficient quantity to meet the enrollment numbers of all students living in Dos Vientos and enrolled by the June enrollment date in 2005. Consistent with Districtwide practice, students moving into Dos Vientos after that date and during the school year will be enrolled at Sycamore on a space available basis.
5. Identify the options for addressing the capacity which would be least acceptable to the Board based upon public input. These options include:
a. Year round school
b. Elimination of the CSR program at one or more grade levels
c. Drawing new attendance boundaries for existing residence areas within the Dos
Vientos area