SCHOOL DISTRICT ON TARDY LIST? : MOORPARK PARENTS LAST TO KNOW OF TRANSFER PLAN.

Byline: Paul O'Donoghue Daily News Staff Writer

In the fall, 275 mostly Latino youngsters from a downtown neighborhood are slated to be transferred to other schools to improve the racial balance on campus, but many parents from the area complained they'd never heard of the plan.

The Moorpark Unified School District just last week started mailing home notices of the change that will uproot children from their neighborhood schools and send them to campuses across town.

``Everybody no sabe nada,'' said Teresa Rodriguez, who has four children who could be affected by the changes, before the notices were sent.

Rodriguez said she had read some newspaper stories about the changes, which affect kindergarten through eighth-grade students, but didn't really understand them because her English is limited.

Assistant Superintendent Frank DePasquale expressed surprise at the parents' complaints, saying the issue had been discussed for the past year in newsletters sent home with the children, in newspaper reports and at informational meetings at local schools, including Flory School, which is close to downtown.

As of Friday, Peach Hill Elementary School had received about a dozen calls, all of which were requests from families for more information.

``What I will do is follow up with the school sites, and I will find out what kind of issues were brought forth by parents,'' he said.

``If there were concerns that there was not proper notification, then I think we will probably have to have a meeting with parents, and review with them the procedures that we went through to get the information out to them,'' he said, ``to let them know that we are concerned that they weren't notified, that we will listen to what they have to say.''

No parents from the downtown neighborhood attended the school board meeting in late February when the decision was made to change the neighborhood boundaries to create a racial balance that better represented that of the city.

Under the plan, the 275 students would be transferred from Peach Hill Elementary to Mountain Meadows Elementary; from Flory Elementary to Arroyo West Elementary; and Mesa Verde Middle School to Chaparral Middle School.

The city's ethnic balance is 32 percent Latino and 68 percent white, and Moorpark Unified wants to come as close as possible to that, give or take about 8 percent, said DePasquale.

At some schools now, the ethnic composition exceeds those guidelines. At Peach Hill, 49 percent of the students are Latino.

``We want our schools' populations to reflect the demographics of the community of Moorpark,'' said DePasquale. ``That's our target. Not every school is going to be cookie-cutter, not every school is going to have the exact ethnic (target) . . . But our target is to have the schools reflect the ethnicity of Moorpark.''

As a result of the board decision, the district mailed notices to the parents of the 275 downtown children last week, in English and Spanish, notifying them of the changes.

Notices to the parents of the district's other 5,000 kindergarten through eighth-grade children will be mailed by today, said DePasquale.

Superintendent Tom Duffy confirmed that the downtown parents had not been directly contacted by the district about the moves before the mailing.

Duffy said his office held off on notifying parents directly of the changes, pending confirmation of names, addresses and other information of those families involved with the move.

Those affected are children who live in the area that starts just south of the railroad tracks and extends to Moorpark Avenue and Harry and Second streets, who will be moved to schools that in some cases are a few miles away.

Students now in their next-to-last year - such as second-, fourth- and seventh-graders - may stay put. But their parents must apply to the district for an exemption for the move by April 15, officials said.

``We don't want to disturb the very last year for children if the parents don't want it,'' said Duffy.

Some of the English-speaking parents who live outside the downtown neighborhood boundaries said before the mailing went out that they had heard about the changes.

But neighbors of Rodriguez's Second Street bungalow, most of whom emigrated from the Mexican state of Michoacan, discussed the issue before the notices were mailed and said they knew nothing about the plan or how they could seek an exemption from the transfer.

``No, nothing,'' resident Maria Zaragoza said in Spanish. ``It's bad.''

Part of the problem might be that the information about transfers was entrusted to students to bring home to their parents.

Rodriguez's son, Jose, a fourth-grader, said he'd received a handout to bring home, but that it was probably still in his school bag.

``I forgot to give the paper to her,'' said Jose.

DePasquale said he will follow up on the complaints from the downtown parents.

``That's unfortunate and we need to identify why certain people were not involved in the process,'' said DePasquale. ``That's something we'll really have to investigate.''

He said, ``What our intention will be is that parents feel satisfied and comfortable with what decisions we've made, and that they've still got options for their students in Moorpark.''