From ‘Worst School in Conejo Valley’ to the Comeback Kids

Thousand Oaks teacher Christine Steigelman hated the things people said about her school.

They called Manzanita Elementary the worst school in the Conejo Valley. They singled it out as the campus with all the Latino children, the one where the kids were mostly poor, didn’t speak English and dragged down test scores.

But when criticism reached a high point last year, after standardized test scores pegged Manzanita as the lowest-performing school in the high-achieving Conejo Valley Unified School District, the second-grade teacher, colleagues and a new principal set out to prove people wrong.

Using every dollar and every good idea they could find, they launched new math and reading programs, brought in academic trouble-shooters, encouraged parents to volunteer and put in extra hours on after-school instruction.

Scores released last month on the state’s basic skills exam show the payoff: Manzanita on average raised Stanford 9 test scores from the 44th percentile in 2000 to the 58th percentile last school year.

It was the biggest gain by any Thousand Oaks school and one of the largest increases of any school in Ventura County.

“My attitude was, ‘I am going to show them how good our kids are,’ ” Steigelman said. “It was like, ‘I dare you to do better.’ We took the dare, and we did it.”

But Manzanita’s struggle--shared by schools across the state with poor, minority populations--is not over.

Dozens of parents in the upper-middle-class neighborhood surrounding the school have pulled their children out in recent years, fearful that their youngsters were being held back by lower achievers.

More say they will leave too, unless something is done to balance Manzanita’s high population of students who speak little or no English.

Some believe the solution is to redistribute those kids, bused from a low-income condominium complex across the Ventura Freeway, to other Thousand Oaks schools.

District officials say they have made no decisions about changing Manzanita’s makeup. And parents at the condominium complex vow to fight any effort to do so.

“I am sick and tired of people talking about us and making us out to be the bad guy,” said Joel Murillo, a parent of two children at the school. “Our kids can be No. 1.”

A Major Shift in Demographics

Manzanita was built in 1963 to serve the growing population of Newbury Park. For two decades, that has included the 540-unit Conejo Creek condominium complex.

When the units first sold in the early 1970s, the community was more than 90% white. But as Latino immigrants flocked there over the years, a similar transformation took place at Manzanita.

A decade ago, more than half of the student population was white and only one-third Latino. Today the population is 65% Latino and 28% white. That compares with a districtwide makeup of 16% Latino and 76% white.

Few had voiced concerns about the demographic shift, however, until the state released its Academic Performance Index last fall.

The index, a public ranking of schools based on Stanford 9 scores, designated Manzanita as the only under-performing school in a district where students on average score better than 75% of those nationwide.

Some parents pointed to the school’s high percentage of limited-English speakers--50.3% compared with the district average of 7.8%--as a reason for the low test scores.

And in March, when parents could apply to transfer their children under school choice laws, several jumped at the chance.

Some parents feared their children were not being sufficiently challenged at Manzanita. They worried that teachers were spending too much time on kids struggling to learn English, and that the school was not delivering the kind of top-notch education available at other local campuses.

“It’s not a race thing,” Newbury Park parent Stacy Mohr said. “It’s a quality of education thing.”

In the working-class condominium complex, however, some parents see it differently.

At a public meeting last spring, Conejo Creek parent Berta Cruz sensed that the concerns cited by some parents extended beyond test scores.

Sitting in the crowd at her neighborhood school, she said, she overheard a group of white parents talking about how “Hispanics” were taking over the campus.

“I don’t think they thought I could understand English,” she said. “It made me feel really bad.”

Murillo, the community leader at Conejo Creek, said where some parents see problems at Manzanita, parents like him see the school as providing a good opportunity for their youngsters.

He and many other condominium residents praise the school’s principal and teachers for their commitment to academic excellence and for creating a nurturing, family-like atmosphere where their children can learn.

Those parents also are prepared to do their part to help youngsters lift their grades.

At the start of this school year, Murillo launched a homework club that meets every weeknight in his living room. Eventually, he hopes parents will work with small groups in units throughout the complex.

“Perhaps we didn’t pay enough attention before, and it’s haunting us now,” Murillo said. “We can bring the school to where it should be.”

So far, the Conejo Valley school board has decided not to take any action on proposals to balance the number of limited-English speakers at Manzanita, including shifting attendance boundaries.

District staff members recommend that the school continue following a plan approved in May to further boost test scores.

As much as $300,000 from the state’s under-performing schools program will go to Manzanita this year.

“The bottom line is instruction is going to improve test scores, not boundary changes,” said Linda Vranesh, the district’s director of elementary education.

Test Scores Tell Only Part of the Story

Still, Vranesh and others caution that it can be misleading to look solely at test scores to determine how well Manzanita is performing. Statewide, there is a significant gap between schools like Manzanita, where students are struggling to learn English, and schools made up of mostly white, affluent children.

In fact, Manzanita’s test scores rank high when compared with campuses that have similar demographics. And scores for Manzanita’s English-fluent population are comparable to those at other Thousand Oaks schools.

For now, though, the Stanford 9 is what measures that success.

Manzanita’s latest API scores, the impetus for last year’s turmoil, are not expected to be released by the state until October.

But the district’s projections show that among all students, Manzanita’s score will climb nearly 100 points when it was only targeted to go up nine points. Among Latinos, the target was seven points. It is expected to jump by 120.