Skewed test results no reason to reelect Dunn

In Jo Anne Cobasko's Sept. 14 letter ("Conejo schools not that good when compared to communities with similar demographics"), she blames all the school board members except Mike Dunn as the "culprit in this dismal performance." She even endorses Mike Dunn and a couple others in the upcoming election.

Yet Mr. Dunn himself wrote on Aug. 24 in these pages, "In conclusion, you could vote for anyone running for election to the school board and the academic standards of this district would not change. Why? Because students, teachers, parents, staff and the superintendent deserve 97 percent of the credit."

Thus, Mr. Dunn refutes Ms. Cobasko.

Cobasko focuses her displeasure on four elementary schools (Meadows, Wildwood, Ladera and Lang Ranch) that apparently didn't rank at the top when compared with similar schools. Yet each of these schools scored well above the statewide goal of 800.

In fact, Lang Ranch had an impressive API score of 917 which was second (or third) only to Cypress and Madrona, which scored 922 (the highest in the district).

Meadows, Wildwood and Ladera scored 858, 880 and 843 respectively, all solid results by any measure.

If Cobasko is so concerned with the similar school rankings, she should have discovered that middle schools Colina, Redwood and Sequoia got perfect 10s in their statewide and similar school rankings (10 is best) and API's of 881, 891 and 851 respectively.

For the school districts as a whole, CVUSD got a districtwide API score of 846. By comparison, Moorpark Unified scored 803, Simi Valley Unified earned 797 and Ventura Unified got 763.

The CVUSD results don't seem "dismal" to me.

Cobasko and her so-called "Save Our Children from Mediocre Math" group are nitpicking. There's always room for improvement, but this is an attempt to promote fear during an election cycle to reelect Dunn and others, while trying to discredit good board members Stephens, Beaubien, Phelps and Didio, stating that they need to be replaced.

Actually, Mike Dunn needs to be replaced, but this has to do with many well documented reasons other than school test scores. Dave Dolnick Thousand Oaks