The Conejo Valley Unified School District School Board needs to reject the entire findings of the School Closure Committee. The board should reevaluate the primary and secondary criteria, which are flawed, to properly evaluate schools for closure.

The board needs to include the following criteria in the primary evaluation:

1. API--evaluate schools' performance criteria. Higher-performing schools should be rated as such. Student success and education is the primary objective of CVUSD. I'm sure parents at low-scoring schools would be happy to have their children moved to stronger, higher-scoring schools, unlike the opposite. Try to move high-scoring school kids and they won't even consider going to the low-scoring school. More revenue will be lost to home schooling or private schools, or CVUSD will have to fund a proposed charter school as in the process at Maple.

2. Busing to current locations due to geographic isolation. Schools with large numbers of students bused to the location need to be identified as possible candidates for closure since there will be less impact on the transportation aspect.

3. Include all student numbers in first criteria: school of choice, special needs, etc. These students aren't any less valuable to a school. The school of choice numbers actually show you the demand for a school, which is very important.

4. Diversity--does the closure improve the diversity?

5. Do not apply arbitrary "domino effect" analysis until close of full evaluation and open for discussion.

Another option would be to throw out the statistical evaluation, which cannot truly assess the full problem. Make the decision based on what's best for the students and district as a whole. The current criteria truly addresses just the number of students, not true school district problems. Kim Inglis Newbury Park