Two trustees have served the district for too long

Conejo Valley Unified School District Superintendent Mario Contini and our school board president, Dorothy Beaubien, recently decided to cut costs by closing two of our elementary schools.

They should have worked to provide equal and fair access by keeping at least one neighborhood elementary school open in each neighborhood of our community.

Unfortunately, they didn't. Instead Ms. Beaubien and her cronies decided to close the only elementary school in one neighborhood of our community. This leaves a 2.5-square-mile area of our community with no elementary school, while leaving other neighborhoods with two or three elementary schools, with some of them less than a half mile apart.

Ms. Beaubien and her cronies see no problem making 5through 11-year-old children hike 2.5 miles, with a change in elevation of 600 vertical feet, the equivalent of a 60 story building, and then cross a busy freeway onramp, just to get to school. Does this sound like a free and appropriate education to you?

Ms. Beaubien and her cronies pit school against school. By telling parents of schools targeted for closure that there were alternate schools that could be closed instead, they encouraged frustrated and angry parents to lash out at the alternate schools.

At a recent school board meeting, Ms. Beaubien continued to feed this contentious atmosphere by requiring parents to enter through separate doors, conceding that all of our schools are made up of wonderful students, teachers, staff and parents who are dedicated to making their school the best that it can be. None of them deserves to be treated in this inexcusable fashion.

Ms. Beaubien and her cronies illegally created a class of "special" special needs children. They also killed any hope of increasing funding by making this about saving one or two schools rather than a districtwide problem. Superintendent Contini recently stated, "We leave no children behind."

Check your rearview mirror; you already did.

Wayne Miller Thousand Oaks