School board challenger says district mishandled school closures

Scott Lamp Scott Lamp, a heart researcher at UCLA and father of three girls, said he's considered running for school board in the past. But it was the Conejo Valley Unified school board's recent decision to close two elementary schools that gave him the kick he needed.

Lamp said his No. 1 focus is to reverse the decision to close University and Meadows elementary schools, which Lamp said the board "totally mishandled."

"It's fundamentally the wrong decision," Lamp said. "And financially it's not going to be as strong as they think. If you close the schools and the kids got reintegrated into the other schools, we would save money. But that's not what's happening."

Lamp referred to statistics that show many parents are pulling their kids from the district because of the closures and that others may attend a new charter school that's in the works.

Lamp said he felt that the school closure process split the community and now residents are left with a lack of unity in the district and on the board.

"We are all in this together," Lamp said. "During this whole thing, parents from some schools didn't want to go to certain other schools for whatever reason, usually because they were lowerperforming schools, and that was usually because of socioeconomic reasons or because more of the kids didn't speak English as their first language.

"If there are schools that parents don't want their kids to go to, the board is failing. We should judge the district's success by the bottom three performing schools, not the top. We need to target those schools."

Lamp said he'll solicit businesses and other partners to help fund some of the district's needs.

"We need to fundraise on a much bigger level," Lamp said. "Employees who come to this area want to send their kids to good public schools. It's in everyone's best interest to help the schools."

Lamp would also like to remove Everyday Math from the curriculum and push for more vocational programs. He also plans to look at changing meeting dates to allow parents to attend both school board and City Council meetings.

"I look at being on the board like a service," Lamp said. "I had just been thinking about giving back to the community, and although it will affect our time as a family, we are looking at it as something we'd like to do."

Lamp and his wife, Carmen, who works at Amgen, moved from Santa Monica in 1998.

"We were focused first on finding the best school district we could afford," Lamp said. "We found Conejo Valley Unified and picked it without knowing anything about Thousand Oaks. It turned out to be a great community, too."

The Lamps have three daughters, ages 15, 13 and 12, two of whom attend Thousand Oaks High School; the third goes to Redwood Middle School.

Although Lamp doesn't have experience in school-related committees or organizations, he said that could work for him, rather than against.

"We do need people who are totally integrated into the district," Lamp said. "But sometimes people can get too caught up in that. I think I can be a board member who looks at the bigger picture. Doing every single job in the district is not necessary to be a board member."

For more information, visit scottthomaslamp.com.