Disagrees that school closures were a necessity

I'm responding to the Sept. 18 Acorn editorial that said the school board's 3-2 decision to close Meadows and University elementary schools, while mishandled, was necessary.

The opinion suggests that I, as one of the candidates running for the school board to reverse this decision, am just trying to impress the voters who don't know any better. Wow, I guess the Acorn knows better than the voters.

If this was necessary, why did two members not vote for this closure? Two of those who did are not seeking reelection and were in office during the boom times of increasing enrollment and funding.

The Acorn wants to put all the blame on increased property values. Of course we lost students due to high property values and the decline in economy, but the Acorn shouldn't make one-sided claims of correlation when it hasn't done research to find out what happened to the other lost students.

What about the exodus of students to private schools and other local districts? Why did this year's kindergarten class enrollment go up if it's so expensive to live here?

The Acorn wants the school system to act like a business, where you expand and contract as enrollment increases and decreases. I'm all for efficiently run schools, but small neighborhood schools are not a scourge to be closed, but must be embraced because of their benefits of being safer, higher GPAs, lower drop-out rates, higher teacher satisfaction and better community support.

By selecting these two schools to close, the board has put the onus on two neighborhoods to take the blame for poor planning and inefficient decisions by the board and the superintendent's office. Remember, in the last 10 years we built two new elementary schools, permanently expanded others and haven't brought our district up to the level it needs to be.

We are a strong, dedicated community, and we can find better solutions to our declining enrollment and shrinking state budgets than to close our neighborhood schools. Scott Lamp Thousand Oaks