District should reevaluate criteria for closing schools

In response to your Jan. 24 editorial, "It's no surprise parents are angry and upset over school closures," you do a disservice to parents who are trying to make sense of how the school closure committee has determined the potential schools to be closed by implying their reaction is solely based on emotion.

Many parents are trying to understand whether the best criteria and analysis are used to ensure the children, parents and teaching professionals of Conejo Valley Unified School District will be better, not worse off, after the closures.

First, none of the criteria considers school performance or the availability of supplemental enrichment programs. Rather, the primary criteria consider convenience factors such as the number of displaced students and distance to new schools.

Under the current criteria, high performing schools will likely be selected for closure over lower performing schools. Most parents would choose transporting their children a little bit farther to go to a school with a higher API than choose a poor performing school nearby, as evidenced by the high number of school choice students at schools with high APIs.

Second, even if the criteria as recommended by the committee were acceptable, the analysis is the wrong statistical analysis, and leads to incorrect results and recommendations. A review by an independent professional statistician has determined the rank order of schools would change dramatically if the analysis were done using the correct approach.

So while you recommend "the quicker the list is cut in half, the better" in your editorial, citizens in Conejo Valley must demand that the district take the time required to develop evaluation criteria that preserves school performance, and to implement correct statistical method so that accurate recommendations for this serious decision are made. Lynn Jurss Thousand Oaks