County Issue / Selling Surplus School...

Doug Crosse, Board member, Simi Valley Unified School District

The district has experienced over the years a decline in student population. Forecasts for our district are such that our existing schools and the one planned Wood Ranch school are satisfactory for the present and foreseeable future needs, thus putting us in the unique position of having surplus properties and several closed schools. For our district, the leasing of surplus properties is an economically feasible and advantageous situation. We are basing the word “surplus” on not just present but future needs. We’re confident that our inventory of schools and properties is going to be adequate for the maximum build-out of the community of Simi Valley. The revenues from our surplus property fund allow us to do a bit better job in maintenance, and we can clean up, paint, fix up and do certain things that would normally encroach upon the general fund and come out of the classrooms.

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Debbie Sandland, Board member, Simi Valley Unified School District

I don’t feel comfortable with selling outright our surplus properties. I know our school district has been involved in a joint venture with a developer, and I don’t feel comfortable with it at all. I don’t think school districts should be in property management. My concerns are that we should be in the business of educating children, and I don’t think property management is part of that business. My fears are that we may be too shortsighted. Our reasonable population level is 150,000, and we’re going to need more educational facilities. I don’t want to gamble our children’s inheritance away. That’s how I look at it. We need to have more insight into the future and provide for future generations, not gamble that property away and lose it forever. There’s no other way to look at it. Once that property’s developed, it’s gone forever.

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Tom Baldwin, Board member, Moorpark Unified School District

I can’t speak for all school districts, but in our particular case, the site that we’re trying to dispose of is not where the students are. By retaining it as a school, we’d have to bus students in, and it just doesn’t make sense. You want to have the schools where the students are and not have to bus them in. You have to make decisions based on your needs. If a school district like Moorpark, which is in the state building-aid program, sells a surplus site, we have to use the money from that surplus site to build new schools. We can’t just take the money and give the teachers a salary increase or buy textbooks with it. I don’t see it as trading long-term benefits for short-term gains. In Moorpark’s case, we don’t have that option. If we sell it, we have to use the money to put classrooms in somewhere else. In essence, all we’re doing is shuffling classrooms around.

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James F. Cowan, Ventura County superintendent of schools

I think that the local school boards are in the best position to determine the utilization of any surplus property in their district. My observation has been, in Ventura County, that any disposal of surplus property has usually been in an area where there will not be a future need. Therefore, the property could be expendable, and the resources could be applied to other areas viewed as a higher priority to the local school board. I’m probably most aware of this in Ventura Unified because I live in Ventura, but where I’ve seen them do that is in areas where, as they look at the long-term planning of the district, there’s not really going to be a need for those facilities in the next 20 years or so, if not longer. And yet, because of growth occurring in some areas, they do have immediate needs. Sometimes, you do what you have to do to meet the short-term requirements.

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Jorge Gutierrez, Director of facilities, Ventura Unified School District

Our district is growing at a 1% annual rate, and there is sufficient surplus property available to handle the student growth. The property that we have identified as surplus will not affect our efforts to address student growth, which will most likely occur in the east end of Ventura. When we did our assessment, we determined that there were four vacant parcels of 20 acres or more each located in the areas of foreseeable growth. We have one school that’s closed in the west end, which is currently leased out and will be available to handle growth on the west end of Ventura. The short term benefit of selling or leasing surplus property is that it’s an alternative source of funding to raise capital for maintenance and improvement projects. Because a majority of our schools are 30 years old or older, that revenue can be used for maintenance costs. Looking at the dwindling sources of funding from the state for education, this is just an alternative option for bridging that gap.