ON THE MOVE – Carden Conejo School will move to the former La Reina High School and Middle School campus beginning in the 2025-26 school year. Acorn archive photo

After four decades at its current location, Carden Conejo will move after the next school year.

The K-5 school has reached an agreement with the owners of the former La Reina High School and Middle School property and plans to move to that campus in time for the 2025-26 school year.

“This move not only ensures the continuity of our educational mission, but also provides a beautiful and enriching environment for our students,” said Nasi Peretz, Carden’s board president, in a statement released Monday by the Sisters of Notre Dame, which owns the property. SND was also a previous sponsor of La Reina.

Carden first inquired about the possibility of leasing the former La Reina property in May after La Reina closed at the end of the school year, Peretz told the Acorn. For about a year, the school had been engaged in sometimes turbulent negotiations with the Conejo Valley Unified School District to renew the lease on the property on Evanstar Avenue, which it has occupied since 1984.

FINAL CLASS – La Reina High’s graduating class of 2024 sings the alma mater during graduation on May 24. The school closed after the end of the school year. MICHAEL COONS/Acorn Newspapers

“We reached out as soon as we heard it was going to be vacant,” Peretz said Monday evening after returning from touring the property at the La Reina property at 106 W. Janss Road, noting that he hadn’t even looked at it properly until then.

The Sisters of Notre Dame shocked the Thousand Oaks community – especially the students and families who attend La Reina – with the announcement in January that La Reina would close at the end of the 2023-24 school year. They said several schools had reached out to them expressing interest in the Janss Road campus.

“We have communicated to everyone that we are only open to considering a short- to medium-term lease at this time, and everyone has been given the opportunity to tour the campus,” Jenniffer Deckard, SND’s chief financial officer and administrator, told the Acorn by email.

Peretz said Carden’s lease is for four years with an option for an additional year.

Although the sisters received inquiries from several brokers, SND only interviewed with schools and only with those that contacted them directly, Deckard said.

Peretz said he was aware of at least three other companies being considered.

“They never told us who it was, who we were playing against, if it was a school or anything like that,” Peretz said. “We took the opportunity to put our best foot forward.”

Deckard said Monday that the sisters made the decision to lease the space to the Thousand Oaks school within the last 10 days, but the final lease was not signed until Monday, Aug. 5.

Peretz said the private school community was shocked and pleased by the news.

“We are not a religious school, we are secular. We thought there was no way they would choose a secular school – and they did,” said the board chairman.

“We are excited to welcome Carden Conejo School to our campus,” Deckard said in the SND statement. “As we considered what might happen next on this campus, we hoped for an organization with a track record that would bring stability to both our campus and the surrounding community.”

Peretz declined to give a specific amount, but said the cost difference from the school’s current costs is not enormous, but that the new campus offers much more in terms of opportunities.

“We live in trailers. We don’t have a gym. We don’t have a multipurpose room. And we certainly don’t have a robotics lab,” he said. “Believe it or not, we haven’t maxed out our budget to meet (the new lease terms), and we’re breaking even. That’s the reality of a school.”

Carden’s current lease with Conejo Valley Unified, for which he pays about $22,500 a month, expires next summer.

Questions about the renewal of the CVUSD lease arose in December 2021 after Bob and Holly Fleming, who had led Carden since 2005, informed the school board of their plans to retire and asked the district to transfer the lease to a nonprofit to take over the school. However, the lease could not be transferred. Instead, Carden’s new board had to enter into its own lease agreement with the district.

This isn’t the first time Carden has been threatened with displacement. Nearly a decade ago, district administrators floated the idea of ​​reclaiming the campus for district use. CVUSD had planned to build a new education center next to its district headquarters on Janss Road, but the plan proved to be much more costly than originally envisioned.

As an alternative, the district considered swapping the locations of some of its less traditional educational programs and moving Carden from its longtime location in Westlake.

There was an outcry from Carden parents and an ad hoc committee ultimately recommended not terminating the school’s lease. The current lease has been in place since 2017.

Read the next issue of Thousand Acorns You can read more about this move and the community’s reaction to it here. Reporter Zia Zografos contributed to this article.