77-Acre Gift to Village Christian Provides Means : School’s Dreams of Expansion Coming True

When Village Christian Schools Supt. Jeff Woodcock looks at the hills near his Sun Valley campus, he sees beyond the barren valleys and fuzzy peaks to an imaginary football stadium, an outdoor amphitheater, a parking lot and a new classroom building.

They are dreams that Village Christian, by far the largest nondenominational Christian campus in the Valley, will be getting even bigger.

Woodcock and dozens of other administrators and teachers at the 1,900-student school have been dreaming a lot in recent weeks.

Just before Christmas, 77 acres in the hills south of La Tuna Canyon, adjacent to the 30-acre campus, were donated to Village Christian by a Valley businessman. The property, worth nearly $3 million, is the largest gift the school has received in its 36-year history.

School officials will spend the next six months drafting plans for expanded campus facilities on the new land. Part of the land may be sold for residential development to raise funds for new construction, Woodcock said.

The businessman, who made his donation anonymously, described himself as a longtime admirer of Village Christian. His affection for the school is shared by the Christian education community, which regards the school as one of the best in California.

“The school is giving the foundation to young people that they would never have gotten otherwise,” said the 60-year-old man, who made the donation on the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It is tougher today for kids than it was for me. There are so many alternatives that they are confronted with. These need to be narrowed by a spiritual strength that they can draw from.”

The donor, who has no formal ties to the school but is active in Christian causes, sold Village Christian the 30 acres of Sun Valley land that enabled it to move from Burbank in the late 1950s.

“When you see a growth like that and a foundation as strong as that, it is an area that you would like to make an investment,” he said.

Village Christian was founded in Burbank in 1949 and is affiliated with the Village Church of Burbank. It says its teachings and admissions policies are not keyed to any one Christian denomination.

Enrollment peaked at just over 2,000 students in 1983, Woodcock said. Not interested in expanding its student body any further, the school is consciously holding enrollment to just below 2,000, he said. Students come from more than 100 churches.

Village Christian has at least triple the enrollment of any of the three dozen other Christian schools in the Valley, according to the Assn. of Christian Schools International (ACSI).

Village Christian officials and other Christian educators attribute the school’s appeal to a tested reputation, a strong family and church orientation and a superior faculty.

Richard Wiebe, ACSI regional director for California, Nevada and Hawaii, said Village Christian is the largest Christian school in the state to offer classes from kindergarten through 12th grade on one campus.

“It is really like a unified public school,” said Wiebe, who is based in Fresno but was superintendent at Village Christian for three years in the late 1970s. “The curriculum plan can be united, so a map can be laid out for each student from kindergarten through graduation.”

Admissions Policy

High school students pay about $2,000 an academic year to attend the school, and students in lower grades pay from $1,400 to $1,700 a year.

Admission for pupils in the elementary school is fairly lenient, Woodcock said, describing the early grades as a “training ground” for children to “win them to Christ.” Students in the junior and senior high schools, however, face a stricter religious background requirement. They must demonstrate a commitment to the Christian faith, typically by means of a letter of recommendation from their church pastor, and they must agree to a statement of faith before entering the school.

Moreover, students must adhere to dress and grooming codes (no “bushy” hair for boys, no “heavy” makeup for girls), dances are forbidden at the school and at private parties after school events, and “wordly music such as rock, whether soft or hard” may not be played on campus. And students are automatically expelled for behavior “damaging to the Christian testimony of the school”--including the use of tobacco, unprescribed drugs or liquor, either on or off campus.

“It is our desire that the Village Christian Schools should not conform to this world but should be an example by discriminating between the things of the world and the things of Christ,” states the school’s Standards of Conduct.

Woodcock said that the school does not hesitate to expel students who do not conform.

“That is one thing that makes us different from public schools. We want to know if the kid is motivated in any degree to spirituality. If we open it up to everyone, we find that discipline problems increase.”

According to Woodcock and other Village Christian officials, such demands are a major drawing card.

“We are not competing with the public schools,” said Dave Wilson, Village Christian high school principal. “Parents know that we don’t have the gang situation, we don’t have the truancy problems and we don’t have the drug use that other schools experience. It is all related.”

Gift Was Anticipated

Woodcock said the 77-acre donation has created a new excitement at the school, but added that it had been awaited by school officials for more than a decade. In the early 1970s, he said, the anonymous donor gave the school the legal rights to one-quarter of the property. Since then, the school had been expectantly awaiting a decision about the remaining land.

With the new land, congested parking lots, home football and volleyball games played away from home and cramped recreation fields could become things of the past, Woodcock said. Nature paths, field trips and academic courses that emphasize the outdoors could become new fixtures, he said.

“We are in a very unusual place here,” Woodcock said. “We are five minutes from the Burbank Airport, but I have seen deer and coyotes up in the hills. There are all kinds of things we could do with the land. There is a lot of it.”

Priority Projects

The school’s priorities, he said, will be to add parking and athletic fields, although both projects would require substantial earth removal. In the early 1960s, 15 acres of hilly land was leveled for the current school buildings. The dirt and rocks from that land were removed by the state and used to build part of the Hollywood Freeway, he said.

A decision about what to do with the land will be delayed at least until the school can raise enough money to finish the construction of a gymnasium, Woodcock said. To date, the school has raised only half of the $800,000 needed for the project.

In a letter to parents and friends of the school to be mailed this month, Woodcock appeals for funds, but also, in the spirit of the school, seeks other assistance. “Pray that God will bring in the money to complete the building,” he writes. “This is every bit as important as giving . . . .”