The Old School : Curly Keeps Warner District, Pupils on Straight and Narrow

Out here, where Indians-turned-cowboys work the cattle, where the neighbor just down the street is actually miles away and gliders soar overhead, there’s just not much use for bureaucracy.

Like the life style and the landscape, things are nice and simple here when it comes to government functions. Consider the running of the Warner Union School District and its one school.

The nine elementary grades are taught by just seven teachers, most of whom have split grade-level classes. And there’s not even a principal or a superintendent to oversee the business of schoolin’. There’s a teacher in charge of the teaching, and a businessman in charge of the rest.

And there’s Hubert H. Horn. You can call him Curly or you can call him Mr. Horn; nobody calls him Hubert.

Horn is 84 years old, and for the past 22 years, he’s been the president of the local school board. It’s not that nobody else wants the job; it’s just that nobody figures he can care for children as much as Curly Horn, who’s never had any children of his own.

So, he’s adopted all of the children in Warner Springs, Ranchita, Lake Henshaw, Sunshine Summit and the Los Coyotes and Santa Ysabel Indian reservations as his own.

Horn is the patriarch of the district’s sole school, situated on California 79. It’s the quintessential country school, with its bright white buildings, fresh red trim, white fence, rows of flowering red and yellow canna and, to the west, a view of the glimmering white observatory domes atop Palomar Mountain.

Under more than two decades of Horn’s leadership, the little school has flourished: New classrooms have been constructed without state building assistance. There are no more than 27 students per class--and each class has not only the teacher but a professional teacher’s aide. Achievement tests have shown that the students rank higher than most of their peers in California. A collection of 15--count ‘em, 15--computers fills a room for the kids to practice their math and reading. And, there’s money in the bank.

It’s a far cry from when Horn first came on the scene in this wide-open stretch of northern San Diego County.

Horn--who spent 30 years in the Navy, much of it in underwater salvage work to repair ships--and his wife of 61 years, Gladys, moved from Chula Vista to nearby Ranchita in 1950 to begin their retirement.

Several years later, Horn started nosing around in the business operations of the little school district, prompted by the board of education’s contention that a tax increase was necessary to meet mounting expenses.

“The cafeteria fund was broke, and a milk company was owed $1,900,” Horn said. “When they asked to raise taxes, I started asking a lot of stupid questions--like, what were they doing with all the money they did have. I had a feeling the kids were getting a bum deal.”

Horn smelled a rat, and met with the county superintendent of schools to air his suspicion. That led to a meeting with the district attorney’s office.

One thing led to another, and a county grand jury blew the lid off the school district by indicting the superintendent on grand theft of school funds. He was convicted and sentenced in 1961 to two years in state prison, and in the wake of the controversy, three of the five school board members resigned--including one who was using the school’s tractor for himself.

“It was a slip-shod operation,” Horn said.

He was immediately elected to fill one of the three vacancies and, in 1964, was elected president of the board. He’s held the post ever since and has missed only one school board meeting in his 22 years as president.

The district put its business back in order, dropped the idea of a tax hike and still found enough money to build a new cafeteria.

A couple of years ago, two new classrooms were built without outside help, and two more classrooms are nearing completion--again, with only district money being used. And a 6,000-square-foot gymnasium, financed jointly by the school district and the county Department of Parks and Recreation, is being built next to the playground.

The gym will be used by the pupils on rainy, windy or snowy days, and it will serve as a community hall of sorts for these parts of the countryside.

Horn smiles as he walks the grounds. He waves to the youngsters--and they wave back--and he points to the things he and the community have built with donated labor: that chain-link fence over here, that Quonset hut over there.

“This school is his whole life,” said Mary June DiPaolo, who began teaching at the school in 1957, taking time off here and there to get three children into kindergarten.

“We’re all one big family, and he’s the father--or, the grandfather,” she said.

The feeling of camaraderie runs thick here. Through last spring, the seven teachers had together taught at the school for a combined 85 years. Teacher contract negotiations open and close on the same day without nary a fuss. “We see items in the news about teachers and school boards not getting along . . . well, the only thing we have here is trust in one another,” DiPaolo said.

The seven teachers earn from $20,800 to $36,500 a year.

The Horn-led school board decided years ago it could get along without a superintendent or principal to head the staff. “The problem,” Horn opines, “is that there are two kinds of superintendents. The young ones who want a steppingstone to go somewhere else, and the old fellows who just want to retire.”

So here, Robbie Blackwood, a resource specialist, serves as administrator over the certificated staff and curriculum and Wayne Taylor, who himself graduated from the school in 1966, is the district’s business manager, overseeing the cafeteria operation, the buildings and grounds maintenance, the payroll and the five buses, which collect each of the school’s 193 students from five outlying communities.

Together, Blackwood and Taylor report to the school board.

“He doesn’t breathe down our backs,” Taylor said of Horn’s involvement in the school’s daily operation. “He reads the latest educational materials and the legislative matters to help us keep informed, but he does it without interfering.

“And the $40,000 or $50,000 we save in a superintendent’s salary, we can plow back into instructional aides, computers and the curriculum.”

The district has an annual operating budget of about $450,000--and a half-million dollars stored away in the bank.

But Horn says more important than worrying about money matters is hiring a staff that cares for the students, and for people like him to set the example. He visits all of the classrooms regularly, sometimes spending up to an hour with the teacher and children.

“You’ve got to let them know you’re interested,” Horn said. “If I don’t care for the children, then why should they? Caring about kids is the most important thing a school board member has to do. Teachers are old enough to care for themselves. But somebody’s got to care for the kids.”