Saddle Up! School’s Open in Rustic Trabuco Canyon

Thursday was the first day of school for sixth-grader Reed Reichward, but it was a school unlike any he had seen before.

Dropped off by his mother an hour early, he found himself standing alone on a rustic campus in the middle of Trabuco Canyon and leaning against a weathered wooden sign that read “TRABUCO SCHOOL, est. 1879.”

As Orange County’s only remaining country school awakened to its 109th year, this is what unfolded before Reed:

- Principal and part-time science teacher Ray Leverich appeared carrying his straw cowboy hat and freeze-dried lunch, went into the old schoolhouse that now is the library and office, came out with a bullhorn and poised himself at the gate to greet parents. At Trabuco School, there is a corral for horses but no parking lot, so Leverich was going to have to direct first-day parent traffic into the field to the east.

- Across Trabuco Canyon Road, Rachel Chandos and Desiree Randall waited obediently for the crossing guard’s consent, then rode their horses across to their classes. School rules permit students to ride their horses on certain days.

- The school cat, Tigger, a tough tom who for nine years has successfully dodged the local coyotes and mountain lions, finished eating and hid under the office floor until things calmed down.

- The school goose--penned up with the ducks, chickens, turkey, goats, rabbits and horses--hissed at some of the strangers who gawked through the fence.

- Selected for the privilege, fourth-grader Virginia Patton pulled on the rope that hangs through the ceiling in the teachers’ lounge. A bell, the non-electric kind, rang in a steeple on the roof to signal the beginning of class.

“I like it,” said Reed. “This is my first time at a country school.”

Trabuco School, created to educate the children of 19th-Century ranchers, farmers and miners, has remained a country school through its history. A one-room school in a one-school district where board members were expected to garden as well as govern, the school as recently as 1963 had only one teacher for all grades from kindergarten through sixth.

But in the last few years, the suburbs have spilled into the backcountry east of Mission Viejo and El Toro, bringing with them flocks of suburban children and doubt about how long the school can remain as it has.

The general area in 1980 contained only 1,866 people, but in little more than two years it is expected to contain more than 14,000--most in suburban housing tracts like Santa Margarita, Robinson Ranch and Portola Hills.

The school, absorbed into the Saddleback Unified School District in 1979, now has 227 students enrolled and is expected to have 300 or more before year’s end. Its five-teacher faculty has been augmented with substitutes while administrators wait to see how many new full-time teachers will be needed to handle the uncertain enrollment.

The enrollment is about half that of the other district’s elementary schools, but for tiny Trabuco School, it’s a mob.

“It was small up until last year,” said Ruth Frisby of Trabuco Oaks, the school’s secretary who sent both her sons through the school. “The only residents used to be Trabuco residents. The children came from ranches and farms.”

Now children who have known nothing but modern, suburban schools within walking distance of home are catching school buses to Trabuco or being driven there by parents.

“It’s a much different feeling,” said Jim Kistenmacher, who is moving his family from Irvine to Coto de Caza and enrolling his son Jason in the sixth grade. Although Coto de Caza residents are in a different school district, they are permitted to attend Trabuco School because it is much closer to their homes.

“Look at this setting!” Kistenmacher said. Before him were live oaks estimated to be hundreds of years old. Just visible on the other side of campus were the school’s horses, available for riding during recess.

“See how the kids just naturally took off toward the animals?” Kistenmacher said. “There are people in Irvine who never would believe this place.”

“Yes,” said Kistenmacher’s wife Susan, “there is life after Irvine.”

Leverich has seen the reaction before. It has two phases, he said: “People who move in, it’s amazing how quickly they get empathy for this country environment. But then as soon as they move in, they want the development to stop.”

“This is a very protective community,” said Chris Rukstalis, who was enrolling her second son at the school. “This is the only school in Orange County that has everything going for it. You never see this kind of nature in Orange County.” She said she and her husband Dave were “just delighted” when they first laid eyes on the school. Even some of the children seem to appreciate its uniqueness.

“They talk about it to their friends: ‘At our school, we have a cat that comes in our room!’ They pet the horses. They walk next door to see the fire station.”

Arlene Anderson, teacher of the combination fifth- and sixth-grade class, has worked at the school four years. “People who don’t know the school, the joke is we have straw coming out of our ears,” she said.

But, she said, when a state evaluation team went through the school last year, one of the team members seriously inquired about job openings.

“After a couple of days, it’s like you’ve been here all your life,” she said. “I’ll stay here till they bury me.”

Connie Martin, who is teaching a combination fourth- and fifth-grade class, said that despite the saddle on the library shelf and the bits and halters decorating the secretary’s office and the occasional smell of a campfire from nearby O’Neill Park, “once you’ve walked inside, you’re in a classroom anywhere. The textbooks are the same, the teaching is the same, the rules are the same.”

Ruth Frisby, the school secretary, was doing what all the other school secretaries were doing: registering late students.

And the kindergarten parents in Trabuco Canyon were doing the same as others in Mission Viejo: taking pictures of their children and saying goodby at the door.

“I think it’s great here,” beamed newcomer Ann Bryant, setting aside her video camera. “It’s just like going back to ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ” “It’s getting too big,” said longtime resident Ann Kershaw, who was enrolling her third child in the school. “It’s getting too big, and it’s breaking my heart.”

“We thought that school’s enrollment would go down when Trabuco Mesa (Elementary School in nearby Santa Margarita) opened, but it’s coming right back up again,” said Ken Anderson, associate school superintendent of the Saddleback district. “That area is just booming.”

Peter A. Hartman, the district superintendent, said virtually everyone in the district administration “thinks pretty fondly” of the district’s oldest, quaintest school. “We use it extensively for recreation programs, and we hold our administrative luncheon out there at the end of every school year.”

“We’ve been looking the last few years at whether we need it. We’ve just been keeping it as kind of a safety valve, but they’re growing so much we can’t afford to even think about closing it.”

Which should be good news to Frisby, who has lived in Trabuco Oaks for 17 years and sent her two sons through Trabuco School before hiring on as the school secretary. “I like the canyon, but I love this school,” she said. “It’s part of our family.”