RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA : Getting Ready for First Day of School

It was a rainy morning during Christmas vacation, but Cielo Vista Elementary School’s new campus was alive with activity.

Secretaries tried out the phone system. Technicians tested the fire alarms and then had to scramble to find the off switch. Teachers were busy hanging drawings and posters in their classrooms. One clerk was trying to locate some misplaced furniture.

Principal Larry Callison was giving a visitor a tour of the 10-acre site while signing paperwork and fielding questions from his employees about various details.

All this was in anticipation of Monday’s scheduled opening of the $5.5-million, 625-student school. Cielo Vista will be the Saddleback Valley Unified School District’s 21st elementary school.

“We are in various stages of readiness--I guess that would be the honest way of putting it,” Callison said while watching a worker toy with some telephone lines. “But this is a very beautiful and spacious campus, and it’s going to be good for the kids.”

The campus will be dedicated during a 9 a.m. ceremony in which the students will parade one mile from the school’s temporary facility on the playground at Trabuco Elementary School. Cielo Vista opened there in September while awaiting the completion of the permanent campus.

Located at 22811 Avenida de los Funadores, Cielo Vista is designed in the Spanish style of the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

The school has a working bell tower, and the light tan walls form two plazas. The main plaza has a three-tiered water fountain. The school has five buildings of four classrooms each, a kindergarten building and a combined library and computer lab. Also, each building will have its own small computer lab, with six or eight terminals each.

“The way the school is designed, it will allow the teachers to work more closely together,” Callison said.

School district officials said that the opening of Cielo Vista, plus the planned September opening of another elementary school in El Toro, will make a major dent in the district’s overcrowding. The district has proposed building five more elementary schools.