BREA : Teachers, Students Prepare for Big Day

Perched atop a hill, Mariposa School was a flurry of activity Tuesday as anxious parents and students roamed the campus, searching for their teachers and classrooms in preparation for the first day of classes today.

Teachers have spent the last week decorating their classrooms, sometimes using their own money. The playground bathrooms have been repaired and re-tiled. New portable classrooms have been set up for the after-school program.

And Principal Howard Bryden got new “No Double Parking Any Time” signs for the school’s driveway where parents clog the road with their cars at 2:30 each afternoon.

On Tuesday, Bryden walked the campus, greeting students and parents and resolving last-minute emergencies. “He’s putting out fires today,” said teacher Debbie Workman.

Workman, about to begin her 15th year at the school, said she was a little nervous.

“Teachers tend to have the same scary dreams the night before school begins that students do,” she said. “You dream that you forgot to wear your shoes, or worse.”

But Workman and the other 18 teachers at Mariposa were too busy Tuesday to reflect on their fears for long.

They spent much of their time answering questions from parents. Class assignments were posted at 3 p.m., but many parents came earlier.

The day began at 8:35 a.m. when the elementary school doors swung open to admit 606 students for orientation.

In one classroom, fifth-grade teacher Rita Hood gave instructions to 10-year-old John Smart, who came with his mother, Doralisa.

“We’re here to find out what I’m supposed to bring and then we’re going to go to the Brea Mall,” John said.

Hood told him to bring glue, marking pens, an assignment notebook and erasable pens. “It’s nice if they have a red pen, for correcting mistakes,” she told his mother.

Hood brought her own son, Lauran, to help prepare her classroom: decorating, cleaning, and setting out supplies. “This is what’s known as enforced labor,” she said jokingly.

Hunt said one of her school projects for this year is to help her students create their own impressionistic paintings, modeled after those of Vincent van Gogh. “And of course it looks nothing like Van Gogh, but they get a big charge out of it,” she said.

Bryden, meanwhile, who is set to retire at the end of this year after 25 years at Mariposa, said his goal for his last year is to be a “super principal.”

Workman praised Bryden for choosing his own staff rather than allowing the district to assign teachers to him.

“We all know that he wanted us,” Workman said. “You wouldn’t want to teach anywhere else.”

Workman and other teachers are devoted to the school and to their students.

Workman said she spent about $300 of her own money to buy supplies for her room. The first unit for her second-grade class is about frogs, so she put up big green frogs pasted on deep blue wallpaper.

She said she checked out 30 books about amphibians from the library. She also plans to use music and art to spark her students’ interest in reading.

“The main thing in second grade is that they come out loving to read,” Workman said.

But Vanessa Nadler, who was to begin second grade today, was equally concerned about her appearance.

Tuesday she strolled up to the school with her hair in curlers. “She’s been bugging me all summer to get a perm,” said her mother, Karla Nadler.