Elementary Schools in County Win Honors From State : Education: 15 are listed by Distinguished Schools Program as among top 4%. Award ceremony planned.

Fifteen Orange County schools are among the top 4% of elementary schools in the state honored this month in the California Distinguished Schools Program.

“We’re still tap dancing,” said Principal Frances Byfield of John Adams Elementary School in Santa Ana, one of the schools to be recognized. “We’re still yelling and screaming, we’re so excited.”

Byfield’s school was one of 206 in the state named Wednesday by William D. Dawson, acting state superintendent of education.

“In these times of economic hardship, it is especially important to recognize public schools that are addressing the complex challenges our students will face in the future,” Dawson said.

Each school recognized by the program submitted a lengthy application, and the finalists were visited by education officials in March.

“We’re ecstatic,” said Evelyn Menzel, principal of Cordillera Elementary School, one of two schools honored in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. The other was Lomarena Elementary.

Menzel said that both parents and students were excited when state officials visited the school as part of the nomination process. “They said, ‘We’re distinguished anyway, we might was well be recognized for it.’ ”

In the Capistrano Unified School District, Barbara Smith, director of curriculum and instruction, credited the principals of Barcelona Hills and Newhart Elementary schools for the recognition they received.

Of Principal James Henderson, she said, “The faculty at Newhart knows that when they want to do something they have a principal who goes out to beat the bushes to get them the resources they need.”

Smith said she rarely finds Suzette Lovely, principal of the Barcelona Hills School, in her office because she is “out working with her teachers and students to make that program as outstanding as it is.”

John Bennett, assistant superintendent in Santa Ana, said John Adams School owes much of its success to Byfield, its principal.

“She really reaches out to the community and makes the community part of the school,” Bennett said. “The parents come at different times of the year to learn how to teach their kids, and they take pride in their school. It is their school and their community.”

Officials from all of the schools will be honored at an awards ceremony in Anaheim later this month.

The other schools honored in Orange County are John Marshall Elementary in Anaheim; Laguna Road and Raymond Elementary in Fullerton; John H. Eader Elementary in Huntington Beach; Vista Verde in Irvine; Francis Hopkinson, J.H. McGaugh and Los Alamitos Elementary in Los Alamitos; and Bryant Ranch and Linda Vista in Yorba Linda.