Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Picking Colors No Neutral Issue for New School : Education: Hart district hires 10-member panel and a consultant to pick an interior scheme. Choice is pale peach with pale blues and pale peach with teals.

When students of Santa Clarita’s newest high school stare off into space during classes next year, at least they’ll be calm as the deep blue sea while doing it.

That’s if the color schemes selected by the William S. Hart Union High School District work as advertised.

No doubt other school districts will be green with envy when they see the colors of the classroom walls in the new high school scheduled to open in September, 1994, in Valencia.

The Hart district took its color scheme so seriously that it named a 10-person panel and hired a color consultant to decide what colors the classroom walls should be.

The winning colors: pale peach with pale blues and pale peach with teals. The carpet will be pale terra cotta with blue in it.

The color selection process, said Robert Gapper, supervisor of facility planning for the district, was part of the $1.3-million architectural contract for the yet-to-be-named high school.

Most important, Gapper said, was the effect that the colors would have on learning.

The colors selected, said interior designer Penny Saidel of the Pasadena-based architectural firm Neptune Thomas Davis, were “very introspective.”

“They make the students turn inward and enable them to concentrate on what they are doing,” Saidel said.

“There’s a lot of shading on the walls. No white; it’s very intense and tires them out,” Saidel said. “The whole point is basically that you don’t have this real exciting color scheme so that they’re not distracted, but not so dull that they are bored.”

Hart district officials took their color selections seriously, Saidel said. She said Hart district officials placed greater emphasis on choosing the right colors than any of the other schools she has dealt with in the past.

Even with all the effort put into the selection, some members of the school panel agreed that the colors didn’t seem all that special.

“We’ve probably ended up with colors very similar to or the same as a lot of other schools in the county,” said Dennis King, a school board member.

Neptune Thomas Davis has been the main architect of the $33-million project since the school’s inception in 1985 and the firm worked on the color selection sporadically for about two months, Gapper said, who met with the school district’s color selection panel for four hours last month.

For those who may turn red with anger over what might be perceived as a frivolity taken on by cash-strapped schools, Gapper said the color selection came at no extra expense to the district.

King said they wanted to start the new school off right and color selection is part of that.

“You build a building and somebody has to make a selection,” King said. “You don’t leave it up to the guy who puts in the carpet to decide the color. Everybody has an opinion, and I know through experience that somebody is always saying, ‘Why did they paint it this color?’ ”

Just before the board voted on the colors, King toured three high schools.

“A nice, pleasant environment is conducive to better learning,” King said. “You certainly don’t want it to be grotesque or bland.”

While color experts agree that colors influence people’s emotions and abilities to work, it’s not at all clear that painting the walls certain colors is the best way to achieve those effects.

Some colors, such as pale blue, tend to calm people and foster a positive working environment, said Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at UCLA.

At the same time, however, “pale blue is going to make children feel submissive,” Mehrabian said. “It’s going to make them feel passive and depend on others to guide and push them. They won’t be as likely to take charge, and depending on your educational philosophy, that could be a bad thing.”

More than a specific color, however, Mehrabian said, is that children need to be moved in different ways during a given day and individual students have distinct needs. Therefore, Mehrabian said, one fixed color scheme in a room may not achieve the desired results.

“Once you start playing around with wall colors, since the color is always going to be the same, it’s a pretty risky proposition. I would want to begin with the highest possible degree of flexibility,” Mehrabian said. “When you back yourself into the corner by painting the walls certain colors, you’re stuck.

“I would go with white or something neutral,” Mehrabian said. “I would rather have the opportunity to put up posters or to use slides that project colors.”