Pacoima : ‘Vaughn, the Little School That Could’

Yvonne Chan thought they could, thought they could, thought they could. And on Friday morning, the principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima and 1,100 students celebrated the opening of 14 new classrooms--a project Chan compared to the story of “The Little Engine That Could.”

“Boys and girls, reaching this day has not been easy,” Chan told the student body during a ribbon-cutting ceremony that included school board members, a city councilman, state legislators and dozens of other dignitaries.

“We have put you first and we succeeded,” said Chan, accompanied by the recorded strains of the song “The Impossible Dream.” “We have shown the world what a new public school looks like.”

The school fought an uphill battle to be approved as the first charter school in Los Angeles, juggled funding sources and scraped up grants to get $1 million for the new buildings. It also juggled schedules so that all students could attend school simultaneously in a school year that is 37 days longer than state requirements.

So Chan arrived at the ceremony driving The Little Engine That Could--actually a golf cart borrowed from Pueblo Contracting Services of San Fernando, the company that built the new classrooms in four months. The cart was decorated in black and red to look like the engine from the children’s story. Chan was followed by five children riding red tricycles.

“Now I’m going first class,” said Chan, who used to ride a bicycle to get around the campus. Small groups of dignitaries even took a turn following Chan’s golf cart during the ceremony, circling seven news television cameras camped in the middle of the school playground.

Near the end of the ceremony, the dignitaries unveiled a sign for the new building: “Vaughn, the Little School that Could.”

Chan’s dream, she said to the crowd, was to create a safe, clean, well-disciplined school with smaller, high-tech classrooms. The new classrooms, which will be used by third- and fourth-graders as well as for special education, is not the end of her ambitions, she said. She wants to link the entire school together on a network of computers, much like the network of parents who have made Vaughn’s programs successful.

“This is not so much a school of children,” Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alarcon said to the crowd. “This is a school of families. That is why this school is so special.”