Moorpark Schools to Celebrate 100 Years of Class : Education: Officials plan to assemble a book on the district’s growth and a series of presentations to mark its centennial.

It all started 100 years ago in a one-room schoolhouse, on the top of Peach Hill in Moorpark, with a handful of students and a young teacher at the front of the classroom.

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Now the Moorpark school district encompasses nine schools, more than 200 teachers and more than 6,000 students.

It cost only a few hundred dollars to run the district when it opened its first school in 1895, but now it costs more than $20 million to educate the city’s youth.

Reminding themselves that they have come a long way since then, the Moorpark Unified School District plans to put together a book about the district’s early years and assemble a series of presentations throughout the school year to commemorate its centennial.

“It’s important,” said school board member Tom Baldwin. “I also hope we can get the alumni, the old teachers and administrators together and have some sort of celebration. We should remember where we’ve come from.”

Baldwin is one of seven people on a committee set up to put together the book and plan how the district will celebrate its first 100 years. A reunion of older Moorpark High alumni in May was billed as a private celebration of the centennial.

Now they hope to plan public festivities, as well as publish the book and involve students in commemorating the district’s history.

The Moorpark school district started in 1895 with a simple one-room schoolhouse administered by an elementary-school district. Just after World War I, the city opened its first high school, which was administered by a separate high school district. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the two districts were joined into what is now called the Moorpark Unified School District.

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The committee working on the commemoration has already started on a project to tell the story of schools in the city with old photographs gathered together by Connie Lawrason, president of the local historical society.

Shots of such things as the old high school in the 1920s and the wood-framed Victorian house that was the city’s first school will be compiled into a book that the organizers hope to put out in December.

Many of the photographs came from family collections such as the Everetts, who were one of Moorpark’s pioneering families.

Other shots came from Florence Dawson, 75, a graduate of the Class of 1938 who started a campaign for a centennial celebration five years ago.

“You need a good five years to plan something like this,” Dawson said.

The celebration was important for Dawson, who has compiled many of the photographs as part of a family history.

She has some of the district’s earliest attendance reports, which came from her aunt, Mary Willard Cornett, who was one of the earliest schoolteachers in the city. Dawson’s photo collection includes pictures of her aunt riding to school in a horse-drawn carriage sometime around the turn of the century.

The memories of the early school days in Moorpark also have come from Dawson’s older siblings, who have all passed away.

Her four older siblings attended Moorpark schools before she and her twin sister started in the local elementary school in the 1920s, and remembered some of the first classes at the local high school.

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Dawson herself remembers attending Flory elementary school right after it was built. She also recalls that the elementary schools were segregated at the time--with Latinos attending a separate school on Charles Street.

Board member Baldwin said that he would like to include some of the history of the school segregation in the commemoration.

Beyond working on the book, to be published by the school district, the committee is organizing a history project in which each school will take up a different theme or topic and make presentations at school board meetings throughout the school year. Baldwin hopes one of the presentations will look at segregation.

Other topics might include a look at the history of the various high schools that were built in the city, Baldwin said. The first was completed in 1920 on top of a hill off Casey Road.

Dedicated in October, 1920, the school was named Moorpark Memorial High School in honor of the soldiers who died in World War I.

The unreinforced masonry building was severely damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and had to be demolished. While a new school was being built, the students attended class in tents and school buses on the old campus. The next high school was completed in 1937, and still stands on Casey Road, although students now attend classes at Moorpark High School on Tierra Rejada Road.

That new high school was completed between 1987 and 1992, and cost about $27 million to build.

The committee is still working on new ideas for the commemoration, but hopes to have its plans ready for the new school year.

“It’s going to be something to last through the whole school year,” Baldwin said. “And I think students are going to be able to learn from it all.”