Alumni Show School Spirit at Centennial Fete

It may be summer vacation, but class was in session Saturday as the historic Little Red Schoolhouse--Ventura County’s only one-room school--celebrated its centennial.

History was the primary subject being taught at the modest festival in the schoolyard of the scarlet county landmark on California 126 midway between Fillmore and Santa Paula at Toland Road.

The alumni who returned to reminisce with former classmates on the school’s veranda ranged from 57-year-old Don Hopkins, who has never lived more than two miles from the school and has seen three generations of his family enroll there, to Edryce Talbott, a 1931 graduate who journeyed from her Idaho home for the occasion.

In the grassy schoolyard, under the three-story tower holding a bell that students still ring to signal the start of classes, equestrians were on hand to demonstrate the importance of the horse to students and residents of the agricultural Santa Clara Valley in years past.

And cakes were served as hundreds of alumni, neighbors and onlookers sang “Happy Birthday.”

But between the displays of yellowing ledger books and class photos, horse-drawn buggies and antique toys was a deeper, more meaningful lesson.

Although the schoolhouse is considered as much a part of the valley’s landscape as the citrus orchards that surround it--locals routinely include the distinctive building in directions to strangers--it wasn’t the structure that drew people to Saturday’s event as much as what it represents.

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“It is a symbol of the community being involved in the school,” Assemblyman Brooks Firestone said.

“This school epitomizes this valley,” Fillmore Mayor Roger Campbell said.

“I couldn’t understand when my children went to school why they only knew people in their own classes,” said 85-year-old Marie C. Merriken of Fillmore, who is believed to be the school’s oldest surviving alumnus in the Santa Clara Valley and who remembers when the school was painted white. “Here you knew everyone.”

Everyone still does.

Santa Clara Elementary School, as it’s official known, will have two teachers and 28 students in kindergarten through grade six this fall. That is less than half the number of pupils who originally attended when the $2,531.20 school opened its doors for the first time Aug. 17, 1896.

One of 27 one-room schoolhouses in California, it is also the second-oldest in the state, said Henry Heydt, an unofficial historian of the subject who is soon to retire from the state Department of Education in Sacramento.

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The district itself is even older. It was founded in 1879, and the present schoolhouse is actually the fourth incarnation of the school. The school received its trademark red coat of paint in 1962.

Heydt keeps track of the state’s diminishing number of one-room schools--there were almost 60 in the state in the early 1980s--as a sort of hobby, because of the media’s persistent fascination with the subject and because no one else does. He attended a one-room school in Lancaster County, Pa., and understands the mystique that accompanies the subject.

“It’s a whole different culture,” he said. “There’s a camaraderie there. . . . You don’t find one-room schools in the big city. They’re all in rural areas.”

Growth and economies of scale--Santa Clara Elementary School is the most expensive in the county to operate per student, said county schools Supt. Charles Weis--mean one-room schoolhouses are slowly disappearing.

But the Little Red Schoolhouse is by no means obsolete. Indeed, its students’ test scores are consistently among the highest in the county, he said.

“It costs what it ought to cost to educate kids,” Weis said. “At other schools, we’re not spending enough.”

These days, fewer than a dozen of the students come from within the district’s boundaries. The remainder are there because of the school’s academic reputation, and there is a waiting list of parents who want their kids to attend the school.

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The small student-to-teacher ratio and the interaction among children of different ages contribute to the academic excellence, Weis said.

Despite its success, the schoolhouse is threatened.

Saturday’s event was partly a fund-raiser to offset the $10,000 in lawyer’s fees that the one-school district, with an annual $169,000 budget, has incurred since it joined the legal battle against the expansion of nearby Toland Road Landfill.

School officials and parents fear the project will bring intolerable noise and dangerous traffic to a road that 100 years ago was a simple wagon trail.

Plans to build an additional classroom were put on hold because of the proposal, and the possibility exists that the school could even be moved if the expanded landfill becomes a reality, Supt. Tammy McCracken said.

But most people expect the schoolhouse to endure for another 100 years.

“This school will still be here years from now,” said Deann Hobson, school board president. “The support of the community is unbelievable--that’s what has kept this school here.”