1st-Year School Learns Pluses, Minuses of County’s Growth

Nostalgia descends on most school campuses about this time of year as teachers watch children fly out the door for summer, bound for another grade in another classroom come September.

But the sentiment will run especially thick when the last bell before vacation rings this afternoon at Wagon Wheel Elementary School in the outlying canyons of South County. There, both a community and its students have come of age during the last school year.

One of about a dozen new public schools in Orange County, Wagon Wheel Elementary opened nine months ago with hopes of becoming a center of public life in a rapidly growing neighborhood of gated subdivisions next to Gen. Thomas F. Riley Wilderness Park.

It also was overcrowded from Day One.

How this school came to life for 178 days of learning is a story with details that resonate with principals, teachers and parents anywhere.

There was the installation of an urgently needed stoplight in front of the school last fall to ease the pre-8 a.m. and post-2 p.m. traffic jams. There was the addition of nine portable classrooms last winter, an equally urgent task to accommodate smaller classes for third-graders.

A mascot had to be picked (the Mustangs), a PTA organized (it raised about $60,000), even a vintage hay wagon with rusted wheels procured (a local business lent one for the school’s front entrance).

Dozens of Internet-capable computers were installed. A barbecue in October and a sock hop in March drew crowds so large that parked cars filled the school ball field.

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“That school really binds us as a community. It’s a fabulous school,” said Jill Harmon, 44, a retail consultant and parent volunteer. She moved to the neighborhood a year ago from Long Beach, in part to transfer her two elementary-age daughters out of an urban school system.

A reporter’s visit to Wagon Wheel Elementary last week, following a tour before it opened in September, found that the school was still very much a work in progress.

Even as students were taking their last quizzes and polishing their last book reports, a backhoe was grading a far corner of the playground in preparation for another dozen portable classrooms. Enrollment in this school designed for 722 students is expected to surge to 1,050 in the next year. That’s a lot of extra backpacks slung onto the backs of a lot of extra, pint-sized classroom seats.

Can the restless fifth-graders in Elise Pieper’s class, headed soon for middle school, understand what it took to launch this school? Probably not. But Pieper, 26, herself a first-year teacher, knows.

“It’s an incredible amount of work,” she said during recess one morning. Pieper allowed that she’s a bit choked up at the prospect of closing down her class in Room 22 today. “I’m really going to miss these kids. It’s hard to lose your family after you’ve created a family.”

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In most classrooms, an academic diary of sorts can be found among the student projects and laminated materials that teachers staple and tape onto the walls. Pieper’s was no exception. One wall, labeled “To Infinity and Beyond!” held pictures of the solar system, satellites, comets and the phases of the moon.

On another wall, Pieper tacked up a scroll containing the results of an inquiry into the stock market. Students were assigned to invest a hypothetical $10,000 in such companies as Disney, AT&T;, Microsoft or Netscape and track their fluctuating value for a month through graphs. The total class “profit” was $334.39, the charts indicated, for an annualized “return” of more than 40%.

A third wall was adorned with student drawings and writings about the future. Samples: “Just in case modeling doesn’t work out, I will be a vetranaryan and work with animals.”--Jessie; “In ten years I will be in college hopefully at UCLA. I will get good grades and have a porche.”--Casey; “I will be a professinal soft-ball player and hit a lot of home runs.”--Ashley.

Tim Johnson, one of 29 of Pieper’s students scheduled to go through a “completion” ceremony today--they don’t call it graduation in fifth grade--was for the penultimate week the class captain. That meant leading the flag salute and wielding the all-important power of choosing the order of class dismissal for recess and lunch.

Tim’s summary of his year and the class zeitgeist: “I’ve learned a lot about math and fractions and decimals, and I learned about the stock market. . . . I play the trumpet. . . . I like art. . . . I don’t like history. . . . I don’t really want to go [to middle school] because it might be kind of hard. . . . I’m always happy to go to summer vacation because there’s no school. . . . I might go to Disneyland.”

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For her part, Pieper said the year was exhausting but satisfying. The kids all know their state capitals, can work with fractions, can read and analyze good books such as Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” and can look up astronomy references on the Internet via the three Macintosh computers in the class.

In September, Pieper had marveled at the good fortune she had in finding her first full-time teaching job here. “This school is so new and fashionable, I felt like I was being introduced to a million-dollar home,” Pieper said at the time.

Now, mindful of the school’s biggest challenge, Pieper chuckles at that quote. “It’s still too small,” she said of the school. “That’s the only problem: It’s a million-dollar home with a family of 900.”

Indeed, plans for how to accommodate more kids in this “home” have progressed all year and will continue well into the future. That is the way in South County, in places like 33,000-student Saddleback Valley Unified School District and 40,000-student Capistrano Unified School District, Wagon Wheel Elementary’s parent agency. The supercharged real estate market is drawing new families with school-age children to this region as fast as builders can pave new six-lane roadways leading to new hillside homes with two- and three-car garages.

Principal Dick Campbell expects the school to have 27 portable classrooms by September--five more than its permanent structure holds. That’s not counting a satellite school, from kindergarten to second or third grade, expected to open in Coto de Caza in September 1999 to relieve the pressure at Wagon Wheel.

The unbridled growth worries some parents who came here expecting the best in public education that Orange County--and California--have to offer. Harmon, the parent from Long Beach, said daughter Katie’s second-grade class began the year without a permanent room and was forced to roam from space to space for two months until one was found.

Sally Garber, 40, who moved to Coto de Caza from Texas last year, has a son finishing second grade at Wagon Wheel and a daughter finishing sixth at nearby Las Flores Middle School, which is growing just as fast. She sees the crowding firsthand as a lunch monitor at the elementary school.

Surveying a cramped patio where kids eat lunch in brief, staggered shifts, Garber said she wished that California education officials could cap the size of schools as easily as they cap the size of classes. “At some point, you begin to jeopardize safety and quality,” she said.

But Campbell points out that Wagon Wheel Elementary occupies 13 acres, “a big chunk of land,” with plenty of room for expansion. Two or three urban schools might fit in the same space.

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The principal, who was starting his second school in five years, said he was amazed at the number of people--nearly 2,000--who came to the ‘50s-style dance on a Friday night in March. In part, he said, the turnout was a function of public curiosity and the sheer newness of the school. But there was something else at work too. Until this year the neighborhood never had a public school to call its own.

“I have never in my whole life seen so many people come to an elementary school event,” Campbell said. “It’s a testimony to the fact that the school is the center of the community.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

School’s Out

Last Day of Classes for Orange County School Districts

Elementary School Districts:

Anaheim City, June 26 (all schools are year-round; some tracks start as early as July 7)

Buena Park, June 12

Centralia, June 18

Cypress, June 17 for traditional school year; also has year-round schools

Fountain Valley, June 12

Fullerton, June 11

Huntington Beach City, June 11

La Habra City, June 10

Lowell Joint, June 12

Magnolia, June 18 for traditional school year; also has year-round schools

Ocean View, June 12

Savanna, June 18

Westminster, June 15

High School Districts

Anaheim Union, June 12

Fullerton Joint Union, June 11

Huntington Beach Union, June 11

Unified Districts

Brea-Olinda, June 17

Capistrano, June 16 for traditional school year; also has year-round schools

Garden Grove, June 17

Irvine, June 17 (year-round schools start July 29)

Laguna Beach, June 17

Los Alamitos, June 16

Newport-Mesa, June 18

Orange, June 12 for traditional school year; also has year-round schools

Placentia-Yorba Linda, June 11

Saddleback Valley, June 18

Santa Ana, June 17 for traditional school year, also has year-round schools

Tustin, June 17

Source: Districts

Wagon Wheel’s Rookie Year

By the Numbers:

School district: Capistrano Unified

Opened: Sept. 8, 1997

Year end: Today

Grades: Kindergarten through fifth

Construction: March 1996-July 1997

Construction cost: $11 million

Number of teaching days: 178

Number of teachers: 39

Number of portable classrooms: 15

Number of portables to be added over summer: 12

Computers per classroom, average: 3

Designed enrollment: 722

Enrollment on opening day: 824

Enrollment today: 900

Enrollment expected next year: 1,050

Students per teacher in kindergarten: 15*

Students per teacher in grades 1-3: 20

Students per teacher in grades 4 and 5: About 30

Amount raised by Wagon Wheel PTA: $60,000

Cost of awning planned for student lunch area: $10,000

Estimated minutes required to drop off students when school opened: 15

Estimated minutes after stoplight was installed outside school: 7

* For half the school day. Ratio is higher in other half.

Enrollment

Designed enrollment: 722

Opening day: 824

Today: 900

Expected next year: 1,050

Sources: School officials, Times reporting.