Blueprint for Learning

Forget hall passes, metal detectors, outdated textbooks, chronic computer shortages and airless classrooms holding too many bored bodies.

Imagine a warmly attractive high school on a quiet hillside, where 500 eager students--whose parents may be laborers or entrepreneurs, descendants of California pioneer stock or recent emigres--meet in small groups with motivated teachers in scaled-down classrooms or pleasant outdoor spaces.

Picture teenagers chasing down bits of trash to toss into a bin and trooping off to perform community service projects. Envision a library equipped with the latest computer and multimedia devices and a cozy fireplace where students can gather to chat or study. See these kids from diverse backgrounds graduating from top universities and dedicating their professional and personal lives to making the world a better place.

A utopian vision? You bet.

But never underestimate the power of good connections. In September 2000, when Sage Hill School opens in Newport Beach with 150 ninth- and 10th-grade students, the vision will be tested in the real world of young skeptics and their goal-conscious parents. (Juniors and seniors will be phased in during the following two years.)

So far, Sage Hill School trustees have raised nearly $16 million toward construction costs estimated at $25 million, and a start-up fund of about $5 million, which includes a subsidy for expected operating losses during the first five years, when the school is not expected to have a full student body).

Rough grading of the 30-acre site begins Feb. 15; construction is to start in April; and, even if fund-raising falls short of the goal, the school’s administration has pledged to open on time, in temporary buildings if necessary.

This the story of how a small group of well-connected, can-do parents is making their dream school happen.

Building a Team of Visionaries

The timing couldn’t be better: These days, teens rule. Orange County had 143,204 students enrolled in public and private high schools in fall of 1997 (the latest available figures). And, according to the U.S. Department of Education, California’s high school population is likely to increase by 44% between the mid-1990s and 2006.

Concern about crowded classrooms and poor test scores often nudge parents to look for alternatives to public schools.

But Newport Beach residents Dori K. Caillouette (daughter of Orange County developer Don Koll) and her husband, James, had a precise and lofty vision: a small, independent campus with a diverse student body, close student-teacher interaction, a strong arts program and a dedication to community service.

Trouble was, in Orange County--unlike in New England, with its rich tradition of “country day” schools--the 79 private high schools are overwhelmingly church-affiliated, even if they don’t necessarily emphasize religious training.

With four young children in Harbor Day School in Newport Beach, the Caillouettes by 1995 realized that they’d have to help start the high school they envisioned themselves.

Dori, a 41-year-old Stanford University graduate who says she never felt challenged as a student at Newport Harbor High School in the early 1970s, and James, an orthopedic surgeon who spent his high school years at Polytechnic, a private institution in Pasadena, sought others to share their dream.

Joanne D. Fix, an accountant and board member of Harbor Day School, where Dori serves on the development committee, was the first to lend her enthusiasm and expertise.

Then came lawyer Karina M. Hamilton, the only one in the group without children, and marketing executive Ellen Feldberg Gordon. They formed a board of trustees whose ranks now include 14 high-powered specialists in technology, finance and education.

It was the Stanford connection that brought Hamilton on board as a volunteer after a tip in early 1996 from the director of admissions at her alma mater. She is now Sage Hills’ chief operating officer.

Thinking of her own years at an international high school in Cannes, France, Hamilton--who speaks five languages--remembered “how much kids learn from each other about their cultures.”

Hamilton--who says (“I know it sounds corny”) that the only way to change society is through educational opportunity--said she was especially drawn to the idea of a private school that wouldn’t just be for rich kids.

Gordon, who attended Boston’s private Winsor School before matriculating at Harvard University, remembers sitting around a conference table in a high school English class. “It really was an opportunity to think and to challenge and to be encouraged to be curious,” said Gordon, the mother of twins in sixth grade and a fourth-grader, all of whom attend the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach.

The board’s combination of social cachet and professional clout enabled it to negotiate a 99-year ground lease from the Irvine Co.--the terms are under wraps--on an agricultural preserve at Newport Coast Drive and the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road. The school has the option to buy the land during the lease period.

Sage Hill--surrounded by 80 acres of open space, including a coastal sage preserve that gives the school its name--is unlikely to become the neighbor of a shopping mall or housing tract. Construction is restricted in areas designated as agricultural preserves.

School founders insist that the idyllic setting doesn’t represent a posture of aloofness.

“We’re next to the freeways, so kids can get here from all over in about 20 minutes,” Caillouette said. “We’re just over the hill from UC Irvine, which we see as a great resource.” Meanwhile, the board did its homework, researching budgets at private schools across the country and taking field trips to look for model private campuses. What mattered most, they discovered, was not the buildings but the kids’ attitudes--the vibe.

At Crossroads School in Santa Monica, founded in the early 1970s in funky old buildings, board members admired the way students moved freely from one space to another.

University High School in San Francisco impressed the board as “a community where the kids feel respected as well as respecting [of] the teachers,” Caillouette said. “It’s not, ‘These are a bunch of teenagers we’re trying to keep under control.’ ”

The trustees eventually decided that Sage Hill’s faculty will teach three or four sections of 15 to 20 students each, for a maximum daily load of 75 students. (Public high schools operate in another universe, where as many as 40 bodies routinely pack a classroom and daily student loads can reach 175 or 180.)

“We’ll be small enough so there really is a sense of community--so they’ll know each other--but large enough so we can offer a comprehensive program,” Caillouette said.

Caillouette said she believes Sage Hill’s intimate size may discourage the cliques frequently formed by students on large, culturally diverse campuses.

While the school won’t set a quota for the number of financial-aid students, 10% of tuition income is committed to financial aid. A $1.5 million grant from Bill and Sue Gross of Laguna Beach will fund half the financial-aid budget for the first five years.

An advisory council--chaired by Juan Francisco Lara, assistant vice-chancellor of enrollment services at UC Irvine--will help locate potential students from inner-city neighborhoods throughout the county who might otherwise be deterred by the $12,000 annual tuition.

By comparison, Santa Monica’s Crossroads costs nearly $15,000 a year. St. Margaret’s in San Juan Capistrano, which is affiliated with the Episcopal Church, costs $10,465. (Annual tuition at local Catholic high schools generally ranges from about $5,000 to $6,000.)

Gordon emphasized that tuition relief will extend to help with other expenses, such as fees for field trips and athletic events, “so that those kids will truly feel integrated in the life of the school.”

Taking Inspiration From Nature Itself

About a year after the Caillouettes began seeking supporters for their dream school, its key elements began to jell. News of the high-school project had reached LPA Inc., a high-profile, Irvine-based architectural firm consistently honored by the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The trustees’ meeting with LPA was the professional equivalent of love at first sight.

“We felt really comfortable with each other,” said Dan Heinfeld, president of LPA’s Orange County office.

“LPA knew what we were talking about,” Caillouette said. “From the very beginning, we talked about creating . . . interaction between students and teachers, a place where kids want to be.”

In physical terms, Caillouette said, they wanted Sage Hill “to be rooted in the foundations of classical architecture but be very much a school for today and tomorrow.”

LPA’s Wendy Rogers, who led a team of seven designers, remembers how the project clicked for her when one of the parents used the word “collegiate.”

Rogers, a parent herself, began to envision “lots of different kinds of places where learning can occur . . . and bringing in elements like wood and stone, that give an element of permanence, of tradition.”

The focal point of Sage Hill’s design is a 60-foot tower. Recalling the ubiquitous bell towers of Italian hill towns, it is designed to be capped with a lantern made from futuristic translucent material. Lit from within, it would be visible to cars on the freeway--a beacon of learning.

Other cues came from the colors and materials of the site. The dusty-colored plaster buildings climbing the hill will be trimmed in stone that mimics the color of the rock outcroppings.

The Community Resources Center, housing student services and administrative offices, is designed to be the symbolic spine of the campus. In front of it, a stone wall forming arches reminiscent of an ancient aqueduct will link the gym with the building housing the library, media and technology center--the school’s high-tech nerve center.

Inspired by the idea of the campus as a unified community, Rogers--who won an honorable mention award last year from the AIA’s Orange County chapter for the Sage Hill project--designed 12-foot-high “barn doors” for the gym; the doors could be left open to the gaze of passersby during pickup games or practice. During spirit-week rallies, they would allow students to stream in as one active body.

By maximizing and enhancing space between the buildings, architects hope to encourage impromptu gatherings. A central open area would become the quad, that hallowed patch of greensward featured in virtually every prep-school movie since the original “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”

“We want [the students] to move around,” Hamilton said. “Not just sit in one building all day.”

A U-shaped math and science center would be part of the school’s second phase, as would a 500-seat performing arts complex. (For the first few years, math and science would be taught in the humanities building, and student productions would be housed in an outdoor amphitheater and multipurpose gym.)

Philosophy Defines Spaces

The school’s small-is-better emphasis became even more pronounced in March, when, after a nationwide search, the committee hired Clinton P. Wilkins as headmaster.

An Ivy Leaguer--Wilkins holds degrees or a certification from Williams College and Princeton and Harvard universities--he has served as principal or headmaster of several well-regarded private schools on the East and West coasts during a 25-year career.

Wilkins’ expertise extends from helping to establish the Chinese Studies Program at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., to assisting California charter schools to develop business plans.

“The best thing about having the headmaster involved is that the building and the sizes and shapes of the classrooms actually are a reflection of how they’re going to teach,” Heinfeld said.

The board had envisioned 900-square-foot classrooms, the size mandated for California’s public schools. But Wilkins felt they were too cavernous for a school that dedicated to “the teacher-student relationship.”

Revised plans show 450-square-foot conference rooms--where 10 or 12 students and a teacher would sit around a table--and 600-square-foot English, history and foreign-language classrooms. The eight science labs--which also would serve as multifunction rooms--will be about 1,200 square feet each.

“This will be a school that has traditional academic disciplines, but we will be making real creative connections among and between those disciplines,” Wilkins said. “So we wanted the architect to encourage those connections.”

As a result, the math and science center--initially planned as part of the humanities complex--got a building of its own, with two wings that will embrace part of the triangular-shaped library.

Concerned about how a forward-looking library integrates books with new technologies, Wilkins assembled a group that included college and high school librarians, an information systems specialist and Stephen G. Johnson, vice president of America Online Technology Development. (Johnson and his wife, Rosemarie--Newport Beach residents whose three children are at the Pegasus School, where Johnson is on the Technology Advisory Committee--recently donated $2 million for the library.)

LPA was able to bring its experience in designing a technologically progressive library for San Marcos City Hall, where, instead of treating the front desk as merely a piece of expensive furniture, the firm wired it as a fully functional computer workstation.

Realizing that kids don’t necessarily need chairs and tables and chalkboards to exchange ideas, Sage Hill’s planners have designed a variety of impromptu gathering places. Outdoors, there are extra-wide stairways and grassy areas; indoors, students can hang out in spacious hallways or on couches near the library’s fireplace.

“One of the most underreported factors in assessing the strength of an academic program is tone and atmosphere,” Wilkins said. “It’s not going to be the kind of school where they have to have a hall pass and they’re not trusted.”

To achieve this atmosphere, the school intends to accept only motivated students.

“We want a rich diversity of kids with different economic as well as cultural backgrounds,” Caillouette said. “But we’re not going to be dragging them to this school.”

Not that there won’t be supervision.

“It’s like driving the carpool when the kids forget a parent is driving the car,” Wilkins said drolly, referring to the boisterous, unguarded conversations of school-bound teens. “Yet they are being supervised.

“Teenagers are masters of finding flaws in the adult world,” he added. “We’ll channel that energy into: ‘OK, how do you make a better school? How do you solve those problems?’ ”

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New Private School

Set to open in fall 2000 with 150 ninth- and 10th-graders, Sage Hill School will occupy 30 acres within an agricultural preserve. Juniors and seniors will be phased in over the following two years, raising the full enrollment at the school to 500 students.

Source: Sage Hill School