School’s Out at El Toro Marine Elementary--Forever

It didn’t take long for El Toro Marine Elementary School Principal Clay White to read the names of the sixth-graders who were graduating to junior high; just as quickly as you can say Christine Villava, Anoush Kullukian and Tahnee Mickelson.

Back in September, there had been 350 students learning and playing on the grade-school campus of the Marine base. But toward the end, only 50 remained to roam its abandoned walkways and fields.

“You could tell the school was getting smaller and smaller,” said Christine, who started at El Toro Marine as a kindergartner and has attended for seven of her 11 years. “There wasn’t as many kids on the playground.”

And now those few will scatter, after the school closed its doors Wednesday for good.

Christine, who lives in Lake Forest, will start junior high school in a new place. Her mother has a job at Camp Pendleton.

Danielle Mills fought back tears when she talked about what it has been like this year. The 10-year-old moved to Lakeview a couple of months ago, but came back for the last day of school to see her teachers and friends one more time.

“It’s very sad,” Danielle said. “All of my friends are moving. My school’s closed down.”

Even Principal White must be moving on--in his case, to Irvine’s Deerfield Elementary.

“It has been kind of rough on some kids,” White said. “Some of the youngsters are pretty lonely by now, starving for some friendship.”

But not for teacher attention. As the number of students at El Toro dwindled, the school’s 11 teachers combined their classes to preserve a sense of community. Teachers say that despite the disruptions, they have never been able to cover so much academic material in a single year.

“With all of our friends leaving, it has been a hard year,” said second-grade teacher Mozelle Paxton, stroking one of her young students on the head. “We’ve practiced our writing by writing letters to our friends.”

The last housing units at the closing El Toro Marine base had to be cleared out by June 14, but several families took up in motels or trailers so their children could finish out the school year. Still others are looking for private housing in Irvine so they can keep their children in the school district.

Diane and Gary Townsend have been living in beach cottages near San Onofre, shuttling between their four children’s schools in Irvine and Gary Townsend’s new job as an F-18 structural mechanic at Miramar Air Force Base in San Diego.

“I asked my daughter how school was the other day, and she said, ‘Well, we’re down to seven,’ ” said Gary Townsend. “Just the look on her face was as if someone had taken her best friend or stolen one of her treasures.”

Families have been leaving the base all year for Pendleton and places as far-flung as Japan. Some never said goodbye. Others hung on until the very end.

Armen Kullukian, a supply chief headed for Camp Pendleton, said he was lucky to receive temporary housing at El Toro for himself and his family through the school year. They had already been relocated once before with the closure of the Alameda base, and he didn’t want to uproot his two daughters during the school year, especially not sixth-grader Anoush.

“As it is she’s already going to go from elementary to junior high school,” he said. “I wanted her at least to finish this and have a little closure,”

This was a school year of countless farewells at El Toro. And then Wednesday, there was one last day of goodbyes all around as students hugged their teachers, snapped photos and signed each other’s’ T-shirts.

There are no plans yet for the campus, which remains part of the Irvine school system. No teachers were laid off because of the school closing. Most will teach at other schools in the district.

“Coming down off this is going to be hard,” said teacher Nan Pelayo. She was retiring Wednesday after 34 years of teaching, 29 of them at El Toro.

Pelayo has seen this school’s children through the wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. She said the teachers at El Toro feel a special closeness to their students because so many of them have had to endure the strain of relocation, or of having a parent deployed overseas.

“A lot of times we have to be their moms and dads while their parents are away,” she said.

During the Persian Gulf War, teachers formed the Overseas Club to provide special support for students whose parents were serving.

“Two-thirds of the school had a parent deployed,” Pelayo said. “We sent them banners and letters. And as the veterans would return, we had them in to school for a ceremony.”

It wasn’t that way during the Vietnam War, Pelayo recalled.

“I came here in 1970 and Vietnam was not mentioned. The kids did not bring it to school.”

When the bell rang to signify the end of the school day Wednesday, students left in all directions. A group of boys shuffled through the sand of the playground, swinging from the bars as they passed. A little girl and her mother, hand in hand, walked to their car. And as a great big yellow school bus groaned out of the parking lot, the four little children inside peered out the windows and waved.