New Ways to Educate Children

Fortunately for some students who don’t fit into the standard educational mold, the mold is giving way to welcome innovative approaches.

For some of them, the classroom is in a 22-foot mobile trailer in the parking lot at the Lincoln Inn Motel in Anaheim. For others in the Capistrano Unified School District, it soon will be at the mall in Mission Viejo, near the upscale Saks Fifth Avenue store.

These are but two of the latest examples of extending the reach of education away from the traditional classroom to where it is more accessible and needed.

In high-priced Orange County, where affordable housing is increasingly hard to find, many of the county’s working poor have turned to living in motel rooms. Current estimates put more than 2,000 children living in motels throughout the county. The mobile classroom and library trailer run by the nonprofit Project Dignity, which also provides food, clothing and medicine to motel families, helps children keep up with their schoolwork.

The Capistrano district’s Educational Resource Center, the first of its kind in California, initially will serve as a training and resource base for the district’s home-schooling program. Space for the new center is being provided rent-free by the mall’s developer, Simon Property Group, through its nonprofit youth foundation, which has opened 12 other centers across the country and is planning many more.

These efforts by nonprofit community groups are welcome innovative efforts helping the county’s public schools meet today’s changing education needs.