Suggestions for Naming Campuses Flood Santa Ana Unified

What’s in a name? About three months, 100 phone calls and letters, a few petitions and a lot of local history.

That’s what has gone into the Santa Ana Unified School District’s process for naming as many as 14 new campuses that will begin popping up in the next five years.

District officials, who asked residents for name suggestions in July, have been clear on the matter: They wanted names that mean something to the community.

Some people have called multiple times with multiple ideas. Others sent petitions. The results show some serious soul-searching on the part of community members and offer insights on who they feel have contributed most to their lives.

The vast majority of names submitted were local historical figures.

There was Edith Gilbert, a former Fremont Elementary School principal who, during the 1920s, took many Latino children and their families under her wing. If a family needed food, clothes, even help paying the bills, she was there. One local called her “an angel to the community.” She died in 1975.

Another beloved name: Earl Engman, who for 40 years worked as a teacher, coach, administrator and mentor. Many described Engman, a former pro football player and Olympic athlete in track and field during the 1940s, as “larger than life.”

“I met Earl Engman in 1969, and little did I know the impact he would have on my life,” said Robert Harrel, a former Santa Ana High School student and track team member. “He was kind, caring, and he was known for his great bear hugs. He was a second father to me.”

Jane Aatencio said her children, now 29 and 32, still refer to Engman, who died in 1993, as “Uncle Earl.”

“All the kids just revered him,” Aatencio said in her nomination. “He was the epitome of what a good role model was. . . . Earl was Santa Ana Unified.”

And there was Juan Pablo Grijalva, the area’s first rancher, who settled in Santa Ana in 1797.

“His low-tech efforts launched two centuries of water management that spawned vast orange groves, locked the river in a concrete jacket and quenched the thirst for a metropolis of nearly 3 million people,” said a sixth-generation cousin, Edward T. Grijalva.

Earlier this week, the school board considered dozens of suggestions. Former students, teachers and parents waited patiently late into the night to offer nominations--so many that the board postponed a decision until the next meeting on Oct. 24.

Other districts have gone through similar processes. Capistrano Unified School District last year held a months-long campaign seeking the community’s input before naming Tesoro (which means treasure in Spanish) High School, scheduled to open next fall.

“We sought names from everyone,” said Julie Jennings, Capistrano Unified’s director of communication. “We had, I’d say, almost 100 suggestions.”

The Irvine Unified School District solicited ideas for Canyon View Elementary, which opened this year.

“Generally, what occurs is the school will start out with a project name, and then we’ll go through the formal naming process, and the community is involved with that,” said Brigitte Campa, a facilities technician with the district.

If the Santa Ana school board follows the recommendations it received from the community, the district’s new schools will be named after people, not places.

“We heard from a lot of folks who have been around for many years and have their own local heroes and heroines, and I think that should be the basis for the board’s decision,” board member Nativo Lopez said.

“What I enjoyed most was hearing from the people whose lives have been shaped by our local teachers and coaches, who are in many ways the unsung heroes. They shaped our youth to become sports stars and teachers themselves. We had a very brief but very rich snapshot of our community’s history.”

A handful of residents asked the board to consider naming a school after Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter killed while covering civil unrest in East Los Angeles during the 1970s.

“It would be a name the students could relate to,” Albert Martinez told the board. “It would be a motivation for them to find out more about what was happening back then in the ‘60s and ‘70s and what we need to do to continue our progress.”