Bringing ‘This Place to Life’

Its blueprints say the place is built of steel. People say it’s actually made of Stelle.

The $26-million campus that is scheduled to open Jan. 5 in Calabasas is being viewed as a tribute to a couple who helped turn a desolate, 89-square-mile area into one of Los Angeles County’s most desirable places to live.

The Alice C. Stelle Middle School will house as many as 1,000 students. Engineers say its steel construction is what makes it unusual. Residents say its name is what makes it important.

Alice Stelle, 81, played a pivotal role in the 1963 creation of the Las Virgenes Unified School District, which ensured the area’s independence from the Los Angeles city school system. For a quarter-century, she served as a trustee, overseeing curriculum and campus advances.

Her husband, Macneil Stelle, 83, had a major part in the 1958 creation of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. It brought drinking water to the area and prevented the region from becoming annexed to the city of Los Angeles. For more than three decades, he was an elected district director, guiding the expansion of water lines and creation of the area’s sewer system.

So one Stelle helped make it possible for people to live in the western county area; the other helped make people want to live there.

The results are the soaring property values and strong school test scores enjoyed by residents of Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, supporters said.

“You can see the effect of their work every day in every community out here,” said Agoura Hills City Councilman Jeff Reinhardt, who is also a director of the Conejo/Las Virgenes Future Foundation, a nonprofit think tank.

In selecting the Stelle name, current Las Virgenes school leaders waved off suggestions that the new school be named for a local landmark or neighborhood or for a 9/11 hero, Todd Beamer.

Each time a future student asks, “Who is Alice Stelle?” the name will serve as a real-life lesson about “the importance of integrity, persistence and civic involvement,” predicted one district trustee, Judy Jordan.

The sparsely inhabited hills and grazing land of western Los Angeles County were barren and uninviting in 1956 when the Stelles moved from San Marino to Hidden Hills. The neighborhood boasted about 50 homes.

Macneil Stelle was an Atomics International engineer whose job had been transferred to Canoga Park. Alice Stelle was a stay-at-home mother with five children.

The nearest grocery store was five miles to the east, at Ventura Boulevard and Winnetka Avenue. The Ventura Freeway didn’t exist. What is now Calabasas Park was a Warner Bros. movie ranch.

On a Sunday in May 1957, the Stelles discovered the area’s water problem. Without warning, Hidden Hills’ tanks went dry.

Macneil Stelle found that only about six of the 45 wells drilled by Hidden Hills’ subdivider actually produced water. And only about three gallons a minute flowed from each -- enough for about 20% of the community.

Farther west along Ventura Boulevard, things were worse in Agoura. Residents out there who had formed a do-it-yourself water company and drilled a horizontal well into landmark Ladyface Mountain were getting only a brackish dribble out of it.

The scattered farms and cottages in Agoura had rooftop tanks, which were kept filled by a local fireman, Hughey Hughes. He would load up truck and trailer tanks with Los Angeles city water in Woodland Hills and then sell it to Agoura residents for a penny a gallon, Macneil Stelle said.

Los Angeles officials refused to let the thirsty outsiders hook up to their San Fernando Valley water pipes unless those in Hidden Hills and Calabasas annexed themselves to the city.

Unwilling to be swallowed up by the big city, Stelle and other country dwellers instead formed their own water agency, the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. Then they joined a partnership with the existing Calleguas Water District in Ventura County to buy water from the Metropolitan Water District.

Calleguas built a water pipe to carry Metropolitan water from Glendale to Simi Valley. The Las Virgenes group then passed a $6-million bond issue to pay for a pipeline that tied into the Calleguas line at Chatsworth and carried water to Calabasas.

The arrival of abundant drinkable water in 1963 set off a housing boom that has lasted 40 years in the Las Virgenes region. Fortunately for newcomers, the local school system was expanding too.

Alice Stelle helped ward off annexation of the Las Virgenes area by the Los Angeles school district. Then she helped with the consolidation of the region’s separate high school and elementary school systems into the Las Virgenes Unified School District. As an elected member of the board of education, she helped plan construction of three high schools, two middle schools and eight elementary schools.

The independent Las Virgenes school system resonated with parents dissatisfied with Los Angeles’ sprawling district. Las Virgenes’ small size allowed it to fine-tune curriculum and classroom procedures easily. Such nimbleness in the early 1960s made it one of the first districts in California to establish a more child-centered middle school in place of the traditional 7th-to-9th junior high. In the 1970s, the district was able to head off school financing problems that vexed other public school systems in the state.

Along the way, Alice Stelle helped launch and for a decade edited the area’s first community newspaper, the Las Virgenes Enterprise. “There was no way to get news about the school district, the water district, anything. The place was filled with rumors. The only way to deal with it was to give people real news,” she explained.

By the 1980s, the 10-mile stretch between Los Angeles and Thousand Oaks had grown to include thousands of families. These days, the independent cities of Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village line the area. About 65,000 people live there.

“They brought this place to life. Without water, this area was nothing. Once they got water in, Alice took care of the schools,” said Jim Colbaugh, general manager of the Las Virgenes water district.

Donald Zimring, Las Virgenes’ deputy school superintendent, has watched the Stelles at work for three decades. “Together, they have been a foundation for this whole area to develop upon. The school’s name is a tribute to both Mac and Alice.”

The 31-acre campus at 22450 Mulholland Highway has been built between a residential neighborhood and open mountain land. It will relieve overcrowding at the Wright Middle School, named after 1940s Agoura pioneer Arthur E. Wright.

Stelle Middle School’s pair of two-story classroom buildings and its gymnasium/multipurpose room structure used steel fabrication, a first for a school in the western end of the county.

But as they say in Calabasas, that’s not what gives the place its strength.