A VISIT TO PACIFIC HIGH SCHOOL
published in the Town Crier Subscribers' Section, April 10, 1963

There lurks in the minds of most people the image of an old-maid schoolteacher, full of sweetness and pedantry and dressed in a mothy black sweater and orthopedic shoes.

Like most stereotypes, this one is too bad to be true. but let us imagine this dear lady on a visit to Pacific High School, the peninsula's least-known fount of education.

Pacific, our old maid would learn, is situated in an L-shaped adobe ranch house on Greensward Drive, about three-fourths of a mile up Magdalena from the Rancho Shopping Center.

She enters double doors and finds herself face-to-face with a cage of slumbering iguanas in a room that is part laboratory and part (as yet) lumber yard. Hurrying past what was once a kitchen, she inspects classrooms that were once bedrooms. They are distinctive for their lack of furniture, including chairs. Floor cushions, however, abound.

Of greater fascination for her is what goes on. She night encounter a "school meeting," one of the daily seminars for as many of the 18 students and four full-time faculty as can make it. Her prim sensibilities are jolted by the sight of barefoot scholars cadging cigarettes from their teachers in an atmosphere so utterly casual that a student may recline on the floor while expressing rigorous doubts as to the worth of a recent field trip. At this point our old maid hikes her skirts and flees in horror, stepping over the bejeaned legs of a mandolin player sprawled at the foot of a stairway.

(L) Nelson Samuels, Mark Paulekas, Pete Watkins, (R) Willy Moses

She would have seen the most obvious - and least important - aspects of Pacific High School, and thus have missed its point.

In spite of the rag-taggle clothing and insouciant atmosphere, the minds within the school are shining bright and cutting sharp, whether discussing the merits of Marlowe over Shakespeare of the value of SMSG mathematics, the new mode of learning arithmetic.

Pacific was founded in 1961 by a group of parents and teachers who had been associated with Peninsula School, a private elementary school in Palo Alto, in an effort to provide secondary-education opportunities somewhat in the manner of that school. There is, however, no connection other than sympathy between the two/ Pacific has enrolled only three Peninsula graduates.

Alan Strain was a teacher at Peninsula School and was a founder of Pacific, where he now teaches mathematics. He would probably be Pacific's headmaster if the school were that highly organized. He has been described by the mother of a former student as, "a brilliant and outstanding teacher."

Alan Strain

Disorganization, or, more precisely, unorganization is a hallmark of Pacific High School. There are no bells, no intercom, no PTA, no home economics department, no baton twirlers, no senior proms, no trustee elections, no fixed curriculum and no grades or grading.

all seems chaos at Pacific until one considers its purpose, as explained by Stanley Bean, one of its teachers and chief counselor of students: "Pacific is a place for people who care about things. It gives responsibility to those who want it."

Stanley (Reynold) Bean

In this sense, then, a student is made to feel responsible for acquiring an education, and the responsibility can make him as eager at receive it as his parents and teachers are to provide it.

The theme of responsibility also extends to teachers and parents, according to Bean. Teachers are paid "probably better than at public schools," he said, "but there are no prospects of 'pay increments' and the like. We are paid according to our needs, and we are responsible for deciding what those needs are." He admits, with a grin, that the concept has its peculiarities.

Pacific parents are responsible for deciding how much tuition they should pay for their children. An average figure, according to Bean, is $900 a year, which, at this point, is somewhat less than per-student cost. A bank loan is making up the difference now, and increased enrollment will take up the slack in the future.

The school is still small enough that decisions can be made in town-hall fashion. Once a month students, parents, and faculty gather to discuss problems and goals. Because it is small, Pacific can afford the luxury of being "unstructured," to use sociolgical lingo. Structure is bound to come, Bean has said, when a desired enrollment of 60 is reached. Classes will be more firmly scheduled and curriculum more clearly defined. Whether structure will erode Pacific's virtues is something they worry about. "At any rate it will be easier on the teacher," Bean observed.

Classes at Pacific can be exceedingly far flung. Dave Werner, biology teacher, recently took a third of the school's students on a five-week expedition to Mexico in search of specimens and culture, and found both. They journeyed as far south as Tepic, not far inland from the resort city of Puerta Vallarta, and returned with a grasp of the language and three cages full of iguanas, gila monsters, lizards, and insects.

It was a long outing, and in many ways a grueling one, but the people of Pacific are accustomed to travel - they have to be. School opened in the fall of 1961 in a suite of offices behind the Crow Drug store in downtown Palo Alto. From there they moved to the Duvenecks' hidden Villa Ranch, in Los Altos Hills, where they stayed until a house was made available in Portola Valley. When the owners returned from vacation, classes were moved to borrowed rooms in Temple Beth Am, in Los Altos Hills. Then at the first of this year the former Eshner estate on Breensward Drive became a schoolhouse. The home had the misfortune to lie in the path of the proposed freeway. Not a movable house, it was sold to the state, which rents to Pacific. Looking back over their travels, Bean commented ruefully, And we're not bad tenants, either."

The next move - and there's bound to be another, because of the freeway - will be the school's last, they hope. A Palo Alto philanthropist has made a tentative offer of three or four acres in the Palo Alto foothills, where permanent quarters may be erected when money is raised. (A wealthy foundation has been approached.) Parents, students, faculty and friends will pitch in and do as much of the work as they're able. This was the case at the Eshner house, where a teacher might as easily be found astride a sawhorse as before a class. Furniture was purchased from Goodwill and through this publications's Bulletin Board. County regulations had to be fulfilled before classes met, and students agreeably helped to bash holes in walls so new doors could be hung. The house's heavy shake shingles unnerved the fire marshal, and as a consequence, the faculty laid sprinkler pipes along the ridgepole. On sunny days water drips constantly from the eves, reducing the fire hazard and disconcerting the visitor who tells weather by ear.

Construction of the new school will intensify the drove for capacity enrollment. New students will be gently recruited from public and private schools throughout the area by means of personal contact and a brochure. According to Bean, Pacific is no more a school for geniuses than it is a reformatory for truants. The attribute of responsibility well be looked for, not past scholarship.

The present full-time staff consists of Strain, who teaches mathematics; Bean, social sciences; Werner, biology; and Barry Goldensohn, English. Teaching part-time are Lincoln Moses, a Stanford professor of physics and father of one of the students; Roy Oliver, doctoral candidate in English and Stanford, who teaches French and German; and Paula Bowman, a Portola Valley housewife, who teaches art.

Are they good teachers? This begs the question, what is a good teacher, and an endless debate ensues. An administrator in a nearby public-school district has remarked, A private school can attract outstanding teachers because of a flexible approach and unusual challenges." The public-school man hastened to add: "Of course, they can also get some people we wouldn't have on a bet." Apparently Pacific is blessed with teachers of the first sort, although without grade and graduates, it's hard to tell. Students who have transferred form Pacific to public schools have made the transition successfully, receiving generous credit for their previous work. The social transition can be something else again. As one bemused mother put it, speaking of Pacific students, "These kids are surprisingly naive - not about politics or math or science but about bouffant hairdos and stylish clothes."

What about accreditation? "We will probably seek accreditation by the University of California," Bean said,"which will have the effect of saving our graduates the trouble of taking and extra battery of admission tests." At present Bean points out, Pacific offers all subject matter required for entrance to U.C. "infact," he said, "we may be overdoing it a bit by offering 'Philosophy of Math.'" Accreditation, too, raises the spectre of structure. "Although we don't give grades," Bean said, "we'll have to figure out some way of presenting grades to those colleges that require them. And we'll have to decide whether to give diplomas and all that. As things stand now we'll graduate a student when he decides he's ready to graduate - and when we agree he's ready to leave."

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