Another Time and Place Echoes at School

This column almost wasn’t written. Some of you who tunnel through to the end may still be puzzled why it was. Others will know.

All I’m getting at is that I didn’t plan it. Even in my most self-absorbed moments, I know there are weightier things going on in the world than me being “Principal for a Day.” To be sure, hundreds have gone before me. So when I headed out one morning last week for the little school on Lilac Lane, in a corner of Brea off Carbon Canyon Road that I didn’t even know was still Orange County much less Brea, it wasn’t with pen and notebook. It was not to record events.

What I can state as fact, though, is that when I got back to the office after a couple hours at Olinda Elementary School, I was abuzz. My morning as stand-in principal, even under a format where real Olinda Principal Sherrill Clevenger followed me on my rounds, left me more jazzed than my real job.

Naturally, one asks one’s self why that should be.

The answer is that I heard some echoes that morning. And not just because Olinda is nestled against a hillside.

To start with, the school is so off the beaten track you feel like you’re about to head off into the Enchanted Forest as you drive up Lilac Lane to get there. The vast playground more resembles a mesa where, as a school official says, “a stray cow has been known to mosey.”

Besides that, the school has only 200 students. To give you an idea of how small-townish it is, Principal Clevenger also teaches fourth grade at the school.

Clevenger has a small office, and the teachers eat in a cramped room. This is not some gilded school upon which the district lavishes great sums of money.

Clevenger escorted me from class to class and, suddenly, I was “Mr. Parsons” standing in front of 6- and 8- and 11-year-olds and asking them if they enjoyed school and liked to write and if they had anything they wanted to ask about the

newspaper.

“What was it like, talking to a horse?” one boy asked, referring to a recent column about a long-dead show horse in Orange County that stunned and amazed people with his ability to solve math problems and perform psychic feats. “Was it true?” another asked, and I said I thought it was.

In a kindergarten class, a girl named Chelsea mentioned she had a Beanie Baby, and I asked her to get it for me. This terrible imposition on her time prompted her to inform me, by using sign language for each of the four words, that “You drive me nuts!” I informed her that she drove me nuts as well, and she seemed pleased.

And so it went, from class to class, each one as entertaining as the one before. I doubt there’s ever been a principal who laughed as much as this one.

Somewhere in all that, the echoes came.

I thought of another Mr. Parsons, a young guy in his 30s who was the superintendent of schools in a small Nebraska town 40 years ago. In his entire K-12 domain, he probably presided over 200 students, a kingdom about the size of mine on this day.

In his four years in that town, I was in third through sixth grades. He’d walk into a classroom, unannounced. The teacher simply halted, knowing there would be a short pause in the lesson plan. “Good morning, boys and girls,” he’d say, “what are we learning today?”

He’d ask Byron to add or subtract a couple of numbers; he’d ask Patty to name the capital of Ohio; he’d ask Ronnie who was going to win the big game that Friday night. He had a bottom line: School was supposed to be fun.

I remember everyone having a swell time when the superintendent came into the room.

Years later, right up to the end of his days, he’d say that his favorite moments were when he’d walk into those classrooms and hold court. No matter what kind of a mood he was in, he’d say, nothing cheered him like the kids. The most fun, of course, were the kindergartners and first-graders, but even the high schoolers got visits.

I suppose I heard that other Mr. Parsons talking last week as Chelsea told me I drove her nuts and another boy asked me what it was like interviewing a horse and Principal Clevenger brought two first-graders, who’d been fighting on the playground, to see me.

I went out on the playground after lunch and there was a girl skipping rope backward and a boy bouncing a basketball. Another boy approached me on the playground and asked if the book I’d read to the class about the “true story” of the Three Little Pigs was because I had a grandma too. Just outside the door to the principal’s office, the two pugilists were serving their penance on chairs while their classmates frolicked outside in the sunshine.

Just a typical day at school, I suppose. Children so full of possibilities, teachers with such a sacred trust, the great human drama known as learning continuing to unfold.

I guess that’s why I felt a buzz that day.

All morning long, nothing but the sounds of children’s laughter and soothing echoes.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at [email protected].