Students Celebrate School History

Gallery • 6 Photos

Kate Sequeira

AP art history students spent class outside on Sept. 14 in honor of San Dieguito’s first day of school 80 years ago.

Art teacher Angela Jackson began this tradition last year after speaking with alumni director Bonnie Wren about the school’s history.

“I thought this was a really cool history lesson,” Jackson said. “It combined architecture and the facrict that there was this female architect, which was very rare in the 1930s.”

San Dieguito was first built under a Work Progress Administration grant, a federal program to lift the country out of the Depression, so that students living around Encinitas would have the opportunity to go to a closer high school. Before the school was built, students would have to make their way to Oceanside to attend school.

The art history students brought tents to the greenbelt at the edge of campus facing Santa Fe Drive. They did so to commemorate the students who attended San Dieguito its opening year who went to school in tents because the campus had still been under construction.

During the first year, 1936, the senior high school of San Dieguito was held at the Pacific View Elementary School site, said Wren. The school bought soft canvas tents from the Los Angeles school district to provide enough classrooms for all of the students.

Courtesy of Bonnie Wren

To give students a better understanding about the school in its first year, Jackson presented a PowerPoint to the class, describing the San Dieguito Union High School of 1936.

“The mustang symbol [among other things] that we know of today was completely different,” Jackson said. “It looked like a bucking bronco. It just kind of morphed and changed over time.”

Upon its opening, San Dieguito was focused greatly on agriculture, as both animal pens and vegetable gardens could be found on campus.

According to Wren, the 1936 Coast Dispatch said that the “vocational work [was divided] into four phases; Class room [sic] work, agricultural mechanics, Future Farmer club activities, and the project program.”

At the time that San Dieguito was built, the school looked very modern in comparison to surrounding schools, Jackson said.

“The school is coming from this female architect that really defied boundaries at that time,” Jackson said. “I think that was kind of the progressiveness of it. It’s very SDA, as most people would say.”

Architect Lilian Rice designed San Dieguito with the intention of providing a more natural look. For this reason, SDA currently has a lot of hills within its campus.

San Dieguito was constructed to utilize light and climate.

According to the 1936 Coast Dispatch, “All regular class rooms [sic] are to be built in groups of two- facing south- to get the full benefit of the sun, reducing heating costs, and connected with all other building by covered corridors, protecting the students in the rainy season.”

Some of the original architecture has remained the same. Rice designed the buildings now known as the offices, 10s, 20s, 40s, 50s and 70s along with their covered corridors.

“When you’re walking, let’s say, passed Ms. Temple’s room, [when] you’re walking to the front of the building, you see how things really haven’t changed,” Jackson said. “It’s still kind of that historical building and you have more, I think, of an appreciation of the space we have. It links us with the students that were originally here, which is really cool.”

Later architects attempted to incorporate the covered corridors into the designs of the library and the PAC.

Jackson wants to continue her tradition of celebrating the very first day of San Dieguito and hopes to get other classes to participate in future years.

“I definitely think [that for] especially social science and anything that’s kind of history related, you’re learning about history in the class, but you’re also sitting amongst history, which is pretty cool,” Jackson said.