Vistamar School

Profiling a private coed college preparatory school, an alternative to traditional high school education in Los Angeles' South Bay.

By Caitlin Adams
USC Annengerg

Students work on computers in one of the sky-lit pods of classrooms at Vistamar. Photo courtesy of Vistamar School
One end of the gymnasium doubles as the art studio as the school continues to expand in its new home. Photo courtesy of Vistamar School

At Vistamar Independent High School, the Chief Financial Officer teaches drama and the chemistry teacher blows things up in the parking lot. Not trash bins or cars, of course - this is a school, after all - but controlled classroom (or rather class-lot) experiments, with all due concern for safety. The difference being that, from what I recall of high school chemistry, none of our "experiments" were big enough to require being held outside, on asphalt.

Things are decidedly different at Vistamar than at other high schools. There are no bells, for one thing; everyone is bursting to talk about the global education program and the courses in Mandarin Chinese (taught almost exclusively in Chinese from day one - using "total physical response") and no Phys. Ed. Students have the option of playing a team sport, or choosing one of the "physical electives" offered by the school, such as yoga, pilates, fencing, dance, martial arts, and more. Add to that, beyond the usual science and math classes, the curriculum seeks to blend parts of humanities and social sciences; studying American literature and concurrent periods of U.S. history, arts, and culture.

So how did this unusual high school haven come to be? Believe it or not, from the minds of parents.

Cindy Smet, a founding parent and member of Vistamar's Board of Trustees, has two sons enrolled here. She said the initial motivation behind Vistamar was not necessarily any perceived deficiencies in the area's public schools, but rather a wish among parents for something beyond the status quo for their children

"We really do want them to be critical thinkers and not just to regurgitate information," Smet said. "My son, when he started here last year, for the first week he had the Head of School for humanities class, and I said, 'Okay Andrew, how's Mr. Buckheit?' And he said, 'Mr. Buckheit makes my head hurt.'"

She said her son, who began at Vistamar as a sophomore last year, was accustomed to reading his assigned work, then basically repeating what he read in class the next day, in response to questions.

"When Andrew got to humanities class sometimes the tables would be turned and the teacher would say, 'Okay fine, what are the key questions we have to ask about what we read?'"

Smet said she's noticed her son has become "a better arguer," more adept at formulating and expressing arguments.

"I don't mean to say he's more argumentative," she said.

So how do parents set about opening their own school?

Early in January of 2001, a group of parents met and talked about a goal to create a small, intimate school with a very good ethic; a place for students from a variety of backgrounds, where they will respect and learn from each other.

Of course, such an innovative new educational environment as Vistamar's founders were devising on paper translated to a heavy hit in the pocketbook before anything could actually materialize. Energetic fundraising became a major source of the school's construction and staffing budget; a long list of donors appears in Vistamar's Summer 2005 newsletter, including corporate donors and contributors such as JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and the Ahmanson Foundation.

Vistamar's financial strategies are also a little unconventional in that respect; the board of trustees determined to make fundraising events an ongoing part of the school year.

The question of tuition is a delicate one. Currently, the school has about 98 students in three grades; the cost of running the school is high, and until all four grade levels are full (a total of about 348 students) tuition, currently set at $22,500, is not enough to fully cover the school's operational costs. But founders were wary of setting tuition at a prohibitive level that would drive prospective students and parents away.

Such was almost the case with Jennifer Floto and her daughter, Jamie.

Floto said her daughter went from an 8th grade class of 124 in Hermosa Beach to a freshman class of almost 700 students at Mira Cost High School and got "swallowed up."

Floto had heard about Vistamar, and had known Jamie wasn't looking forward to Mira Costa. The problem was, Jamie was going to enter high school as a freshman a year before Vistamar was scheduled to open.

"It was a bit of a leap of faith, but to me it was worth it because... I had watched her go from a kid who jumped in the car all kindergarten through 8th grade, and I'd say, 'How was your day?' and 'Bluhblubluhbluhbluh...'" Floto here makes a rapid chatty-mouth motion with her hand. "...for the next half an hour to an hour, literally. She was engaged. And then she got in the car freshman year, and I'd say, 'How was school?' 'Fine.'"

Seeing the effect Mira Costa was having on her daughter, Floto said it was enough to make the decision to invest Jamie's college savings in her high school education.

"That was a very conscious financial decision on my part, and a lot of it was a leap of faith," Floto said. But she's confident that the investment will pay off, and Jamie couldn't be happier.

Planners have partially mitigated this problem by setting aside 12% of student tuition payments into a financial aid fund, established by a $1 million endowment contributed by an anonymous donor at Vistamar's inception.

The largest milestones, Smet said, were raising money and finding a suitable building; the latter turned out to be quite a challenge, as not many preexisting buildings are easy to adapt to a classroom floor plan without extensive renovation, and in order to make the school accessible, the location had to be centralized and convenient.

Apparently the El Segundo School Board had a few reservations about the new school.

"It was a slow process, they had to get to know us, and they had to appreciate that we chose El Segundo because it was centrally located for the entire South Bay, we didn't choose it because we perceived any deficiencies at all with their schools," Smet said.

In fact, Vistamar is within about two miles on three sides of Hawthorne, Lawndale and Manhattan Beach; and is actually located within a division of the Hawthorne School District.

"We're about as far away from the high school as you could be, and still be in El Segundo..." Smet said. "This location was good for us because it's close to the 405, it's close to Aviation Boulevard, and like I said, it's really accessible to the greater South Bay."

The final challenge was finding an experienced educator and administrator for the post of Head of School. Jim Buckheit, who has headed schools in Massachusetts, Frankfurt and Moscow, carries a name with some weight in the educational community, and the Vistamar Trustees were elated to get him.

"Early on, parents said, 'Gee, that's a really nice idea,' and I don't really think that they believed that we could do it..." Smet said. "There are a lot of people who have a 'wait and see' attitude. But I think the fact that we've met our timetable all the way along has helped our credibility."

Following his appointment as Head of School, Buckheit wrote a letter for the Vistamar newsletter about his cross-country journey from Pennsylvania to his new post. In it, he pretty much encompassed Vistamar's philosophy of global education.

"Often strangers ourselves, we have learned that out on the trail a stranger is not automatically a threat. Fellow travelers offer opportunities - for useful information, for assistance, for camaraderie. We all have a touch of the nomad in us. It comes out in places to which we can't lay claim, like conversing with a seatmate on an airplane or sharing directions at a rest stop... One mark of a good education is sufficient curiosity and confidence to have no need for stereotypes. In a shrinking world we are all fellow travelers, and advantage will go to those who know how to make the most of it."