Another school year, and while they are all special, each one unique, each marking another year of growth, development, and learning for our students – this one feels especially poignant as we celebrate 100 years of the Rancho Santa Fe School District. We have something remarkable here, something worth reflecting upon certainly, but more importantly, something worth preserving as we embark upon our second century.
No, we do not often see students arrive on horseback anymore. Our simple schoolhouse has become a beautiful campus in the heart of Rancho Santa Fe. Chalkboards have given way to vertical learning tables and iPads. The furniture is new, the technology endless, and the world of our students unimaginable to the families who first opened our school.
What have we been given, what is worth keeping, and what are we obligated to pass on?
Yes, we adopted a policy to remind our students to begin each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, but my hope goes beyond policy. I hope they want to say those words because they understand that “one nation” is an inheritance entrusted to them, and that the freedoms they enjoy were preserved by generations before them. We can ask our students to recite the words; our greater responsibility is to help them understand why those words are worth saying.
A centennial gives us an unusual opportunity – not to simply celebrate where we have been, but to decide what is worth carrying forward into a future none of us can predict.
What a Child Needs
The tools will change, the methods will change, the laws will change, but the fundamental needs of a child have not changed very much at all. To be known, to belong, to have adults expect something of them – teachers who see not just how a child performs, but who that child is becoming. And it is the children who lead us. Their innate curiosity, their simple innocence, and their endless enthusiasm remind us why we are here. We hope they leave knowing something about themselves – that they mattered, that teachers knew their names and their gifts, that they had friendships that last through adulthood.
And that they were given the knowledge and confidence to step into a complex world and navigate it.
Dr. Rowe, our namesake, understood something we would do well to remember a century later: education is profoundly personal. A small K-8 school can offer something difficult to measure – continuity, lifelong bonds, and the experience of being truly known. A child needs history and tradition because you cannot walk confidently into the future if you have no idea what came before you.
A Century From Now
The landscape of education is changing rapidly, and declining enrollment is a reality facing our district, as it is so many others. We cannot know exactly what our student population will look like in the years ahead. But whether our student body is 500 or 800, our mission remains the same. Perhaps a smaller school makes the qualities we have always treasured even more apparent. Enrollment will inevitably ebb and flow – but our identity endures.
A hundred years from now, the technology will be different, the laws will be different, the building may look different. But I hope a child walking through our doors will find what children have found here for generations: a teacher who knows them, a community that believes in them, a country and history they can understand themselves to be a part of, and a school that feels, in some small but lasting way, like home.
Happy 100 years to our beloved Rancho Santa Fe School District.
Annette Ross is a Covenant resident and member of the Rancho Santa Fe School Board of Trustees.