Thirty years and over 100 sites—39 of which Board members visited—later, Country Day may have found a new campus.

The fourth decade may be the charm, as the 26th and V Streets site, dubbed Newton Booth, seems likelier than any of the others. The administration has suggested moving in September 2009, after Winter Break next year, or as late as September 2010. 

Yet Country Day has a long history with “new campuses.”

In 1965, the school began renting portables at the nearby Unitarian Church, as the Latham campus was prepared.

In 1966, 123 students moved to the current site.

Though the “Dual Campus Vision” wasn’t initiated until the ‘90s and 2000s, the school began looking for alternative sites way back in the 1980s.  

Frank Pignata, assistant headmaster from 1965-87, remembers visiting several campuses in the 1980s. Sites included the Brookfield School in Greenhaven, and a Catholic school off Highway 99, he said.  

The need to move the high school became apparent in the late ‘80s, when conflicts with the neighbors arose.

To raise school spirit, Doug Crone, headmaster from 1987-89, had painted 17-foot-high “SCDS” letters on the gym (there were no high-school portables yet), facing the neighbors, who objected to their ugliness. 

By 1995, tension with the neighbors—mostly connected to students parking on the street—had increased so dramatically that the June 5, 1995, Octagon editorial described this incident:

“When [a junior] returned after school, his car had been pushed roughly 15 feet up the street (with the parking brake on) and into the back end of [a senior’s] car, damaging both bumpers.” 

On Sept. 14, 1995, neighbors openly complained about the school at a Planning Commission meeting. The very next day, which happened to be the day of the Ancil Hoffman picnic—an anonymous neighbor called in a bomb threat. 

By 1997, headmaster Dan White (1989-98), who had created a “Vision for the ‘90s” to plan for the future of the school, helped the Board of Trustees approve the strategic plan of 1997, including a hypothetical new high-school campus and a refurbished Latham campus. 

 “If anyone had 15 to 20 acres at a reasonable price, we looked at it,” White said. 

The official “Dual Campus Vision” policy was adopted in 2001, under headmaster Selden Edwards’s (1998-2003) leadership, though the first priority remained the Latham campus. 

Administrators and Board members searched throughout the Sacramento region, looking mostly at sites east of North Sacramento, which population trends indicated would grow most.  

Thus the long journey in the search for a new campus extended through seven headmasters and was filled with extensive work, almost always leading to heartbreak. Plane crashes, environmental issues, or timing—something always hampered the potential move. 

From the earliest sites to the most recent at White-rock, The Octagon takes a look back at some of the  campuses that almost were. They span all parts of Sacramento, all sizes, and all costs. And they had one thing in common: they weren’t the right one.

—Michael Lewis 

Playing Fields

It’s hard to know for certain exactly who bears responsibility for one of Country Day’s largest blunders in the school expansion process. But when the school lost a big chunk of its playing fields and open space in 1988, fingers were pointed in many directions.

In March 1988, the Dronberger Construction Company bought 4.5 acres of land from the Catholic diocese and turned what had been two soccer fields and a baseball diamond into 10 housing lots that line the south side of Latham Drive next to the school.

SCDS had leased the land for next to nothing for 15 years, intending to buy it from the church, which at the time had no plans to sell it.

But despite those intentions, the first anyone at Country Day heard of the sale was when developer Robert Dronberger called the Board and told them that he had purchased the land we were playing on.

At a Sacramento City Planning Commission meeting in May 1988, then Board president Gail Graham said that the school was interested in buying the land. But it was already far too late.

The land was expensive—40 percent above its appraised value of $560,00—but, according to Graham, someone had offered to lend the school money to buy the land.

Many on the Board had thought that the school was already negotiating to buy the parcel of land that allowed on-campus baseball and softball practices.  Board member Mary Jane Sligar said that Jack Cornelius, a former Board president, was “listening in” on discussions regarding the sale.

Cornelius, however, said that he had no more knowledge than anyone of the plans to sell the land to Dronberger.

There wasn’t even a negotiating team on the Board because no one knew for sure the church was selling.

Board treasurer Jonathan Brown was just as confused as everyone else. “I don’t think there was any serious discussion about [negotiating for the land] if we did it at all,” he said. 

And so in the midst of all the bewilderment and lack of communication, Country Day lost out on a great (and probably the only) opportunity for an expanded high school at the current Latham site.

—Miles Bennett-Smith

Bradshaw Tank Farm

 A 450-seat auditorium, a student lounge, and foreign-language labs⎯the drawings were done, risk assessments were performed, and the class of 1999 was thrilled to be the first to graduate from the 11-acre site off Bradshaw Road. 

A 17–month late phone call caused over two years of planning to fizzle. 

“The fire marshal called within 10 days of our hearing with the planning committee,” said headmaster Dan White. 

The site, which was only four miles from the current campus, was close to a group of storage tanks owned by Santa Fe Pacific Pipelines. They contained petrochemicals that could pose a danger in the event of a fire. 

In 1996, the Foster Wheeler Environmental Company had performed a risk assessment study and reported that the land was safe.

However, a memo written months before by a member of the Hazardous Materials Department surfaced in late August 1997. Addressed to the Planning Department, it pointed out hazards of the site that had been overlooked. 

“Nobody remembers getting the memo⎯it dropped into the communications black hole,” said Janet Peddy, then director of finance and operations. 

But White feels the tanks weren’t a genuine hazard. “I’ve never actually believed that something was lost. I think that for whatever reason—maybe because we are a small private school—we were not considered important,” White said. 

He pointed out that the tanks were next to a church (Warehouse Ministries) and a skating rink, neither of which concerned the County Environmental Health Department. 

An office was later built on the land.

“The building there now looks just like a school. They let a business near the tanks, but they wouldn’t let kids near it,” Julie Nelson, current director of communications, said. 

“We were feeling pretty picked on,” White said.

White left Country Day to take a job in Hawaii the following June.

“Had the Bradshaw property deal gone through, there’s no way I would have applied for a job here in Hawaii,” he admitted.

Selden Edwards replaced White as headmaster in September 1998. 

“I felt really sorry for [White.] The Bradshaw property falling through was demoralizing for everyone. A lot of people had invested their lives into it,” Edwards said. 

After the disappointing loss of the Bradshaw land, the school continued its search. Next on the list was a site in West Sacramento.

—Parul Guliani 

Highway 160

After the announcement of the Strategic Plan for a high school on a separate campus, Fred Katz, (father of Adam, ’97, Shayna, ’02, and, Jared) became chairman of the Board’s Building and Grounds Committee, which explored the individual sites and created an in-depth review. 

Katz had spent several years working on the Bradshaw Tank Farm site with White.

In the fallout from the Bradshaw breakdown, the school began looking at a multitude of new sites.

Five Octagons between February and December 1998 included stories about campuses. 

One cited the Board’s frustration as they looked at an overwhelming number of sites, and reneged on their plan to have the class of ’99 graduate from the new campus. 

“We’ve looked at literally hundreds of sites,” Ryan said in the Dec 18, 1998, Octagon. 

One that seemed hopeful was off Highway 160, one of the least busy thoroughfares in Sacramento, backing onto the American River.

According to Katz, the property owner was cooperative and willing to help Country Day move.

But problems quickly arose. 

 “The first thing we did was hire a biologist to do a survey [of the property],” Katz said.

The biologist discovered several environmental issues with the site—old oak trees, which the school would have to build around, and wetlands, which couldn’t be developed. 

But the kicker was the elderberry bushes with their elderberry beetles, an endangered species. 

“We could have bought a mitigation area to relocate them, but it would have been a process with the city and the Department of Fish and Game,” Katz said. “It was too big of a job.” 

“Beetles prevent purchase of property” was the headline in the Feb. 10 Octagon. 

But the school was already looking past this minor debacle as the Lighthouse West Sacramento Campus loomed in the future.

—Michael Lewis 

Lighthouse/West Sac

The bus pulled up at the riverfront, next to the Lighthouse golf course. Parents, students and faculty members hopped out, enthusiastic, hoping for victory.

But this was no sporting event. In winter 1999, the school sponsored two tours to review the newest promising site for the high school: a plot of land off Fifth Avenue in West Sacramento. 

This time around, the property fell through due to uneasiness of parents and students rather than because of environmental reasons or uncontrollable catastrophes. 

In February, the Board of Trustees voted to discontinue pursuit of the property—due in part to the large disapproval of the site revealed by a survey of the community. 

Issues such as neighborhood safety, distance from the Latham campus, traffic, and distance from the freeway were addressed. 

Daniel Neukom, current dean of students, raised another issue back then: the proximity to the Sacramento and American Rivers would be dangerous in the event of a flood. 

The property was located at the confluence of the two.

“I felt as though the American River was a gun pointed at the school,” he said.

Another factor that influenced the decision was the changing of the Sacramento City Council.

“The new council put restrictions on us that were unacceptable. They told us that their demands were non-negotiable,” said Tim Ryan, then president of the Board of Trustees. 

Additionally, the sellers later asked for a non-refundable $25,000 deposit, which the school wouldn’t risk. 

—Parul Guliani

DC-8

Negotiations for a 30-acre site on Zinfandel Road just off Highway 50 were going smoothly in early February 2000. The school had reached a preliminary agreement to buy the land for close to $1 million. 

“The site would be ours to accept or reject when the project was approved in the spring,” former headmaster Selden Edwards said.

Then came the plane crash.

A DC-8 jet crashed Feb. 16, as a result of mechanical error, at the intersection of Sunset and Douglas Boulevards. That was just two miles southeast of the Zinfandel site.

The crash was catastrophic. Two minutes after taking off from Mather Field, the plane came down in an auto auction yard, resulting in a “runway of fire,” according to eyewitnesses. No crewmember survived, and 200 cars on the ground burst into flame in a series of explosions.

A week later, the Board of Trustees officially declared the land deal dead. Edwards himself said that there had been no decision to purchase the land yet, as the Board hadn’t even voted on the deal.

Caltrans had previously stopped requests to build schools in the area, but Edwards said, “everyone knew it was going to be a danger with the airfield so near. Some thought it was inconsequential; others didn’t. We had not had the ultimate discussion yet.”

The school was close to moving east when a tragedy ended the hope for a second campus in just a few  minutes.

—Miles Bennett-Smith

Whiterock

It seemed as though a solution to the “Dual Campus Vision” had been found when GenCorp donated 80 acres of pastureland off of Whiterock Road in Folsom to the school in 2001. And although his enthusiasm was tempered, Edwards certainly thought Whiterock was it.

The donation was part of an initiative by GenCorp, and its subsidiary Aerojet, to establish educational and enrichment facilities on its unused property.

So in October 2003, the school entered into an agreement giving us the right to develop the 80 acres of land, provided we met certain benchmarks, according to current headmaster Stephen Repsher. 

Those included building 53,000 square feet of high-school facilities by 2015 and later developing middle and lower schools on the site—or else losing the rights to some of the original donation.

Everyone knew there were environmental and infrastructural issues that had to be addressed before construction could begin. Edwards estimated that it would be at least three years before those problems were dealt with and a few more years before the school was built. 

However, then impediments began to pile up, scads of them. Repsher ticked off biological, archaeological, historical, hydrological, toxicological, and seismic studies that took place over the six years after the donation.

Endangered species popped up seemingly at every turn. First it was the fear that vernal pools on the site contained fairy shrimp, but those claims were disproved. Then California bunchgrass and Orcutt grass were found. 

Finally, someone raised concerns over the potential disruption to nearby Swainson’s hawks. 

All in all, several hundred thousand dollars were spent to prepare the land.

And there were also concerns about identity. 

“People saw Sacramento Country Day as part of the city of Sacramento. There was much more affinity to Sacramento than El Dorado Hills or Folsom,” Repsher said. 

But he maintains the biggest impediment was the price tag. 

The land was donated, but $25 million was needed to fully develop the site. 

To date, $3.7 million has been raised as part of a capital campaign to upgrade and expand the campus, but the Board felt—and still feels—that it would not be prudent to issue another bond or go deeply into debt to build a new campus.

When GenCorp first donated the land, Edwards called it “a gift whose effect will extend farther into the future than any of us can now imagine.” 

In the end, his words proved prophetic, just not in the sense he imagined.

—Miles Bennett-Smith