2014 July PASO Magazine

ROUND TOWN
Pleasant Valley School, five miles
east of San Miguel, was founded in
1884. A September, 1886 issue of
“The Inland Messenger” reported that
the people of Hog Canyon wanted to
rename their area ‘Pleasant Valley’ – it
wasn’t changed but the name stayed
with the school.
The schoolhouse, built in 1908,
holds the record as the longest continuously-used
one-room school in
SLO County. Old family names still
abound in the area, including Wells,
Sweeney, Quenzer, Hirschler, Sinclair,
Heer, Dauth, Rougeot, Freeman, Von
Dollen, Tuley, Smith, Henry, Stewart,
Anaya, Root, Christensen, Van Horn,
Davis, Bridges, Doty, Thacker, Silva,
Atkins and McGuire.
Other schools, including Ellis and
Ranchita, are long gone. There were
eight grade levels and as the teacher
worked with one grade the others did
assigned work. Pat Smith Kennedy,
who attended in the 1940s, remembers
the teacher allowing students who had
completed their grade work to listen
in quietly as she taught the next level
and later ask questions. As a result,
when Pat’s family moved into the San
Pleasant Valley School
Miguel School District in her fifth
grade year, she was far ahead of her
new classmates.
Discipline was meted out as necessary
with a ruler across the knuckles.
Children were expected to behave and
expelled if they were too much of a
problem. Tales out of school are told
in “Readin’ Writin’ Rithmatic” (published
in 2004 by the El Paso de Robles
Area Pioneer Museum) of pranks
played on both students and teachers:
of frogs, mice, dead snakes and lizards
put into desks and cupboards and tacks
on seats. A story by Lester Hirschler,
who attended the school in the 1920s,
tells of the Sinclair boys tossing .22
cartridges into the pot-bellied stove –
which popped like
popcorn in the heat
– on some of the
cold days.
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Students were also janitors - cleaning
floors, blackboards and erasers,
emptying stove ashes and bringing
in wood for next morning’s fire. In
later years an oil heater was installed.
Lunches were brought from home in
paper sacks or metal pails and traded.
Games like baseball, basketball, hopscotch,
hide-and-seek, ring-aroundthe-rosy,
marbles and mumbly-peg
(tossing a pocket-knife into the dirt
by the blade) were popular at recess.
Swings, monkey bars, rings and teetertotters
were well used.
Transportation to and from school
was by horse or pony, horse-drawn
cart (later a car), bicycle and walking if
close by. An enclosed shed behind the
school provided stalls to tie up horses,
with food and water stored onsite. Students
put on plays and learned music,
drawing and crafts.
In 1962, with more than one teacher
now at the school, Miss Shirley Lusby
taught first and second grade. She later
taught third grade for several years at
Lillian Larsen School. Rural school
supervisors from the county visited
the schools, giving written tests to
discoversanmiguel.com
Located at 611 8th St.,
corner 8th & Oak in the
Z Beauty Salon,
Paso Robles
Mondays and Fridays
9:30am-4:30pm.
Phone
(805) 440-7500
check progress. County school nurses
checked the health of students and
taught healthy habits. Parents and
teachers provided transportation for
field trips.
A new, large school building was
constructed in 1994 and since then a
half dozen portable classrooms have
been added. Classrooms are large,
bright and airy. When sidewalks were
poured for the new additions students
became part of the process embedding
their handprints in the concrete.
The school is now K-8. Kindergarten
has its own classroom and two classes
are combined in first through eighth
grades depending on the number of
students at each level. A spacious library
boasts an inventory of nearly
12,000 books.
Upper level students raise racing
pigeons. The unique project is used
in math and by 8th graders who keep
meticulous records of the birds’ lives
from eggs to the sky. Current enrollment
is 130 students and parent participation
is high.
In May, 2003 the old schoolhouse
was formally dedicated as a Historic
Building by the Native Sons of the
Golden West. In 2001 the Pleasant
Valley Community Foundation was
formed to preserve the history of
and provide funding for the school.
They recently signed a lease for the
original schoolhouse which they
hope to restore.
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July 2014, Paso Robles Magazine 43