When San Diego County Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts proposed turning an abandoned private school into a boarding school for foster children, they had to prove they could raise $5 million to transform the property.
The duo did more than that.
To date, more than $10 million in private funds have poured in for the 238-acre project east of the San Diego Wild Animal Park in the San Pasqual Valley.
“Clearly, we have been able to do a lot better than we anticipated,” Cox said.
Roberts said although he didn’t think the task would be a piece of cake, he knew it could be done.
“Five million dollars is still a lot of money,” he said. “While I didn’t think it would be easy, I knew there were a lot of services and giving people in the county.
“It was a labor of love, but it has happened.”
The county bought the property in October 1999 for $15 million from the Seventh Day Adventist Church , but not before Roberts and Cox laid out a promising financing package needed for capital costs and renovation of the site.
Since then, donations, some in excess of $5 million, have been dedicated to the academy.
Contributors include: Metabolife ($5 million), the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation ($5 million), Price Foundation ($500,000), Qualcomm Inc. ($1.5 million), Walton Family Foundation ($500,000), John and Becky Moores ($500,000), Jeannie and Arthur Rivkin ($500,000), and Mary and Jack Goodall ($500,000).
In addition to the private donations, $1.5 million in state funding was allocated in the 2000-01 budget.
The school will officially open on Sept. 28. The county plans to house up to 250 foster youths between the ages of 12 and 18. The supervisors said the facility is needed because of the lack of foster homes in the county. There are 7,000 foster youth, and only 2,500 foster homes.
Cox said even if the current property wasn’t available, the county was going to have to find a solution to this growing problem. Acquiring the site was an added benefit, he said.
“Having the San Pasqual Academy as an existing facility has made this tremendously easy to accomplish,” Cox said. “It lends itself to the type of use we were talking about.”
The residential portion of the academy will be run by the nonprofit New Alternatives Inc., which operates 19 similar homes in San Diego and Orange counties. The educational side of the academy will operate under the San Diego County Board of Education and receive annual funds in the same manner as other schools in the system.
The academy is said to be the only one of its kind in the country.
As an architect by profession, Roberts kept a close eye on the renovation work being done. He said the construction crew would sometimes hate to see him coming.
“I’m not trying to be the architect for this project, but I want it to be done right,” Roberts said. “I want to know that not just the buildings, but that this program we are establishing is going to be a model for the whole country.”
