Cal Coast Academy broke ground last month on the expansion of its private school campus in Carmel Valley, a process 12 years in the making.
“It’s finally, finally happening,” said Cal Coast founder Jan Dunning.
The new classroom building will add almost 10,000 square feet of additional building space to the campus located on Clews Ranch Road, right along the SR-56 bike path. The Cal Coast property is home to the 150-year-old historic Stevens house—the “magnificent” old house was completely renovated last summer, painted a deep blue with white trim.
The house will serve administrative uses while the new single-story classroom structure will feature 13 classrooms, a faculty lounge, a multimedia-tech center, locker room and student restrooms. New facilities will also include a student rec room, an art studio, a science laboratory, commercial grade kitchen, an outdoor courtyard and a student-maintained garden.
Dunning said it has been a “long, long haul” for Cal Coast Academy to reach this milestone.
In 2015, the Carmel Valley Community Planning Board reviewed the school plans and made no recommendation, failing to reach a majority vote. There were concerns about the rural location of the school, potential wildfire risks and the close proximity to an equestrian facility now known as Carmel Creek Ranch. An appeal was filed to the San Diego Planning Commission’s approval of the project, which was denied.
The grades 6-12 school will be capped at 75 students and be mindful of the sensitivity of the horses next door by using no outside alarms, bells or public address system and limiting school traffic on the small dirt access road by shuttling students to and from campus from the small 56 bike path parking lot on Carmel Country Road.
In addition to the planning commission appeal, the school was also sued and went to court.
“It took so many years that we lost our permits and then we submitted again in October 2019,” Dunning said. While the city promised an expedited process, the pandemic hit and the next set of permits took over three years to secure.
As the school could not operate on the Carmel Valley site, for years they have been operating the school on a temporary site on a property off Del Dios Highway. However, a silver lining of the pandemic was that in starting in the summer of 2020, they were allowed to operate the school out of outdoor tents in Carmel Valley.
“That saved me. Our population was diminishing because we never knew from one year to the next where we were going to be,” Dunning said.
With the city permits finally refreshed, construction was supposed to start in 2023 but they had to wait another additional year for SDG&E to move a gas line.
Now progress is being made, with the framing of the classroom buildings taking shape.
“We are really pushing so that by second semester, January of 2025, we will be occupying the new buildings,” Dunning said.
During those years of being “bandied around,” the school’s enrollment dropped significantly but Dunning said it is now rebounding and they anticipate being at full capacity once the new buildings are done. “It’s going to be a magnificent site.”
Dunning founded Cal Coast to serve students who felt underserved in other school environments, whether due to mild learning challenges or experiencing anxiety on larger, more congested campuses. With a 6:1 student-teacher ratio, the school’s mission is to prep young people for “a lifetime of intellectual exploration, personal and academic growth and social responsibility”.
“All of us want happy, healthy kids that have great strong relationships with others,” Dunning said. “We are always peppering into our year activities that our students do to build life skills, collaboration, communication, time management and problem-solving.”
Another big part of Cal Coast’s philosophy is career planning, which starts as early as sixth grade. Students take a career aptitude test to help find something that not only lights them up and they are passionate about, but they also learn how they can use those talents to make a difference in the world. The career-oriented school has students participating in internships, apprenticeships and entrepreneurship classes.
“Everything we do is completely application-based, preparing kids for life and to be gainfully employed and ultimately, be fulfilled and happy,” Dunning said. “We are ecstatic about making our individualized approach to education accessible to more students. This is a bold step forward in supporting our mission of serving the whole student, inside and beyond the academic classroom.”
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