Monday, May 19, 2008

Orange County Register Salutes Carol Van Asten, director of Carden Academy

After 30 years, Carol Van Asten's back-to-basics grade school is thriving, even on a street once dominated by crime.

HUNTINGTON BEACH – The fifth grade teacher's attention flew out the window as police swarmed onto Utica Avenue.

She directed her students' attention to the chalkboard. She doesn't remember now if it was a vocabulary word or a math problem she wrote. All she remembers is that she had to keep their minds focused on anything other than the activities outside that window.

Less than 50 yards away, outside, the police were confronting two drug dealers, yet another skirmish in a long-term battle that had been launched, in part, by the teacher herself.

As the police grabbed and handcuffed the men, Carol Van Asten walked past her students to the window and calmly shut the drapes.

At the time, the early 1990s, Van Asten, the school's director and occasional teacher, didn't know if the drug dealers and prostitutes who had staked claim to her part of Utica Avenue would ever go away. About once a month, students weren't allowed to play outside on the playground because of the police activity. Once, a teacher discovered a discarded automatic weapon near a campus fence (she covered it with her sweater and called the police).

Van Asten had no idea if her private school, the tiny Carden Academy, with its pristine academic reputation, would survive the figh.

Everything in Carol Van Asten's background is small … except for the fish.

She was raised in the northern Minnesota town of Borup. Population: 90. She attended a one-room school house where she went from kindergarten through high school with the same 18 classmates.

Her mother was a teacher, and her father was a farmer/taxidermist. By the time she was 10, Carol was proficient at what she called a little girl's "northern Minnesota life" – sewing, crochet, knitting and making corn husk dolls.

And she played piano. She was so good at playing piano that, at age 10, she became a piano teacher. She taught Mozart and Brahms door to door to Borupians from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. She had more than a dozen students.

"I always knew I was going to be a teacher," she said.

Carol Van Asten should be famous in Borup for something else, but, she explained with a laugh, her father Kermit Temanson took all her plaudits. While visiting Borup as an adult, Carol caught a 42-pound muskie, the largest in local history. She reeled it in, but when a newspaper reporter came by to do a story about the historic catch, Kermit told a whopper of a fish tale about how hecaught the muskie.

"It was me," she said.

Carol moved away from Borup for good in 1965 ended up in Southern California, working a teaching job at a public school in Cudahy. She taught second and third grade at Elizabeth Street Elementary School for 12 frustrating years. It wasn't the best experience because the students' test scores did not improve. Carol said they were not reading as well as they should.

In 1977, she and her husband Willy (a metallurgy instructor at Long Beach City College) decided to go into business for themselves and run their own school.

The first place they looked was Stanton where they found the Carden Academy, a school named after early 20th-century educator, Mae Carden, who believed in back-to-basics education.

When Carol walked into that building, she was thinking about an investment.

By the time she left, her life had a new purpose.

"The students were reading. They were writing," she said.

"They were 6 years old, and they were doing more than the students at Elizabeth Street."

Carol fell in love with the Carden method, which hammers home the sounds of the alphabet. Carden reading books, which have not been changed or influenced by education trends over the past 70-plus years, do not have pictures. Instead, they drill on sounds over and over again.

And the teachers don't read to the students. Students read to teachers.

Carol bought the Carden Academy in Stanton for $45,000.

The Carden Academy formula is simple. Carol's enrollment of 165 students (kindergarten through eighth grade) start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution ("We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …) and a non-denominational prayer. As the teachers call roll, the students are required to respond "Good Morning" to the teacher.

At the end of each lesson, the students are required to thank the teacher.

Tuition is $8,000 per year.

She ran the school in Stanton for two years before moving it to Utica Avenue in Huntington Beach.

• • •

Through the 1980s, Carol couldn't have been happier with the results of her Huntington Beach students. But in the 1990s, the neighborhood started to change. And the parents driving near the school and seeing drug dealers and hookers, couldn't have been happy.

"The neighborhood," Carol said, "was engulfed."

Former Huntington Beach Police Chief Ron Lowenberg said Utica Avenue had a reputation that stretched across Orange County.

"It was known as a place… to buy drugs or find prostitution," Lowenberg said.

A Neighborhood Watch program was established, but it failed to keep the criminals away. A man named Dave Burris, who owned property near the school, approached Carol about getting involved.

"It was really bad around here, and she was a fighter," Burris said. "We got tired of the drug dealers."

Despite warnings that many of those drug dealers carried guns, Carol toured the apartments to the east and west of her school.

"It was atrocious," she said. "It looked like a war-torn area. Cockroaches were everywhere. There were electrical wires hanging."

She considered buying a new building and moving the school. But she decided to stay and fight.

Carol and Burris complained to the Huntington Beach City Council so many times and so loudly that a task force was formed. They met each month at the Boys and Girls Club. Undercover officers were assigned to the neighborhood near the school.

Lowenberg said his department established a mobile police unit on the street.

"Carol demonstrated courageous leadership," Lowenberg said. "It was a great partnership, and we were very successful."

Carol helped the landlords of one apartment apply for a government grant to clean up their building. They were given $400,000.

By the mid-1990s, almost all of the crime was gone.

"When I saw the new coats of paint on the apartments, I knew we had won," Carol said.

...

On May 14, Carol Van Asten was honored by local politicians, parents and students for working 30 years to educate children.

Carden kindergarteners rank in the top 5 percent nationally in reading, science, math and listening (all categories on the Stanford 10 test). Carden eighth graders rank in the top 10 percent in reading, math, language, spelling, listening and thinking skills.

The school's academic success, and the story of how Carol fought to keep it going, has impressed many of the Carden students' parents.

"When we started, the school had an impeccable reputation," said Bassem Sultan, the father of a girl in eighth grade girl and a boy in first grade, "And the reputation has gotten better."

They're still back-to-basics at Carol's school, reading classics like "Treasure Island" in sixth grade, "To Kill a Mockingbird" in seventh and "Hamlet" in eighth. The kindergarteners still use the same reading books their parents might have used 30 years ago.

And they all still thank the teachers for their lessons.