Our Community. Our Schools. Our Impact.
San Clemente's first classroom was a house. In 1925, two years before the town had a school building, founder Ole Hanson hired a teacher named Bernice Ayer and gave her fourteen students and a small home on Avenida Sierra to teach them in. A century later, on a single Friday in October, a group of parents persuaded five families to open their front doors, a Spanish Revival on Ola Vista, a mid-century house cantilevered over a canyon on Trafalgar, and invited the whole town to walk through.
People came for different reasons. Some had gone to these schools. Some had sent their children through them and now send their grandchildren. Some have no children in the district at all and simply believe that a town is only as good as what it gives its kids. They admired the tile, had lunch at the Casino, and went home. It was a wonderful day, and it was also a community deciding what it owes its children, and then showing up for them.
The first San Clemente Home Tour raised $135,000, divided the net proceeds among eleven public schools on a per-student basis so that every child counted. The tour handed the money to the parent led Foundations and PTAs who know each campus best, and got out of the way. Here is what they did with it.
1. Improve student mental health
A child's state of mind walks into school with them every morning. A student who feels unsafe or unseen spends the day managing that feeling instead of learning, and no curriculum can out-teach it. So the building itself has to say the right things first: you are safe here, you are welcome, you belong. That is the first thing a school owes its students, and the thing least likely to earn applause when it is done well.
At Vista del Mar, the stage risers in the multipurpose room got stable railings and stairs, so that a fifth grader in the spring concert is standing on something built to hold her, and the handball courts were repainted with bright designs and encouraging messages, then sealed so the paint will last. At Shorecliffs Middle School, the Foundation put its share into security cameras and protective window screens, an investment no one will ever photograph and every parent will be glad of.
"Our primary goal for the 2025–2026 school year was to strengthen campus safety through the addition of new security cameras and protective window screens to ensure a safe, healthy learning environment for all students and staff." — Josh Wellikson, Principal, Shorecliffs Middle School
Security is the part parents notice. What a child notices, every single day, is whether her campus looks like a place somebody cares about. At Las Palmas Elementary, which sits on the site of the grammar school Ole Hanson built in 1927, a partnership with the Laguna College of Art + Design put eight large-scale murals on the campus walls. Luis Barajas, Hanna Smith, and Dave VanPatten painted them to honor the school's coastal roots and the Hispanic heritage of the neighborhood, and more than 700 students walk past them every morning. Adults tend to say predictable things about murals. A third grader says it best.
"When I walk through school and see the murals, they make me feel proud to be a Las Palmas student. They make our campus brighter, happier, and more like home." — Oliver M., 3rd Grade, Las Palmas Elementary
More like home. A fundraiser built on the idea of home produced, at a public elementary school across town, a child reaching for the same word.
2. Unlock learning a standard budget leaves out
A district budget covers the classroom. What it rarely stretches to is the robot, the week at science camp, and the elective that makes a kid decide what she wants to be, and those are the things a community has to choose to pay for.
At Concordia Elementary, the tour's support of the Splash Foundation helps fund Robotics, a MakerSpace, Science Camp, classroom technology, teacher grants, and extra help in math and literacy. At Vista del Mar, it supported training and leadership development for AVID, the program that teaches students, many of them the first in their families to think seriously about college, how to organize, ask for help, and keep going.
And at San Clemente High School, support from the tour and the school's Education Foundation helps sustain the International Baccalaureate program, a distinction shared by roughly seven percent of American high schools and the kind of curriculum families elsewhere pay private tuition to get. Any Triton can take an IB course. Students build a butterfly garden as a service project, engineer real solutions in Design Technology, and stand up at a Theory of Knowledge exhibition to explain how they know what they think they know. A public high school that holds its own against the best private academies in the county is the result of a decision a community keeps making, and in 2025 it made that decision again.
I love the IB Program because it allows me to think critically and not only assess how things happen but also why they happen. I love Theory of Knowledge and IB ideals because they push me to approach my classes and learning from different perspectives! — Lucy B., 12th Grade, SCHS
3. Invest in teacher growth
Some of the most effective money in education never touches a student directly. Through the Forster Ranch Education Foundation, supported by tour proceeds, the entire science department at Bernice Ayer Middle School, a school named for the teacher in that house on Avenida Sierra, attended the National Science Teachers Association conference in Anaheim. They went together rather than sending one teacher to take notes for the rest, and between them they sat through more than fifty sessions on modern lab practice and STEM tools.
"There was SO MUCH information available to us. Our science students are sure to gain from our insight. This was a first for the rest of the team, and they were all amazed by the experience and are still talking about it." — Tracy Welter, Science Department Chair, Bernice Ayer Middle School
A teacher who is still talking about it months later is a teacher whose students are going to excel. Not just this year, but for years going forward.
Why the houses?
Cameras and screens, paint and railings, robot kits, conference badges, and a curriculum that asks teenagers to think. It reads less like the proceeds of a gala and more like a school’s wish list, which is exactly what it was.
On Friday, October 23, 2026, a new set of families opens a new set of doors. Walk through them. Admire the beams, the wrought iron, the hundred-year-old stucco someone chose to keep. Then remember that the people who live there said yes to hundreds of strangers in their living room for one reason, and it was not just to show off the house. It was the same reason you are reading this page. Somewhere in San Clemente, a third grader is walking past a mural and feeling like she belongs there, and she doesn't know you helped.