Schools

Cara Day-McKellar Banking on La Mesa as Home for Her Private Prep School

La Mesa native is remodeling old Home Savings building on Jackson Drive for 110-student nonreligious K-12 school.

Cara Day-McKellar, back in the city of her birth, has a new home for her private school—the old Home Savings building on Jackson Drive.

Day-McKellar Preparatory School, founded in 2008 in Alpine, will boast at least 110 students from kindergarten through high school when it opens Sept. 9 with room for 10 more in the 9,600-square-foot space that began renovation last week.

“Kids are being dumbed down” in the public schools, says Day-McKellar, whose own four children (ages 11-17) will attend her La Mesa school south of Grossmont Center and next to an Interstate 8 off-ramp

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She says her nonreligious school—with annual tuition starting at $14,194—provides an antidote to what she calls the “mugs and jugs” educational system. 

She says public schools, which she terms “holding tanks,” merely open the heads of children and pour information in.

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Public schools teach students “how to find an answer rather than ask the right question,” says Day-McKellar, who lives in a San Diego waterfront high-rise. “Public education needs to be privatized. I’m a huge supporter of vouchers. The arguments against it are ridiculous.”

Day-McKellar, a trim woman born at Grossmont Hospital in 1970, wore a warmup suit and took calls on her iPhone as she led a reporter on a short tour Thursday morning.

The bank has been mostly empty for seven years, she says, with only Barbecues Galore renting partial space in the stately building next to the FedEx Office store. It’s been vacant for a year.

Day-McKellar says the makeover will cost $577,000. The city’s fees—in 28 categories—account for $5,118 (see attached). She says she designed the floor plan itself, with a central kitchen and surrounding classrooms. The city required extra doors and other changes.

Each class space will be a subject area—with 16 teachers (two per class) working only in their area of expertise. The tiled bank lobby will be a theater space, she says.

But she’s keeping the bank vault. It’ll be a recording studio.

Sharon Wilson of Alpine, a local architect, helped Day-McKellar with the formal drawings, which were approved July 15 by City Hall after being submitted last November.

Although she’s happy with the location, she originally sought to put her school elsewhere in La Mesa—at 7317 El Cajon Blvd. in an office complex across the street from a used-car dealership.

“We really didn’t like the location—it wasn’t right for us,” she says, mindful of her client families, who travel mainly from coastal San Diego and North County. (She has only two La Mesa students, she says.) Now their 45-minute commute to Alpine will be cut to 20 minutes, she says.

Owner Went to Rolando Elementary School

Cara (pronounced CARE-uh) Day-McKellar is a product of public schools, it turns out.

She attended and Monte Vista High School, graduating in 1987 at age 16. After San Diego State, she says, she taught in the early 1990s in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District—at Loma, Highlands and La Presa elementary schools—all in Spring Valley. She earned her SDSU master’s degree in 1998.

Her venture is fulfillment of a dream. At age 4, she says, she announced to her family she wanted to have her own school. 

“You want to be a principal?” her family asked.

No, she wanted to start a school—and not be what she now terms a paper-pusher principal.

But owning a school didn’t happen until after a 15-year career as an after-school tutor and reading specialist in Alpine. She says her client families urged her to expand to a full-scale operation. So she launched the school three years ago.

In April 2009, Day-McKellar Prep gained full accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Now Day-McKellar is looking forward to an Aug. 30 grand opening.

A renter for now—the Jackson Drive building is owned by Donald and Lois Dechant of La Jolla—Day-McKellar would someday like to buy a shuttered elementary school.

La Mesa as Large Classroom

Despite its physical limits, her school will use La Mesa as a classroom—with dozens of field trips planned to local resources such as the Joan Kroc Center and forays to local nursing homes, where students can perform. Her school’s PE requirement will be met by shuttling students in a van daily to the La Mesa Community Center and Lake Murray, for example.

She balks at the idea that her school caters to the wealthy, saying, “I don’t have a bunch of kids being dropped off [by] helicopter. I have families making choices.”

She takes special pride in her emphasis on preparation for the SAT—once called the Scholastic Aptitude Test but now terming itself a reasoning test.

“It’s a test of how well you think, reason,” Day-McKellar says. “It’s the great equalizer” for students seeking college admission from different backgrounds.

“It’s a reliable test,” she says, but typical schools don’t get students ready for it. Hers does, she says, by weaving SAT test-taking skills into the curriculum at all ages.

She calls her teaching method “project-based, constructivist learning,” where students rarely use textbooks (except in math) and write their own study guides.

“You have ownership of it,” she says. “It’s transformational. Our frame of reference is experiencing, exploring, discovering—a very different learning model” from public schools.

Although she hasn’t been in operation long enough to cite figures on college admission of her students, she’s boasted success on a national stage.

In mid-June, five of her seventh-graders competed in the Kenneth E. Behring National History Day Contest at the University of Maryland—and took first place in the Junior Group Performance category.

After preliminary local and regional contests, a group led by teacher Hillary Gaddis made it to the national finals, where they told the story of the 1980 U.S. Summer Olympic team—which stayed at home amid President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Games.

“We are so excited,” Gaddis, 28, told a reporter. “We did it. We got the gold medal—it was incredible.”

Also amazing: One of Day-McKellar’s teachers was a fourth-grade student of hers 20 years ago.

Kerianne Koehler was an 8-year-old student back in her Spring Valley school days. Now 28, Koehler will rejoin her former mentor as a primary school teacher.

 “I know you and want to work for you,” Day-McKellar recalls Koehler as saying.

Day-McKellar says she pitted Koehler against other candidates, and the screening was definitive: “She was the first pick.”


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