In the Valley of the Private Schools : Education: Five exclusive private schools have turned the Ojai area into the prep school capital of the West Coast.

The trip down the hill was only seven miles long.

But the moonlight ride past lemon orchards and stone fences that line Ojai’s meandering country lanes was long enough to take five teen-aged girls into a world of trouble.

The five 11th-graders from conservative, traditional Thacher School traveled across the valley one Saturday night late last month to attend a party hosted by students from liberal, holistic Oak Grove School.

Thacher and Oak Grove are among five exclusive boarding schools that have turned the rural Ojai Valley into the West Coast’s prep school center--a place where nearly every other teen-ager in town goes to a fancy private school.

Along with Ojai Valley School, Villanova Preparatory School and Happy Valley School, Thacher and Oak Grove offer high school curricula that feature individualized instruction and exotic field trips, and cost up to $16,300 a year.

The boarding schools also share California’s best climate and a spectacularly isolated mountain setting that shields youngsters from big-city distractions while still offering handy access to Los Angeles.

But students attending the five schools don’t necessarily share the same philosophy about life, the five Thacher girls would soon learn. That discovery would lead to their expulsion from the “Valley of Prep Schools.”

Thacher School was started 101 years ago by an Ojai rancher to extol the virtues of hard physical and mental work and the value of a rigid code of honor of the kind that helped win the West.

Oak Grove School’s high school was started six years ago to further the teachings of a New Age philosopher promoting “the investigation of enduring human issues with originality and an open-minded spirit.”

The five Thacher 11th-graders allegedly encountered beer being served and marijuana being smoked when they arrived at a private Ojai home for the Oak Grove students’ party.

When they returned to Thacher, the girls were asked about their unauthorized absences. Officials say they eventually admitted that one of them had sipped beer and two of them had smoked a marijuana cigarette.

The next day, the girls appeared before Thacher’s “judicial council”--a panel of students that advise school administrators on matters relating to the school’s honor code.

The five were found to have broken Thacher’s rules by sneaking off campus to attend the party and by using drugs and alcohol. Even worse, they were found to have violated the honor code by lying.

Three of the girls were expelled that day. The other two were ordered suspended until at least next fall.

“They came back and tried to cover up,” said Mike Mulligan, Thacher’s assistant headmaster. “Had they told the truth, the outcome would have been much different. When you break the trust, you break the ideals we strive for.”

Across the valley at Oak Grove School, no punishment was meted out as a result of the party. In fact, school officials said, they were unaware of the incident.

School administrators say their policy is to “attempt to avoid the use of punishment” by getting students to focus instead on the “logical consequences” of their own behavior.

“We’ve never had to dismiss anyone,” said Mary Lou Sorem, director of the Oak Grove high school. “We probably don’t have as many rules.”

Any Oak Grove student found to be abusing alcohol or drugs would be counseled, Sorem said. A “heavy problem” could lead to a student’s expulsion, she said. “They understand if they take drugs we may ask them to leave.”

That policy is consistent with the philosophy of Oak Grove’s founder, India-born Jiddu Krishnamurti. School officials say they try to keep their teaching format flexible enough for students to investigate such things as the importance of establishing the “right relationship among human beings.”

Eighteen of Oak Grove’s 30 high school students pay $11,100 in annual tuition and board and live in a co-ed dorm on the woodsy, 150-acre campus. Taught to respect the environment, youngsters are discouraged from collecting lizards, squashing bugs or eating meat.

Oak Grove students say they are sometimes painfully aware that their boarding school neighbors have less freedom than they do.

“This school tried to organize reggae dances a year or so ago and we wrote to the other schools inviting them to come,” said Anne Gustafson, an 18-year-old senior.

“But the only people who showed up were from Nordhoff High,” the public school. “It’s hard for the kids from Thacher and the other schools to get into town at night.”

Students at Thacher say they are kept so busy with their studies and with campus activities that they don’t have time to worry that they are limited to short visits to downtown Ojai on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings.

Thacher freshmen are required to tend to horses each day at the 425-acre hillside ranch. Students regularly take mountain trail rides, hikes and backpack trips that mirror the rugged life style that students have experienced since 1889.

That’s the year rancher Sherman Thacher first invited Eastern boys to his sprawling spread to experience the fast-disappearing life of the true West.

The 225 students who paid $15,350 each to enroll this year must still adhere to Sherman Thacher’s stringent study ethic, his love of the outdoors, a Western code of honor and strict rules that guide life in the separate boys and girls dorms at the ranch.

“Sometimes I’m here on campus a month and a half at a time without ever leaving,” said 17-year-old senior Peter Bouchard, of Alberta, Canada. Bouchard spends his spare time working on a radio-controlled model airplane that is equipped with a camera that can take aerial photographs of the Thacher School grounds.

Twelfth-grader Andrew Shakman is Thacher’s elected chairman--its student body president. He said he ventures off campus every few weeks to visit his family in Ventura for half a day.

He said he does not socialize with Ojai residents or with students from the valley’s other boarding schools, however. There isn’t time.

“I don’t know them. I don’t think we’re at any great loss by not knowing them. I know that comes across arrogantly. But the fact is everything is focused on campus here,” Shakman said.

Thacher requires students to dress formally for dinner four times a week. It strictly limits boys and girls dorm “visitations” and prohibits teen-agers from having television sets in their rooms or cars in the campus parking lot.

But Thacher isn’t the toughest of Ojai’s boarding schools. A mile away, Ojai Valley School has most of the same rules. And more.

A neatly typed “haircut list”-- naming students in need of a school-arranged trip to the barber--is posted on the locked glass door that leads to the office of Carl Cooper, headmaster of the 106-student high school.

The 25-year-old campus sits high atop a ridge on a remote 180-acre site at the edge of Los Padres National Forest. The boys dorm is on one side of the brushy ridge, and the girls dorm is on the other. Rooms are off limits to those of the opposite sex.

Cooper’s house stands between the two residence halls to make certain that edict is enforced for students, who pay $16,000 a year in tuition and board.

“We’re very conservative in our rules and regulations,” Cooper said. “We have one hour of homework each night for every hour of class. The isolation here minimizes distractions.”

Academic classes are conducted six days a week. Discipline is strict. Students face expulsion for lying, cheating on tests, unauthorized absence from school, use or possession of drugs or alcohol or “explicit sex.” Cooper said one student found with marijuana was dismissed last year.

Students must obtain written permission from their parents before they can leave campus in a vehicle. Youngsters who file their weekend free-time plans with school administrators after noon on Thursday are punished by being required to work 50 minutes on a campus project.

“That’s a pain. It’s not spontaneous,” said Darby Thomson, 18, a senior from Kauai, Hawaii. “And it’s a seven-mile walk into town unless you call a taxi, and that costs $12, one way.”

Ojai residents are friendly, Thomson said. “But they look at us as rich kids. They can tell all of the kids from boarding schools. We’re the ones carrying goody bags around with us when we’re in town.”

Said Sarah Morris, 16, of Bel-Air: “It would be nice to get out of Ojai town. I think we should do more things with the other schools up here--dances, trips. But I like the atmosphere here. It’s family-oriented, and that’s very important to me.”

The 74 students enrolled at Happy Valley School about six miles east of Ojai have considerably more freedom.

Students live and study in angular, white-stucco dorms and classrooms on a grassy hillside at the 400-acre site. Students grow some of the vegetables served in the school dining hall in their own garden.

Tuition and board totals $16,300 a year, said Lane Toler, Happy Valley’s assistant director. The school is operated by the Happy Valley Foundation, a nonprofit cultural organization established in 1927 by Theosophist Annie Besant. School officials say Besant sought to create a school “held together by an ethical and profoundly spiritual bond.”

Oak Grove’s Krishnamurti was involved in the actual creation of the school in 1946, although Happy Valley administrators say the ideas of other founders, including novelist Aldous Huxley, are blended in its educational philosophy.

Like students at other Ojai schools, Happy Valley students are given a heavy dose of outdoor activity. There are field trips to the desert, as well as snowshoeing expeditions in Yosemite National Park and autumn backpacking outings in other parts of the Sierra.

Students say they are allowed open visitation in their dorms until 10 p.m. daily. Older students can have cars and leave campus with permission. There are minimal rules.

“Happy Valley School will not condone academic, social or sexual behavior contrary to the standards of honesty, respect for others and propriety that the school deems fundamental to a learning environment,” according to a school statement.

“You can go out for dinner if you want,” said senior Juliet Yao, 17, of Mission Viejo. “A few days ago I took two friends down to Marie Callendar’s in Ventura.”

Ojai is a little too quiet for her tastes, Yao said. “I wouldn’t want to live here the rest of my life. It’s too simple for me.”

Carter Raff, a 17-year-old sophomore from Millbrae, agrees.

“Ojai is a little confining,” said Raff as he sat in the middle of the campus and strummed a guitar. Sporting shoulder-length hair and a sleeveless T-shirt bearing the name of a hard-rock band, Raff said the school’s atmosphere has helped him improve his grades “from four F’s to straight A’s in the year and a half I’ve been here.”

T-shirts and blue jeans are banned in class at Villanova Preparatory School at Ojai’s southern city limit. The school’s 240 students are free to wear them afterward, however.

Ninety-five students live on the 130-acre campus, which has been operated since 1924 by Augustinian Catholics. The school has accepted girls as boarding students for the past 2 1/2 years.

“The girls dorm is on the east side of the campus and the boys are on the west,” said Father John Pejza, Villanova’s president.

Tuition for day students is $3,600 per year. Boarding students pay $12,000.

“The school provides religious instruction but 45-50% of our kids are non-Catholic,” Pejza said.

The college-like setting of the stately 130-acre Villanova campus encourages many of the commuting students to stay late each day, said senior Dan Clark, 17, of Ventura.

“It’s a nice atmosphere where everybody knows everybody else,” Clark said. “It’s nice and green around here, not concrete like at other schools.”

Boarding student Jim Williams, 15, of Oxnard said he appreciates Ojai’s educational environment--although he initially had mixed feelings about moving to the Villanova campus.

“I wasn’t too thrilled the first time I went to Ojai,” the sophomore said.

“I went all the way through the town looking for it before I realized that that was it. But Ojai is a good place for a boarding school. You wouldn’t want one in downtown Ventura. There would be too many things to get in the way of studying.”

Villanova senior Nicole Wargo, 17, said she lives at home in Ojai, about three minutes from the campus. She said all students attending the community’s boarding schools are often painted with the same brush by local residents.

“They think we’re stuck-up prep school kids. But we’re not,” Wargo said.

A few blocks away at Nordhoff High School, Ojai’s public school, students agreed with the first part of Wargo’s assessment.

“I really don’t like the boarding school people that much. They call people here ‘townies.’ At Thacher, they’re snobbish,” said Andy Brucker, an 18-year-old senior.

Of Ojai’s five prep schools, “Villanova is a little more down to earth,” Brucker said.

Nordhoff senior Sarah Kirk attended Thacher as a freshman. But, she said, teachers there “kind of looked down on me” because she was one of only a few day students enrolled at the time.

“If you’re not spending all of your time there at Thacher they think you’re not enthusiastic. I kind of felt trapped up there. Here, I have more freedom, and I still have the same educational opportunities with my advance-placement classes that they do.”

Nordhoff High School Principal Ron Barney said his school’s advanced classes, which now offer college credit in subjects such as English, math and foreign languages, is helping keep Ojai’s private schools from siphoning off his brightest students.

Sixty of Nordhoff’s 840 students signed up for the accelerated classes last year, “so obviously they’re not draining off our top scholars,” Barney said.

The Ojai scenery and serenity that has proved so attractive to boarding school students is just as seductive to his pupils, Barney said.

“My biggest challenge is to get kids here to broaden their horizons beyond the Ojai Valley,” he said.

“There are are a lot of third- and fourth-generation kids here who are very comfortable.”