The Mall Crawl Gets Educational in Mission Viejo

If you’re home-schooling your children in the Capistrano Unified School District area, there’s an upscale Orange County mall that wants to be your friend.

Giving new meaning to the phrase “one-stop shopping,” patrons of the Shops at Mission Viejo will soon be able to outfit themselves at a mega-chain clothing store, grab a gourmet snack, and attend a math workshop, all in one trip.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Capistrano Unified School District’s new Educational Resource Center--the first of its kind in California--is scheduled today at a spot right around the corner from Saks Fifth Avenue, dontcha know. The center opens later this year.

The idea is simple: take education where the people are. Shopping.

It’s not because the mall can’t find some ritzy boutique to sign a lease. The mall’s developer, Simon Property Group, and its nonprofit arm, Simon Youth Foundation, will forgo the rent--a hefty $100,000 a year. Foundation director Arny Bereson said the donation is part of an ongoing Simon mission.

“We view the mall as the town center of the new millennium,” Bereson said.

“These types of centers could be almost anywhere. There’s no reason why you can’t have them in museums, at the workplace.”

“It’s very innovative,” said Jolene Dougherty, the district’s director of elementary school operations. “We want to reach the public any way we can and we thought this was a wonderful idea. It’s very centrally located, very accessible.”

The foundation already works with school districts in other communities where it has malls, and has opened 12 Educational Resource Centers throughout the country, with three others scheduled to open by year’s end. Fifty more are in development or will open in 2001.

In Mission Viejo, the idea’s not entirely new. At one time, the district ran its reading program out of the old mall before it became the upscale Shops at Mission Viejo.

Struggling students could make an appointment, then drop by the mall for one-on-one time with a reading specialist. That program now operates at individual school sites.

When the new Education Resource Center opens, it will tap into a different education trend: The 50 parents of home-schooled kids in the district will have a central place to go.

The home-school program, Capistrano Home Outreach Option for Student Education (CHOOSE), will be housed there. Two teachers will be available to offer workshops on how to teach and test students, and walk parents through the curriculum. Textbooks also will be available for them. In addition, the district’s nonprofit fund-raising arm for art, music and other programs will have offices there.

That’s the plan now, but district spokeswoman Julie Jennings said: “Who knows beyond that? Our hope is that we can grow this.”

Most of Simon’s other mall centers operate as a satellite campus targeted at high-risk high school students on the verge of dropping out. The students learn at their own pace and also intern at one of the mall shops.

The concept worked, Bereson said, because those students liked going to the mall--even if it was for school.

“The second largest component of a young person’s time is spent at the mall,” Berenson said. “It’s a socially acceptable environment. It’s neutral.”