Founder to Release Reins of His School

For his 70th birthday, the director of Los Encinos School in Encino got a canoe.

It sits in Chris Holabird’s home in Beverly Glen, a reminder that when the school bell rings in September, he and the canoe will be drifting through the waters of June Lake north of Mammoth Mountain, leaving the school to sail on without him.

“It will be hard,” said Nan Marx, a parent of two children at Los Encinos and a trustee for the private school. “But we know it’s time for him to go.”

Seventeen years ago, Holabird was an educator on leave of absence from the Oakwood School when he found St. Nicholas Episcopal Church on Ventura Boulevard. The church had built school rooms a decade earlier, but could not open a school program, he said.

So, Holabird used it to create Los Encinos School, a private kindergarten through sixth-grade school.

“I was very lucky in finding this empty,” Holabird said.

Because of limited space, the grades had to be combined, but Holabird found that worked better for his philosophy of teaching.

The students are often told, “Do your personal best, not your neighbor’s best,” he said. “Your best.”

So, if a first-grader does not start reading with the other classmates, teachers do not have to push or prod. “This is a school that doesn’t rush achievement,” Holabird said.

Combining the grade levels not only gives children the flexibility to learn at their own pace, but also to intermingle with students of different ages.

“Of course, the $64,000 question is, ‘If we ever moved to a bigger space, would we keep it the same way?’ ” Holabird said. “I don’t know.”

Holabird has broadened the students’ horizons by connecting second- and third-graders with elderly patients in a nursing home, arranging for fifth- and sixth-graders to volunteer at the Valley Shelter in North Hollywood, and having third- and fourth-graders become pen pals with public school students.

“We try to get the kids relating to the community,” he said.

Los Encinos School has had its tough times, Holabird said, especially during its second year when a teacher went on an emergency leave of absence. The quality of the program suffered, he said, and some parents pulled their children out of the school.

“I was really worried,” Holabird said. “I could see it collapsing.”

What saved Los Encinos was the loyalty of parents, he said.

His open-door policy with parents and his habit of saying hello to each student every morning has been part of what make Los Encinos special, said Nancy Sherman, the mother of an 8-year-old boy at the school. “He’s the reason we came to this school.”

Holabird, who stays in shape by jogging three times a week, has a self-effacing wit and charm, parents say. He plays the bagpipes at special events, sprays the playground to repel bees and even plunges the toilets if needed, Sherman said.

“We say we should get him a gold toilet plunger as a going-away present,” Sherman said.

To Marx, who is on the committee searching for Holabird’s replacement, Los Encinos is like Holabird’s child, one who has reached its adolescence and created its own identity. “I think it’s time for it to step out on its own,” she said.

Added Holabird: “It seems to me a plus to pass it along when I felt good about it.”

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