Rancho Santa Fe Spends $289K to Turn Rowe Classrooms Into 'Laboratories of Thought'

Students at R. Roger Rowe School walked into newly redesigned classrooms this week, trading traditional desks for theater-style benches, round ottomans, and whiteboard tables built for group work. The overhaul followed a two-year pilot program and cost the Rancho Santa Fe School District board $289,376, marking one of the most visible changes to the campus in years.

The redesign, first detailed by The San Diego Union-Tribune, touched 17 classrooms across the single-site K-8 campus. Joe Erpelding, R. Roger Rowe's elementary school principal and director of curriculum and instruction, called it a massive investment by both the board and teachers. He said the goal was to transform traditional classrooms into what he described as “laboratories of thought.”

School board president Jee Maghani gave the project its own nickname during the board's tour of the new spaces at last Thursday's meeting, dubbing it Rowe 5.0. Superintendent Kim Pinkerton described the start of the school year with a sense of calm excitement as the new furniture and technology settled into daily use.

New Furniture, New Tech, Same Small-School Feel

Each classroom now includes three whiteboard flip tables and three rolling vertical whiteboards, letting students collaborate and show their thinking directly on the surfaces. The tables can be flipped and nested away to free up floor space for other activities. Vertical whiteboards came from MooreCo, flip and nest whiteboard tables came from Maverick and Smith Systems, and flexible theater seating and modular stools came from Fomcore and CEF. The district partnered with Culver-Newlin to design the flexible, modular, collaborative learning spaces throughout the school.

The board also spent $166,501 on new Optoma smartboards, which let teachers write lessons by touch, embed webpages or videos, pull up Google documents, and interact directly with students. Students can share screens from their personal iPads onto the boards as well. Teachers underwent training on all the new furniture and technology before the school year began, and many spent weeks setting up their rooms and experimenting with different layouts.

Clearing Out Decades of Classroom Clutter

Swapping out old furniture for new was no small logistical task. The facilities team moved 525 pieces of furniture and roughly 50 boxes of supplies and materials per classroom, and the cleanup effort filled three dumpsters. Classrooms were deep-cleaned before the new technology and furniture went in.

Not everything ended up in the trash. Books, curriculum materials, and furniture the school no longer needed were donated to a local charter school and a home school program, giving the old classroom contents a second life elsewhere.

A Campus Facelift Ahead of the Centennial

The classroom overhaul arrived alongside a broader round of summer improvements tied to the school's approaching milestone. R. Roger Rowe is nearly 100 years old, and Rancho Santa Fe School will celebrate its centennial year in 2027. The Rancho Santa Fe Post notes the district traces its roots back to 1924, when it began as the 14-student Aliso Canyon School before formally taking the Rancho Santa Fe name in 1927, per the Rancho Santa Fe Post.

Ahead of that anniversary, crews resurfaced the playground blacktop with newly painted game and pickleball lines, completely redid the school's front blacktop with directional arrows and nine new parking spaces, and gave the La Granada frontage a landscaping cleanup. The campus's well-known rock sign, placed in 1955, got a fresh coat of paint. The performing arts center also received a new audio and speaker system, and the school opened a new percussion room next to a new rock band room.

The current campus itself dates to a full demolition and rebuild in 2010, funded through voter-approved general obligation bonds and state facility funds, according to The Coast News Group. That project created the modernized single-site campus and added the performing arts center and specialized STEM labs that now anchor the school's programming.

A Small District Built on Private Support

Rancho Santa Fe School District operates as a single-campus public district serving roughly 500 to 600 students from kindergarten through eighth grade, according to a report from the Montgomery County Office of Legislative Oversight. That small footprint sets it apart from larger, multi-school suburban districts, and it relies in part on the private Rancho Santa Fe Education Foundation, which maintains a multi-million dollar endowment that disburses 3% to 5% of its assets annually toward small class sizes and instructional needs, per the foundation.

The district has not always had it easy financially. In 2019, declining enrollment forced the board to approve 16 teacher layoffs after personnel costs climbed to 92% of operational spending, with enrollment having fallen from more than 800 students in the early 2000s to around 600 by that year. The district also collects statutory school developer fees, assessed at $2.16 per square foot for residential construction in fiscal year 2020-21, to help fund long-term facilities planning under California Education Code Section 17620.

After graduating from R. Roger Rowe's eighth grade, public school students in Rancho Santa Fe move on to the San Dieguito Union High School District, with most attending Torrey Pines High School. The classroom redesign also dovetails with the district's use of Stephen Covey's “Leader in Me” curriculum, which emphasizes habits meant to build student ownership, leadership, and collaboration in the classroom — a framework Pinkerton has discussed as part of the push to rethink how classroom space itself supports learning.

The timing adds another layer of significance beyond the centennial. In March, R. Roger Rowe Middle School was named a 2026 California Distinguished School by the California Department of Education, a biennial honor recognizing strong academic performance and a positive campus environment, giving the district a fresh mark of distinction as it reshapes its physical spaces heading into its hundredth year.