Steven Wagner sees a turnaround story when he looks back at the history of the Orange County High School of the Arts and the 10-plus years he has spent there as chief financial officer.
OCHSA is a charter school that serves students from 7th grade to 12th grade, with a focus on performing and visual arts in 11 art conservatories.
It counts 1,750 students, and an annual application pool of about 3,600. Students come from more than 100 cities throughout Southern California. The school has an annual budget of about $15 million, part from the state and part from families and foundations.
Humble Beginnings
Wagner remembers that the school’s beginnings were rather humble.
“When I took over, we were over $2 million in debt,” Wagner said. “We owed huge amounts of money to textbook companies, to Apple [for our] computers and to other vendors. The school was very close to bankruptcy.”
Wagner was one of the key executives who helped bring the school around and grow it.
Wagner was honored in the Not-for-Profit Category at the annual CFO of the Year awards presented by the Business Journal and the Orange County and Long Beach chapter of the California Society of Certified Public Accountants on Jan. 17.
He joined the administrative team in 2001. The school and its foundation have raised about $40 million since then.
Wagner was long involved with OC schools prior to coming to OCHSA. He was the principal at Serrano Intermediate School in Lake Forest from 1999 to 2001 and taught at Los Alamitos High School for about 15 years prior to that.
OCHSA was founded in 1987 as an after-school arts program on the campus of Los Alamitos High School. Wagner was teaching biology and physics at Los Alamitos at the time.
“That’s where I met Ralph [Opacic],” Wagner said.
Opacic, then another teacher at Los Alamitos, is the founder and executive director of OCHSA.
OCHSA was reorganized as a charter school in 2000, the same time it moved into the Santa Ana campus from Los Alamitos. That was a $20 million purchase.
“The transition was a huge learning curve to take over all the regular business functions of a school,” Wagner said. “Before, a school district was managing all the day-to-day operations, and we only had to teach. Now, we had to deal with human resources, budget, and all the finance stuff. We also had $1.2 million in facility debt.”
The school defaulted on its loans the first year after the move.
California’s tight budget didn’t help.
“I don’t think we made a single payment, just because revenues didn’t come in from California as we expected,” Wagner said. “There was no money left over from the $20 million property acquisition and purchases.”
That brought Wagner and the executive team to look for options in modifying business plans.
Foundation
The OCHSA Foundation, a separate nonprofit organization, helped get things going.
The parents of the students also rallied to bring the school back on its feet.
“We took the booster-club model and applied it to our entire school,” Wagner said. “The first year, the parents raised a little over a million dollars. Since that time, that number has consistently gone up.”
Wagner also credits individual donors and organizations in the Orange County community for the school’s survival and turnaround.
“Our big supporters have been Sandy and John Daniels of the Segerstrom family and Paul Musco—they are big supporters of the arts,” Wagner said. He also counts Opera Pacific, Chapman University and the Samueli Foundation as big supporters.
“The list really goes on,” Wagner said. “Those are some of the folks who have consistently written really large checks for us.”
OCHSA’s corporate sponsors include carmaker Audi, Switzerland-based Omega SA and Long Beach-based Farmers & Merch-ants Bank.
“The business community here has really been wonderful to us,” Wagner said.
“OCHSA 2.0”
If the move from Los Alamitos to Santa Ana counts as the first transformation, the school’s status now is “OCHSA 2.0,” Wagner said.
“Our school has finally stabilized itself,” he said. “The big thing I’m working on now is our 12th conservatory, the culinary arts program.”
The new program is set to launch next year, one of the reasons the school is looking at a boost in enrollment to 1,800.
“The program requires a specific facility,” Wagner said. “We’re actually taking our existing kitchen and doing a $250,000 remodeling on it over the summer. We’re going to turn it into an instructional kitchen. We’ll use it for food preparation in the morning and for lunch time. And then in the afternoon, we’ll bring the kids in for classes.”
