Diamond Bar: A Tale of Two School Districts

Before families grew children to send to schools, farmers grew citrus and ranchers grew cattle in the East San Gabriel Valley. And Prior to Pomona’s incorporation in 1888, there were no civic corporate boundaries drawn to determine school attendance.

Instead, the private property lines of farms and ranches, now traced by the power lines bisecting the city, determined which school district the children of Diamond Bar were to attend.

This is the second in a three-part series. Read the for background on the early history.

The Beginning of the Modern Era

With the signaling a change from agricultural to residential in Diamond Bar, the population of the Walnut School district rose while the neighboring Spadra region fell.

With not enough students to support a school, Spadra was closed and its students joined the Pomona Unified School District.

Through the transition from ranch land to suburban commnity, the Walnut district began to experience growing pains. In 1954, the eighth grade class at Walnut went through four teachers the first semester.

Two were fired. One walked out. One was reassigned.

Superintendent Cyrus Morris knew that a dose of discipline was needed to properly educate the big farm boys in the class of 23 students.

Ray McMullen was the next teacher to go for an interview by the three-member Walnut School Board and he said the district knew what they were looking for.

"(The school board) seemed more interested in the fact that I was a former (Southern California Intercollegiate) All-Conference football player than a darn good student teacher," McMullen said.

McMullen was hired for the position and soon after saw the district enter an initial attempt to unify with the portions of North Diamond Bar that were attending the Pomona Unified School District.

An attempted agreement between the Walnut and Pomona districts eventually broke down because of discrepancies between tax maps and the student population of the time.

In the background, the Korean War was winding down, and in his last year of draft eligibility, McMullen was called to active duty.

Upon his return, McMullen was rehired by the nearly 200-student school district at a salary of $4,000 a year.

Home for the new teacher would be the 9,000-square-foot Currier Mansion. A woman was then keeping the house as an investment on 27 acres of orange grove.

She kept a small area to herself and rented the rest of the vast dwelling to McMullen for $60 per month with an agreement Ray would keep up the home and garden area.

With his eyes set on school administration, McMullen began to outgrow the tiny Walnut school district and eventually decided to take a job closer to Los Angeles. But with time, the district's progress would match McMullen's and he was later selected as the first principal of Suzanne Middle School, which then had nine teachers.

In the first year, another nine classrooms were under construction and the transition from ranch land to suburban community was still making it's slow shift.

One day, after the school's fields had just been sodded, McMullen said he had to alert a neighboring rancher to four cattle that had roamed onto the fields and were "shank-deep walking across."

Just before the first days of school, McMullen said he was on campus opening boxes of newly-arrived furniture before the first students arrived.

The district continued to grow with the expansion of Diamond Bar and McMullen said his early morning runs up the two-lane Diamond Bar Boulevard were shared less often then with coyotes or deer. Years later, he witnessed John Thornton making the last cattle drive past the Diamond Bar Golf Course.

Just down the road, the groundwork was being laid in the Pomona Unified district for the first elementary school within the city limits on Golden Springs Drive. In 1963, welcomed its first students.

By 1968, the student population in South Diamond Bar and Walnut had grown enough to prompt the La Puente High School District to build Walnut High School.