Rienda School, set to open in 2027, breaks ground in Rancho Mission Viejo

Construction has started on the newest campus of the Capistrano Unified School District.

Rancho Mission Viejo and Capistrano Unified officials celebrated a groundbreaking on Friday, May 16, for Rienda School, which will serve up to 1,600 students and is scheduled to open in fall 2027.

The nearly 15-acre school will place an emphasis on STEAM education, which integrates science, technology, engineering, arts and math into hands-on, creative learning. There will be an innovation center with a robotics lab and wireless technology and the campus will also feature space for performing arts and outdoor learning.

District officials said the school will offer students a modern learning environment tailored to the needs of an expanding population in South Orange County.

Rienda will serve transitional kindergarten through eighth grade and will be Capistrano Unified’s second campus in Rancho Mission Viejo, following the 2018 opening of Esencia School.

It will be located between Coyotes and Pablo Way in Rancho Mission Viejo’s newest village of Rienda.

Capistrano Unified has already been seeing more students coming from the Rienda area and has added 400 temporary seats at Esencia TK-8 to keep up, district officials said. With Esencia expected to fill up by fall 2027, school trustees approved the new campus construction during a meeting in February.

The school will have room for up to 1,600 students, Capistrano Unified spokesperson Ryan Burris said. Like Esencia, Rienda will feed into Tesoro High School.

Burris said the new school’s capacity is based on district policy. According to the district’s facilities master plan, new TK-8 campuses must be built to serve at least 1,200 students, with enough space to add relocatable classrooms if needed, bringing the total capacity up to 1,600.

The $78.5 million project is being funded through developer fees and state matching dollars. Burris said underground work is already underway.

Burris said the classrooms will be designed to be more flexible than those at older schools, where desks, chairs and storage were usually fixed in place. At Rienda, the furniture will be movable, allowing the spaces to adapt to different teaching and learning needs — similar to what’s already in use at Esencia and being built at Dana Hills High School.

“All of our new construction features classrooms and learning spaces that can be used for a variety of instructional activities,” Burris said. “The innovation center is the same concept. Instead of using stationary shelves and tables, everything is movable.”

Rancho Mission Viejo is also building a 6-acre joint-use park adjacent to the school, with youth athletic fields, picnic areas and walking trails. Rancho Mission Viejo plans to open the next phase of the Rienda community in June, adding 175 new homes across three neighborhoods. When fully built out, Rienda will cover about 6,000 acres and include 14,000 homes total, with 6,000 of those reserved for residents age 55 and older.

“As the community of Rancho Mission Viejo continues to grow and we build out future phases, it’s essential to support the well-being of the next generations by providing access to top-rated schools close to home,” Jeremy Laster, president of Rancho Mission Viejo, said in a statement.

Capistrano Unified is the largest school district in Orange County, serving more than 47,000 students across 63 campuses.