When Kailua's Le Jardin Academy breaks ground this morning on a $19 million campus expansion project, it will mark the penultimate step in what school officials say has been a remarkable transformation from a one-room preschool to Windward Oahu's largest private education center.

Eight years ago, the school was operating out of rented facilities in several Kailua Road churches. Today, it has a 24-acre campus overlooking Kawai Nui Marsh, with 750 preschool through high school students, and is embarking on a new phase that ultimately will bring its total enrollment to about 1,100 students.

Its academic ambitions are even more grand. The school hopes the expansion will be just one part of a different kind of growth, one that will bring it statewide recognition as Hawai'i's first K-12 institution with a certified International Baccalaureate program producing students prepared to become part of a global society.

"We're relatively new, but we want to prove that we're right up there with the more established private schools in the state, and the nation, too," headmaster Adrian Allen said yesterday.

The changes at Le Jardin are part of similar changes and improvements at private schools across the state. Enrollment at Hawai'i's independent schools has been climbing in recent years, fueled by a strong state economy and new opportunities in the private schools as more expand to new grade levels.

In the past few years, Damien Memorial School in Kalihi, for example, added a new middle school, and Mid-Pacific Institute in Manoa joined forces with an elementary school to offer a preschool to 12th-grade continuum. Enrollment is up significantly at both.

New schools, such as Island Pacific Academy in Kapolei, have added to the mix, and a number of established schools from Punahou to 'Iolani and Mid-Pacific Institute have gone to great expense to improve or expand their facilities.

18 MORE CLASSROOMS

The work starting today on Le Jardin's campus, on the former site of a drive-in movie theater with sweeping views of the Ko'olau mountains, will include construction of a new gymnasium, 18 new classrooms, and library facilities for its middle and high schools.

The gym will have seating for 500, a weight room, and classroom and studio space for tae kwon do, dance and other activities. It will allow the school to better segregate high school facilities from lower-school ones, Allen said.

When Allen says today's ceremony is the culmination of years of planning, he's being modest. The growth of the school was envisioned from its start in 1961 by founder Henriette Neal, a native of France who adopted the Spalding method of teaching phonics as a key element of the curriculum, said Nan Hutton, whose son Grant and daughter Audry attended the school in the early 1960s.

"We were so tiny in those days, it only went up to the fourth and fifth grade. We were known as the little French school in Kailua, but we always expected it to grow. There was a vision of this right from the start," said Hutton, who has served on the school's board of directors on and off for more than 25 years.

As the school expanded into middle grades, its facilities were often in different locations on the Windward side as board members continued to look for the right permanent site, Hutton said.

"We used to dream about it, but somehow the timing was just never right until we finally found this property," she said.

Le Jardin opened its new $8.5 million campus in 1999, serving preschool to eighth-grade students, followed a few years later with a high school, whose first seniors graduated last year. School tuition will increase next year to about $12,700 per year, still several thousand dollars below top private schools in town, Allen said.

UNEXPECTED GROWTH

Even school officials didn't anticipate the rapid growth on campus that has occurred since it moved to its new facilities, in part with the help of several million-dollar grants from local charitable foundations that saw the need for a large private school serving primarily Windward residents.

When the expansion plans were first announced two years ago, officials thought it might be 2010 before they even got under way.

"I think that need has been proven by the response. We didn't think we'd be at this stage nearly so soon, but more and more people kept coming as we offered the highest-quality programs that we could," Allen said.

While the students primarily are from Kane'ohe and Kailua, Allen said, there's increasing interest from others across the island, with some Honolulu, Leeward and North Shore parents finding it easier to drive their students to Kailua in the morning than fight the traffic to town.

More important than traffic may be Le Jardin's efforts to become what they say would be the first school in Hawai'i to be certified in the International Baccalaureate program at every level. Several schools here have similar programs, but they are offered on a limited basis during the last two years of high school.

The program, based in Switzerland, aims to mold students from an early age into transdisciplinary and bilingual scholars with a global perspective. It requires students to study a foreign language at every level of education, do math all through their school years and take on extras such as sports, music and art.

Allen said that type of holistic education can improve a student's chances of getting into and succeeding at top universities.

Le Jardin has been training its staff in the baccalaureate program skills and hopes the 43,000-square-foot expansion program will add to the school's resources to do the job well, Allen said.

"The gymnasium positions us to compete competitively within the ILH (Interscholastic League of Honolulu), provides a venue for Windward events and activities, and becomes a meeting place for the entire Le Jardin 'ohana," he said.

When the work is completed in fall 2008, the school will be able to accommodate about 1,000 students. The school then plans to build 10 more classrooms that will add another 100 students and essentially complete the growth, Allen said.

Artist's renderings of the planned expansion of Le Jardin Academy. ABOVE: Eighteen classrooms will be in this new building. LEFT: The new gym will have seating for 500, a weight room, and classroom and studio space for tae kwon do, dance and other activities.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.