Raise Your Hand if You Want to See Volcanoes in O.C.

At some point toward the end of a recent board meeting, the trustees of tiny Ocean View School District in Huntington Beach flipped the page on their agenda packet and found “the list.”

Eighteen pages long, it detailed the 500-plus places in Orange and neighboring counties the district has deemed appropriate for student field trips.

And as they do each year, the trustees approved the updated list with little fanfare and moved on.

Not so fast. Let’s have a look at this. As one might expect, county museums, aquariums, science centers and the like make up much of the list. There are the perennial favorites, such as the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana with its kid-friendly shows and the county’s various pumpkin patches, where math teachers can trick kids into a lesson on circumference and weight while they pick out their Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. And, of course, no Orange County field-trip list would be complete without Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm -- rewards for a year of hard work.

Not all the journeys, however, are so run-of-the-mill.

On page nine, for example, right between the El Dorado Nature Center and the Endangered Species EcoPark, is the mysterious El Modena Volcanoes.

Volcanoes? In Orange County?

“Oh, sure,” said Steve Arnett, a science teacher at Santiago Middle School in El Modena -- an unincorporated, county-run enclave. Each year Arnett takes his classes on a hike up the innocuous 400-foot hill behind the school that Cal State Fullerton scientists have determined was a steaming pot of lava as recently as 19 million or 20 million years ago. Schools from other districts, such as Ocean View, make the trip as well.

“We tease the kids, telling them, ‘Oh, gosh, I hope it doesn’t blow,’ ” Arnett joked with a typical science-teacher sense of humor. In all seriousness, however, he said the yearly hikes occur only in spring, when there is less chance of running into the rattlesnakes and tarantulas that inhabit the hill.

Note to Ocean View parents: Relax. District officials require teachers to carry a snake-bite first-aid kit on trips to snake-friendly environs.

By far the oddest destination on the Ocean View list is someplace called Reynolds Ranch Mutation Chinchilla in Santa Ana. Some investigative research (a Google search and a call to directory information) turned up nothing. Ocean View Asst. Supt. Karen Colby drew a blank too.

“Well, some of our science classes do animal dissections. It could have something to do with that,” she offered.

In Colby’s defense, the list has grown unwieldy after 15 years of adding destinations. Without sufficient staffing, she said, it is impossible to cull for destinations no longer visited, such as a funeral home in Westminster or the Nabisco factory in Buena Park.

Also impossible, Colby said, is to know for sure what every destination is about or whether it is still around. In other words, what goes on at a chinchilla mutation ranch is anyone’s guess. It’s no mystery, however, what goes on during the field trips by Ocean View and other districts to the Rainbow Disposal Co. in Huntington Beach. There, kids get to see the trucks, conveyor belts, compressors and recycling equipment that handle the trash their parents order them to take out of the house.

“We’re probably one of the more popular field trips,” said Rainbow Chairman Ron Shenkman. “From the time they’re little, one of the greatest joys in kids’ lives is when the trash truck is coming down the street. I think they’re pretty excited when they get here.”

But surely South Coast Plaza must be right up there, too. A plaza spokeswoman said field trips are common at Easter for the “Alice in Wonderland” display and at Christmas when kids parade through the canyons of commerce to Santa’s Village for photos with the big man.

But what of the great American pastime of shopping? Do teachers ever load students into the buses and head to South Coast for lessons on the importance of bargain hunting and calculating sales tax?

“You’ve been watching way too much of ‘The O.C.,’ ” the mall rep said.