Palm Springs Unified School District - Historic Schools

Historic Schools

The PSUSD used to have 5 other public schools in Palm Springs and one other in Cathedral City.

Until the 1950s, the PSUSD had separate school campuses for African-American, Latino, Asian-American and American Indian students when school segregation was then legal, then came the mandated policy of racial integration affected local schools.

Local celebrities and billionaires like Walter Annenberg and Frank Sinatra boosted public schools in the city and desert, whom also personally fought against racial and ethnic segregation of public schools. At the time, even American Jewish and American Catholic students would choose church-run and religious day schools over public ones, until the end of WWII when their parents were comfortable sending them to secular public schools. By the start of the 1960s, the PSUSD was integrated of all races and creeds.

The Palm Valley School in the 1920s on the city limits of Cathedral City, closed in the 1970s.

The Smoke Tree school which faced the Walt Disney ranch and the Bob Hope and Elvis Presley residences.

The Frances Stevens school now the Plaza Theatre.

The Harry Oliver school became the Palm Springs Community School ran by Riverside County Department of Education.

The Ramon School now the St. Theresa's Catholic school.

The El Camino Continuation High School, on Demuth Park (the park and school's original site was on west Ramon and south Palm Canyon Dr.) in the late 1970s, on the PSHS site in the early 1980s, then became the Esperanza High School for teenage mothers in 1986, then closed in the early 1990s.

And the Mount San Jacinto School on Section 14, the land parcel on the Agua Caliente Indian reservation.