History
College Prep was founded in September 1960, sited in a small, 19th-century clapboard house in the Claremont district of Oakland and Berkeley, California. The school was founded by Ruth Willis and Mary Harley Jenks. Jenks, a UC Berkeley graduate and former head of the Bentley School, wanted to create a school in the Bay Area that valued "high standards of scholarship and conduct." Unlike many university-preparatory schools, College Prep does not have a proper name, as the founders thought the name's directness reflected a straightforward, "unambiguous" approach to education. The five-room schoolhouse was built on recently constructed cement block structure and held just eight classrooms.
Because the school was non-profit, its limited enrollment and small size was not economical – furthermore, the small campus precluded expansion in the arts and athletics. The school's Board of Trustees determined that expanded enrollment and a larger campus was necessary, but did not want to sacrifice what they saw as an "intimate" and "intense" environment, that only a small campus could provide. In the early seventies, enrollment pressures began to increase as College Prep's reputation grew, and as a result of increasing discontent with California public schools (See: U.S. education crisis). In 1982 the Board began to plan a move to a larger campus, and it purchased sixteen portable wooden classroom buildings from the Oakland Unified School District placed on a six-acre parcel of land on Broadway Avenue. Many of these buildings are still in use today.
College Prep celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2010. To commemorate the event, decorative street-post banners were affixed at the Rockridge BART station. To celebrate, a special edition of the KALW radio show West Coast Live was broadcast from the College Prep campus, with guests, journalist Anna Quindlen and novelist Roddy Doyle. An "All-Alumni Reunion" was held in April, and a community-wide celebration was held in September.
Read more about this topic: The College Preparatory School
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“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)