Wildwood School - Brief History

Brief History

In the 1970s and 1980s, Wildwood School was one building on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, where the current campus for New Roads School is located. The first graduating elementary class had only ten students. In 1991 Hope Boyd, formerly the headmistress of Westlake School for Girls, became the head of Wildwood, and the following year the elementary campus relocated to its current Culver City location. Hope Boyd began to stabilize Wildwood's academic course and solidified its reputation, and under her watch the school doubled its size. In 1999, the Board of Trustees decided to create a middle and upper school. The school was to be based on the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools and teach project-based equitable learning. The middle and upper school opened in 2000 on Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles, in a small and limiting former warehouse, with no windows, mercurial temperature controls, and only 100 students. George Wood, a respected national educator and principal of Federal Hocking High School in Ohio, was the founding director of the secondary school. The full remodel of the middle and upper school finished in 2002.