Crossroads School (Santa Monica, California)

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For other schools of the same name, see Crossroads School (disambiguation).
Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences
Large photo31791 151309.jpeg
Address
1714 21st Street
Santa Monica, California
Information
Opened 1971
Founder Paul Cummins
Head of school Bob Riddle
Grades K-12
Number of students 1,139
School color(s) Red, White, and Blue
Newspaper Crossfire
Yearbook Crossroads Yearbook
Website http://www.xrds.org/

Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences is a private, K-12 independent, college preparatory school in Santa Monica, California, United States. The school is a member of the prestigious G20 Schools Group, including schools such as Deerfield Academy (Massachusetts), Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire), Phillips Academy Andover (Massachusetts), the Hotchkiss School (Connecticut) and the Lawrenceville School (New Jersey). The Crossroads School has a rivalry with the nearby Brentwood School.

History

The school was founded in 1971 as a secular institution affiliated with St. Augustine By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.[1] Although the founders, and many of the school's original students, came from the former St. Augustine By-the-Sea Episcopal Day School in Santa Monica, Crossroads School has always been a secular institution. Crossroads started with three rooms in a Baptist church offering grades seven and eight, and an initial enrollment of just over 30 students.[1] The name Crossroads was suggested by Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken,” in which Frost writes:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.[2]

As St. Augustine's grew to junior and senior high school, the founders started Crossroads with a separate board of directors and separate campus, which eventually merged in the 1980s under the name Crossroads.

Human Development

Human Development is a fundamental part of the Crossroads curriculum, holding equal weight with conventional departments such as Math and History. It is meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence, important aspects of life that are often neglected in a public school education. Advanced Placement (AP) classes were recently excluded from the curriculum, as the faculty felt the required topics for certain AP classes were too narrow, and taught students to merely pass a test rather than truly understand the subject. Students address teachers by their first names. Some question this untraditional approach, but many at Crossroads insist that this practice fosters friendship and trust between the authority figure and the pupil. Classrooms also have names, not numbers, and are dedicated to important figures in history: Einstein, Mead, Frost, Chavez, and Neruda are examples.

In the media

The 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted, by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner (ISBN 0-471-45051-0), dedicated a large section to Crossroads; it depicted the school (and the celebrities who send their children there) in a negative light. The article focused mainly on a handful of high-profile parents and "drug problems" stemming from the 1980s.[1] The school was also featured in a May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair; like Breitbart's book, it also focused on the school's celebrity clientele.[1]

Notable alumni

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ [1] Archived July 16, 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 The Nerdist Podcast No. 97, 16 minutes
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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External links

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