大学预科学校(The College Preparatory School, Oakland, CA)

加州理工学院(California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA)
2018年12月27日
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这所学校的命名,就已经体现出了它的教学目的!目的就是把学生送入大学,当然,作为一所著名的私立高中,它有这方面的实力。玛丽·哈雷·詹克斯和露丝·威利斯于1960年创办了这所大学预科学校,学校位于美国西海岸的加利福尼亚州的奥克兰。学校于1960年9月开学,33名学生、4名教师和少数家长聚集在烈日下,聆听米尔斯学院牧师查尔斯·吉尔伯特牧师的祝福和神速。这所学校一直是非营利和男女同校的。旧校区的小规模(大约125到150)显示出不经济,并且妨碍了课程的扩展,尤其是在艺术和体育方面。在考虑其他地点时,董事会和我认为保持亲密和强烈是很重要的,这是那些早期,狭窄的岁月的特点。然而,生存需要扩大招生规模,而这反过来又需要更多的空间。由于许多人对公立学校不满,加上CPS自身日益增长的声誉,入学压力变得更大。70年代初,学校有机会在百老汇买了一个占地6英亩的地块,这个地块将成为新的校园。在拍卖会上,奥克兰联合学区以130美元的价格购买了16栋便携式木质教室。其中11间今天仍在使用,9间用作教室,1间用作教员室,1间用作商务办公室和相邻的图书馆扩建。学校于1982年12月搬迁,大部分工作由教师和学生完成。从那时起,随着学校入学人数的增加,学校又增加了六栋教学楼的建设,包括音乐、艺术和体育馆设施以及一座科学大楼也随之开始建设。

Mary Harley Jenks and Ruth Willis founded The College Preparatory School in 1960 with 50 students and families who gambled on a place that offered a different high school experience, one that insisted on the value of deep learning.
The School thrived with the blend of high standards and care that became its signature. When College Prep outgrew its tiny Claremont Avenue location in 1983, 200 “Cougars” streamed up the hill to our open-air Broadway campus. Today, 360 students and 80 faculty and staff continue to aspire to live the motto Ms. Jenks selected from Vergil—Mens Conscia Recti—a mind aware of what is right.

The following are excerpts from “Becoming A Real School 1960-1990: The Story of The College Preparatory School” by Robert Baldwin, Jr. (Head of School, 1969-1990)

The College Preparatory School was launched in September of 1960 when thirty-three students, four teachers and a handful of parents gathered under a hot sun to hear the Reverend Charles Guilbert, Mills College Chaplain, offer his blessings and Godspeed. The site was a corner lot, 6264 Claremont Avenue, Oakland, opposite what is now a Safeway store. The double lot included a small, five-room, l9th-century farmhouse and a just-completed cement block structure containing eight classrooms. Just ten months earlier, Mary Harley Jenks and Ruth Willis had arrived in Berkeley intent on starting a school.

College Prep (referred to in the past as CPS) was the brainchild of Miss Jenks, who at 57, decided she wanted to establish a school of her own design before she retired. Throughout her career she cared deeply for the young people she served, at the same time holding them to high standards of scholarship and conduct. Her joy was to watch a student experience pleasure in learning and to see him/her delight in the life of the mind. Nonconformists, independent thinkers and students with a well-developed social conscience gave her special joy. She passed on many of these qualities to CPS graduates.
There have been modifications of Miss Jenks’ original vision and the school’s early style. Students no longer rise as an adult enters a classroom, dress codes have relaxed and there are no morning prayers. In the ’60s and early ’70s boys wore slacks and a collared shirt; girls, skirts with blouses and/or sweaters in some combination of blue and white. The lengths of boys’ hair and girls’ skirts were serious issues in those years.

The school has always been non-profit and co-educational. The small size, roughly 125 to 150 which the old campus dictated, turned out to be not economical and precluded curricular expansion, particularly in the arts and athletics. In considering alternate sites, the Board and I felt that it was important to retain the intimacy and intensity which characterized those early, cramped years. Yet survival demanded an expanded enrollment which, in turn, demanded more space.

Enrollment pressures became stronger as a result of many people’s discontent with public schools plus CPS’s own growing reputation. In the early ’70s there came an opportunity to buy the six-acre parcel on Broadway which was to become the new campus. Sixteen portable wooden classroom buildings wore purchased at auction from the Oakland Unified School District for $130 each. Eleven of these are in use today, nine as classrooms, one as a Faculty Room, and one as the Business Office and adjacent library extension.

In the design of the new campus on a six-acre parcel on Broadway, every effort was made to capture both the shadow-of-Berkeley heritage and the intimacy of a central courtyard area which would be well populated and traversed during the day by students and faculty. The school moved in December of 1982, with the faculty and students doing most of the work. Since then, as enrollment has grown and a six-classroom building, the music, art and gymnasium facilities, and a science building have been added.

A full school history would include the major achievements of its students, high points in athletics, the school’s listing as among the twenty five academically strongest independent schools in the country (by the Harvard Review), and the long list of students each year receiving National Merit recognition…but that’s the rest of the story for another time.

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