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。
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.
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.