We have beautiful, modern,
functional classrooms.
Each of our two campuses is located in a beautiful Berkeley neighborhood. Our Early Childhood Center, the same charming site where we’ve been educating our youngest students for over 40 years, is on the edge of the Gourmet Ghetto, just off Shattuck Avenue.
Entering our wooden gate is like stepping into a magical secret garden. The four classrooms are clustered around an outdoor space featuring a gentle hillock for creative play, small spaces just right for playing house and make-believe games, and gardens exploding with beautiful flowers and child-sized benches.
The main campus houses the administration, and the kindergarten through eighth grade classrooms.
When we built the new campus a few years ago, we held a design competition overseen by Harrison Fraker, at that time the dean of the architecture school at UC Berkeley and a parent at our school.
We applied the principles of sustainable design, incorporating bamboo floors, low volatility paint, solar panels, natural light and ventilation and so on. We took advantage of our site near San Francisco Bay, with the afternoon westerly breeze helping to cool our classrooms in the fall and spring.
We are especially proud of our historic Depot, originally one of Berkeley’s major train stations, more recently the Santa Fe Bar and Grill, and now TBS’ all-purpose great room and the center of our “seed to table” program. You see, our classrooms maintain organic gardens, and our students care for them, harvest them, and finally cook together from their bounty in the Depot’s fabulous, child-friendly kitchen. You’ll often see students, teachers, and parents cooking healthy meals together. Our roots in healthy eating run deep. Did you know that Alice Waters of Chez Panisse began her career as a teacher at our school? And that Michael Pollan is the parent of one of our graduates?
Some people who visit us want to know, “Where’s the gym?”. We don’t have one. Sure, we’d love to have our own squash courts and saunas, but it doesn’t fit our objectives and priorities, nor our budget. And it probably doesn’t fit yours, either.
That’s not to say we don’t like sports, though. The Berkeley School fields three teams each year, usually in flag football, volleyball, and basketball, and many students participate in Class I and III competitive soccer, judo, ski racing, lacrosse, fencing, swimming, rock-climbing, and lots of other sports. We also have a full physical education program to keep developing bodies active.
It’s important. We were kids once, too.
