Crossroads School (Santa Monica, California)


Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences is a private, K-12, independent, college preparatory school in Santa Monica, California, United States. The school is a former member of the G20 Schools Group.

History

The school was founded in 1971 as a secular institution affiliated with St. Augustine By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica. 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. 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.

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.

In the media

The 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted, by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner, dedicated a large section to Crossroads; it depicted the school in a negative light, focusing mainly on a handful of high-profile parents and "drug problems" stemming from the 1980s. 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.

Notable alumni