Garden Street Academy

Garden Street Academy is a K-12 independent school located in Santa Barbara, California, United States. Garden Street was founded as a K-6 school in 2002 and was created under the paradigm that a focus on social emotional learning is critical to academic achievement. Within two years, the Middle School program was added, followed by the Upper School in 2005. The campus offers classes on a historic site on the Upper Eastside of Santa Barbara, encompassing eleven acres (4.5 hectares). Classes range from 10-20 students with an approximate student-teacher ratio of 8:1.Brief history of locationsGarden Street Academy began in 2002 under the name San Roque School, located at 3214 Calle Cedro in the San Roque neighborhood of Santa Barbara. It began on a site where a Catholic school of that same name had existed since 1936. The original San Roque School was for families who were parishioners at the Santa Barbara Mission. When that Catholic school (known at the time as St. Anthony's Seminary) was faced with closing its doors in 2002, the founder of Garden Street Academy made an offer to continue the use of the site as a K-6 educational institution that would offer an optional Catholic education class in honor of the history of the site. An arrangement was made and Garden Street Academy operated a non-denominational, independent elementary and then middle school there for nearly a decade, until the present location on Garden Street became available for purchase. In an interesting twist of fate, the historic site on Garden Street was the original home of San Roque Catholic School, which began there in early 1900s before its move to the site at 3214 Calle Cedro in the San Roque neighborhood. Therefore, in a sense, the school has “returned” to where it began almost a century earlier. In 2011, Garden Street Academy moved its entire K-12 program to 2300 Garden Street, where it enjoys its own campus on Mission Creek, adjacent to the Santa Barbara Mission and Natural History Museum.