Westside Feeder Schools: From Preschool To The Ivy League: A Well-Traveled Path

Each year, most top Los Angeles private elementary schools send several of their graduates to excellent secondary schools. But, we know you really want specifics. Which schools are “feeders” to specific secondary schools? Obviously, each year this changes. But, there are some well-trodden paths, from preschool to elementary school and then on to secondary schools and from their to certain colleges. According to a friend of ours who works at Harvard-Westlake, the Westside feeder school path goes like this:

 
Sunshine Preschool and Circle of Friends Preschool* send graduates to Brentwood, John Thomas Dye, The Center For Early Education,Curtis School and Carlthorp, which in turn, send their graduates to Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough, which then send their graduates to Harvard College, Yale, Princeton and Stanford (and the other Ivy League Schools).
 
Obviously, these are not the only ways for a child to get into Harvard-Westlake or Marlborough. But, it’s a common path, familiar to the well-connected and well-to-do families on the Westside of LA. From the schools’ perspective, according to our source at Harvard-Westlake, it’s about test scores, ensuring that the kids who follow the “feeder” school paths will hit the test scores the schools desire at every level.
 
Another well-traveled “feeder” school path:
Temple Isaiah Preschool, Wagon Wheel Preschool and Crestwood Hills Co-Op Nursery School send scores of kids to The Willows Community School, which is a feeder school to Crossroads and Windward (the head of the Willows Lower School has a child at Crossroads High School and Lisa Rosenstein, head of school at The Willows, used to run Temple Isaiah Preschool before founding The Willows School)
 
Note: Crossroads, Oakwood, Brentwood, Campbell Hall and Wildwood are K-12 schools so naturally their own students continue from their lower schools through secondary school.
 
* According to the book, Coping With Preschool Panic, “Circle of Friends Preschool in Santa Monica has a reputation of being a bit like a much-sought after private-club–very hard to gain admittance. There are those who call it “Circle of Celebrities’ Children”. (P. 67)
 
We discuss the issue of “feeder” schools in more detail in Beyond The Brochure.
 
 
 
Please follow and like us:

admin

Christina Simon: Los Angeles, California, United States I'm the mom of two kids who attended The Willows School in Culver City and Viewpoint School in Calabasas. My daughter is a graduate of Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism ('23) and my son is a sophomore at UPenn/Wharton ('26). I live in Coldwater Canyon with my husband, Barry, and our dogs. Contact me at csimon2007@gmail.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.