Ravenswood High School was a part of the District from 1958 to 1976. When it opened, the school served 629 students from the communities of East Palo Alto and Belle Haven. In 1971, following the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the District initiated a busing program to desegregate district schools.
As a result, students originally districted to Ravenswood would have the opportunity to bus to other schools in the District, like Carlmont and M-A. Similarly, students who were districted to other District schools would have the opportunity to attend Ravenswood.
When EPA experienced “white flight” in the early 1960s, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People became uneasy about the school nearing an all-Black student population. At the time, the student population of Ravenswood was 60% Black and growing.
A local group, Mothers for Equal Education, advocated for the school’s closure and for students to attend primarily white schools, which they believed could provide a better education. According to author Russell Rickford, students lived with Palo Alto and Los Altos families to attend school outside of EPA in a project known as “Sneak-out” for two years, beginning in 1965.
Instituting a transfer program in 1968, RHS students were allowed to briefly attend other, predominantly white schools in the district, while students from those schools could temporarily attend Ravenswood.
Martha Goodwill Hanks, an alumnus and president of the Ravenswood High School Alumni Association, participated in this transfer program. “My senior year, I was an exchange student at Carlmont High School for a week. Each year, five students would go to another school, and their students would come to Ravenswood to experience being in a ‘diverse setting.’”
During the busing program, Ravenswood High School’s curriculum and pedagogy became more experimental. “My cousin was having problems at school, so his mother had me go to Ravenswood and talk to his counselors. By then, students from other schools were going to Ravenswood because it was such a different experience. They had skiing classes,” Hanks said. “They had no bells.”
Peter Katz, an alumnus who was bused from Portola Valley, chose to attend Ravenswood. “One of the things that the school did was go around to different feeder schools and talk about a program where all the teachers and students would help build the school together. They wanted to do things in a new and innovative fashion,” he said.
“It was more like a college campus,” Katz said. “We had classes that were all over the map. We had, of course, the regular math and science, and all that. But then we’d have things that were a bit more creative. So, for example, instead of taking just one history class, you might take four different history classes, because we had a modular schedule. One might cover the roaring ’20s, and another might cover the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Despite its success in attracting new students, the racial tensions at Ravenswood were steadily worsening. In addition to multiple race riots, EPA began hosting Black Power summits, raising the question of whether schools ought to integrate in the first place.
As friction among the school community increased, parents became less willing to bus their students to Ravenswood. Between 1963 and 1974, the student population dropped from 1,205 to 823. In conjunction with budget problems, the dwindling student population encouraged Ravenswood to close its doors in 1976, making way for the Gateway 101 Shopping Center.
Following the school’s closure, students were bused to other schools in the district. “When my son went to high school, they wanted to send him to Carlmont. I told the district, ‘No, he’s going to Menlo-Atherton—if I need to get to him, he should be close enough that I can drive over and see what’s going on,’” Hanks said.
Eventually, with the help of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in 2013, parents like Hanks convinced the board to send most, if not all, EPA students to M-A.
Since its closure, RHS’ alumni have kept in touch. Katz, when asked if he is still in contact with other alumni, said, “Only about 50 of them.”
“I helped put on one of the class reunions. I’m in very regular touch with a lot of people,” Katz said. With regular reunions and a close community of alumni, Ravenswood’s legacy prevails.
