By Daily Press staff
The Westside Waldorf School is celebrating spring with a new place to educate. The Waldorf has acquired a new site: 1.5 acres at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway, tucked into a 13-acre compound belonging to the Self Realization Center, where Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes are enshrined in a peace memorial.
The school announced Monday that it had signed a letter of intent to lease the former Santa Ynez Inn site at 17310 Sunset Blvd. for 25 years. The private elementary school, currently based in Santa Monica, plans to spend more than $1 million to improve the site, which is owned by the Self-Realization Fellowship. The funds will be used to bring the 14,000-square-foot structure up to code. The move will allow the school, which has 160 students from nursery school to sixth grade, to nearly double its enrollment.
“This is a major breakthrough for our community,” said Waldorf director Jeffrey Graham. “We are blessed to have found such a quality property. There is ample space for the children to hike and explore, and for playing fields and gardens.”
The non-sectarian Waldorf School, founded in 1988, is part of an association of Rudolf Steiner/Waldorf schools with 1,200 campuses worldwide. The education integrates the arts and sciences within an art-based curriculum that addresses all learning styles: logical, linguistic, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal.
With Waldorf’s lease at St. Augustine’s By The Sea expiring next year, Graham had been looking for a new location. When he drove by the Santa Ynez site in February and saw no work going on, he wondered what was happening with New West Charter Middle School’s plans to build a second campus there. He had a real estate broker contact SRF, a worldwide nonprofit religious society founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda and the owner of Santa Inez Inn, and subsequently learned that New West had been unable to formally extend its letter of intent to lease because it had not been able to raise the estimated $750,000 needed to renovate the property.
After two months of negotiations, Waldorf signed its own letter of intent, and will soon begin improvements. When the school is completed sometime during the 2005-2006 school year, it will offer classes from preschool through eighth grade. The Waldorf Early Childhood Center, with additional nurseries and early-childhood programs, will remain in Santa Monica on 15th Street. ‘Taming of the Shrew’ up next at SMC
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 20, 2005. Read the original PDF.