Once slated to close, Mills College Children’s School will merge with Rockridge’s Aurora School

Months after dad and mom and workers at Mills School Youngsters’s College discovered the varsity would shut its doorways in June, a partnership with a Rockridge faculty is providing a lifeline.

College leaders introduced final week that Aurora College, a personal faculty in North Oakland with 76 college students in kindergarten via eighth grade, would welcome college students and lecturers from the Youngsters’s College beginning subsequent yr.

“The increasingly we mentioned, the extra we had in widespread and the extra alternatives we noticed to get the very best out of every of our communities,” mentioned Lynsey Kamine, head of college at Aurora College. “We additionally need to present a pathway to proceed the legacy of Mills’ early childhood program and laboratory program.”

Aurora expects about 20 college students will enroll within the kids’s faculty, Kamine mentioned.

Mills School Youngsters’s College was based in 1926 to offer hands-on, inquiry-based studying in early childhood in addition to ample out of doors recreation on the intensive grounds of the Mills School campus. As a laboratory faculty, it additionally served as a coaching and analysis laboratory for Mills undergraduate and graduate college students learning training.

In 2021, Mills School introduced it could now not grant levels or admit college students, as an alternative turning into a analysis institute, after years of declining enrollment and monetary issues have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Months later, the varsity introduced it could merge with Northeastern College, a Boston college with 12 different satellite tv for pc campuses, together with ones in San Jose, Seattle, Miami and London.

Mother and father and workers started to fret about the way forward for the Northeastern-led Youngsters’s College when, dad and mom informed The Oaklandside, enrollment was suspended earlier this yr. In June 2025, the information all of them feared got here: the varsity can be closed on the finish of this faculty yr.

“I all the time wished to combat to the bitter finish to save lots of the College or the Youngsters’s College,” mentioned Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer, a Mills School alumna and the dad or mum of a Youngsters’s College graduate and present pupil. “This can be a loss to the faculty and group that can’t simply be rebuilt.”

Bauer mentioned she deliberate to ship her youngest daughter, who was in fourth grade, to Hillcrest, a public faculty within the Oakland Unified College District, the place her son is in seventh grade. The merger with the Aurora College opens up a brand new possibility. Her household’s choice will doubtless depend upon the monetary help the merged faculty can present, Bauer informed The Oaklandside.

The Youngsters’s College teaches kids aged 2 and up and has a extremely regarded early childhood training programme. Each college students and school from the Youngsters’s College – together with the varsity’s assistant principal – will switch to Aurora College, based on an Aurora information launch. Within the first section of the Aurora College growth, the merged faculty will set up a transitional kindergarten class for 4-year-olds earlier than they enter kindergarten. In three years, Aurora expects to develop to a full preschool program, primarily based on this system accomplished at Mills.

College leaders additionally hope to undertake the laboratory faculty construction, which can enable schools and universities to conduct analysis and supply skilled improvement to aspiring educators, the announcement mentioned.