History — Page Academy

History

A family-run school, project-based by design.

Page has been led by the Gibbs family across all 118 years of the school's history, currently in its fourth generation under Kristin Vaughan Dickson. The school took its modern form in the mid-1960s, when it evolved into a college preparatory and adopted the project-based, arts-integrated method that has defined Page ever since.

What follows is the short version of how the school got here.

1908

Chapter One The Founding

Founded by Robert and Della Page Gibbs.

Page opens in Southern California in 1908. The school is founded by Robert and Della Page Gibbs and operates in its earliest form as a private academy for boys, the conventional model for a school of its kind in that era.

The four values established in this period, including integrity, respect, responsibility, and perseverance, are still how Page describes what it expects of its students more than a century later. They have carried into every chapter since.

Mid-1960s

Chapter Two The Modern Form

The school takes its modern form.

In the mid-1960s, Page evolves into a college preparatory school under the second generation of the family. The transformation reshapes the curriculum around college placement and around a method that has defined Page ever since: project-based learning grounded in the work students produce.

Arts integration takes hold in the same era. The arts move from enrichment to methodology, and academic content begins to be taught through making, performance, and presentation. Research becomes performance. Science becomes sculpture. History becomes oral storytelling.

The school you tour today is the school that took shape in the mid-1960s.

The family stays in operating roles. The four values carry forward. Page operates in this college preparatory, project-based, arts-integrated form through the rest of the century and into the next.

2020s

Chapter Three The Present

Sixty years of project-based, arts-integrated learning.

Page operates today in the same college preparatory form it has held since the mid-1960s, now expressed as a TK-8 arts-integrated school. The Creators Program runs alongside the academics as a dedicated arts curriculum across four creative disciplines, and every grade still teaches its core subjects through the work students produce.

The school is led today by Kristin Vaughan Dickson, the great-granddaughter of Robert and Della Page Gibbs. Page is in the fourth generation of operation by the founding family, an unusual run for a private school of any size in California.

Two TK-8 campuses serve Southern California, Newport Mesa in Costa Mesa and Hancock Park in Los Angeles, with Page Junior Academy in Beverly Hills serving the youngest students from infancy through junior kindergarten.

By eighth grade, a Page student has done the work, in front of a real audience, every year of elementary and middle school.

The school today is the school Page has been for the last six decades, taken into its TK-8 form and its fourth generation of family leadership.

Schedule a Visit

Stand inside the next chapter.

The most accurate way to understand Page is to walk the campus and watch a unit move through the cycle. Tour the school in its 118th year, in its fourth generation of family operation.

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Newport Mesa Los Angeles