The Berkeley Unified School District was formed in 1936 by the merger of the city's elementary and high school districts. District administrative offices were originally at or near the Kellogg School. In 1927, a two-story administration building was completed at 2325 Milvia Street. Designated a seismic hazard after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, it was put to non-school purposes beginning in 1940 and was razed sometime before 1948, the site becoming tennis courts for the high school. In January 1940, administrative offices were moved to 1414 Walnut Street. In 1979, the district offices moved to the Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Way, and in 2012 to 2020 Bonar Street.
Integration policy
During and following World War II, the African American population of Berkeley, as in the entire region, increased substantially. However, the practice of racial covenants in property title deeds, together with informal discrimination, had resulted in the black population being concentrated in certain sections of the city, primarily in the southwestern portions. Consequently, public schools serving those areas had a disproportionately high number of blacks while virtually no blacks attended the schools in other mostly white sections of the city. The only exception to this was Berkeley High School as it was, and remains, the only high school for the entire district. Heightened local interest in the concerns and efforts of the civil rights movement, shared by many in the community, eventually led to the adoption of a voluntary school integration plan starting in the mid 1960s. The plan included the use of bussing to effect an integration of all the public schools in Berkeley. The first schools to be integrated under this plan were the junior high schools, Garfield and Willard, starting in the Fall of 1966. A third junior high school, Burbank, was closed, demolished and rebuilt as the high school's "West Campus", serving all the district's 9th-grade students. Two years later in the Fall of 1968, the elementary schools were integrated, utilizing the district's own expanded bus fleet. Berkeley's voluntary integration plan, substantially modified, remains in place today.
Governance
The school district is governed by the Berkeley Board of Education. It consists of five voting members and two non-voting student directors.
Schools
Early Childhood Education
Franklin Preschool
Hopkins Preschool
King Child Development Center
Elementary schools
Berkeley Arts Magnet Elementary School at Whittier
