The Phillips Brooks School is an independent, coeducational, preschool-grade 5 day school located in Menlo Park, California. The school is commonly known as PBS and was founded in 1978 by a group of teachers and administrators who split off from the nearby Trinity School. The enrollment of PBS is 270 students. Admission to PBS is highly competitive due to the small class size and excellent reputation of the school. The school has the smallest class sizes of any school of its kind in the area. Phillips Brooks School has actively participated in efforts to make classrooms more attuned to the needs of students, including a focus on identifying the unique ways in which each child learns. This school is named after Phillips Brooks.
Potential second campus
The school had purchased a lot in Woodside, California along Interstate 280 that it planned to redevelop into a second campus. Environmentalists expressed concern that the school's plans would result in the loss of 1,000 oak trees. Discord in the community regarding the school's development plans were in a major issue in the 2001 Woodside Town Council elections. The school's controversial plan was opposed and ultimately blocked by that city's government. As reported in the California newspaper The Almanac:
After hours of meetings, untold thousands of dollars and enough paperwork to fell a small forest, Phillips Brooks School's controversial plan to build a campus in Woodside came to an anticlimactic finale last week when school officials decided to pull the plug on the project at a board meeting....it was a dispute over the wording of open space agreements between the school and the town that reversed the divided Planning Commission's initial support of the Phillips Brooks project. School officials balked over the town's open space easement language, saying it was too restrictive and would make building and operating the campus unfeasible. Town staff countered that Phillips Brooks' easement language was too full of loopholes and would not protect areas of pristine open space. Ultimately, Commissioner K.C. Kelley, the swing vote, withdrew her support for the project, declaring that the easements the school were offering "ain't open space." The project was denied on a 4-3 vote.
