Roeper School (Michigan)


The Roeper School is a private coeducational day school, with campuses in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in Greater Detroit, serving students at all levels from preschool through the 12th grade. It was formerly known as Roeper City and Country School.

History

The Roeper School was founded in 1941 by George and Annemarie Roeper, who were forced to flee Nazi Germany. At the time the Roepers fled Europe, Annemarie had been invited by Anna Freud to be her protégé and, in fact, had completed her first year of medical school.
Together the Roepers founded the school intending it to be a place that, by teaching personal motivation and encouraging critical thinking skills and analysis, would educate children who would not follow leadership blindly as they believed had happened to many people in interwar Germany. It was also hoped the children would come to recognize the inherent dignity of every individual and to not harbor prejudice.
The school first moved to the Bloomfield Hills campus in 1946 and was designated a school for gifted children in 1956. In 1965 the Upper School program was added, and in 1981, the middle and upper schools moved to the former Adams Elementary School in Birmingham, Michigan, thereby creating two campuses. The Capital Campaign fundraising initiative began in the mid-nineties and has provided the school with its largest investment in new facilities, including a new elementary school classroom building that sits adjacent to the new community center that houses the school's first adequate gymnasium, and the lower school's first adequate choir and band rooms.

Notable alumni