Lafayette Tutors Come To You

Much can be said for the city of Lafayette; it is an area of economic prosperity, charming rolling hills, and suburbia as a comfortable and affluent bedroom community of San Francisco. Among its many desirable attributes is Lafayette’s continuing devotion to quality education. This has been true since its early days in the 1850s.

Benjamin Shreve, the community’s first school teacher, was responsible for founding and building Lafayette’s first school. Shreve was young, adventurous, and by all accounts, an excellent instructor. At only twenty-five, he was also one of the more influential figures in the early days of the city. His one room school house was located on Golden Gate Way between First and Second Street. At any given time, dozens of pupils attended his classes, ranging in ages six through eighteen.

Eventually, however, Lafayette grew and was in need of a new school. In the 1860s, local residents voted for a tax increase to fund construction of a new building to accommodate the town’s growing population in need of education. This second school was founded in 1871 on Moraga Road, where a Methodist church currently stands. This second one-room schoolhouse continued to be used as a gathering place and educational facility for citizens of Lafayette until 1927, when it was sold and then moved to Diablo Boulevard. This building is still in use today, though, as a historical site.

So dedicated to education that the third school of Lafayette was built in 1893, again on Moraga. As before, the construction for this school was crowdfunded by citizens in the form of a voted tax proposal, as well as fundraising efforts. This structure is still standing today, as the south end and belfry of the Methodist Church. Jennie Bickerstaff was the next influential educator in Lafayette; she worked in the site of the third school. An avid horse rider and intelligent woman, Bickerstaff dedicated her life to the education of Lafayette’s young residents for three years.

In the late 1930s, local voters approved a ballot measure to construct a modern high school facility in Lafayette, though the third one-room schoolhouse was still in use through the 1940s. This new school would be able to house 300 students and was a huge step forward from the single-room structures that had typified Lafayette’s educational patterns up to this point.

The history of Lafayette’s educational priorities demonstrates that this is a community dedicated to learning, willing to sacrifice money and time to make sure youngsters have a place to go to develop their minds. This is a long-standing tradition in Lafayette, and Grade Potential tutors are proud inheritors of that tradition. Like Shreve and Bickerstaff, tutors in Lafayette work with struggling students to help them find the academic success they so desire, and take pride in their professionalism, enthusiasm, and expertise.