| The Thacher School | |
| Nickname: | Casa de Piedra |
| Established: | 1889 |
| Head Name: | Head of School |
| Head: | Jeff Hooper (Interim) |
| City: | Ojai |
| State: | California |
| Country: | United States |
| Enrollment: | 260 |
| Faculty: | 60 |
| Grades: | 9-12 |
| Class: | 11 students |
| Ratio: | 6:1 |
| Athletics: | 36 teams; 10 interscholastic sports |
| Colors: | Green and orange |
The Thacher School is a private co-educational boarding school on 427 acres in Ojai, California. Founded in 1889 as a boys' school, it is now the oldest co-educational boarding school in California. Girls were first admitted in 1977, with the first co-ed graduating class being the class of 1978. Unique to Thacher are its Horse and Outdoors Programs. Its founder, Sherman Day Thacher, believed in the power of the outdoors to help shape students: “Come West, breathe deep, let these hills be your teachers.”[1]
Sherman Day Thacher did not arrive on the Casa de Piedra ranch with the intent of creating a school.[2] The son of Yale professor Thomas Anthony Thacher and the former Elizabeth Baldwin Sherman (a granddaughter of Founding Father Roger Sherman), he elected to move to California to care for his brother who needed the "fresh air" cure for his tuberculosis. While spending time on the ranch, Thacher was contacted by an old Yale colleague who had a son who desperately wanted to go to Yale but needed tutoring before he would be prepared to attend. Thacher accepted the offer and tutored his colleague's son in both academics and maturity with his unique method of blending studies with outdoor living and horsemanship. Soon other friends were sending their sons out to California to receive Thacher's instruction and a school was born. Though it began as a feeder school to Yale, students were also attracted by the "emphasis on the lessons of the outdoors, hiking and rafting and riding on horseback"[3] and "nearly every boy has a horse of his own and takes full care of it".[4]
Thacher helped expand boarding opportunities for boys in California. Sherman Day Thacher contacted educator Thompson Webb, an instructor at the Webb School of Bell Buckle in Tennessee (founded by his father, William R. Webb), that his school was turning down dozens of qualified students every year, and that an empty school near Claremont was for sale. If Thompson opened a school there, Thacher agreed to refer his applicants.[5] This led to the founding of The Webb School of California in 1922.
Only 28 boys and 28 girls are admitted to each year's freshman class. In 2023, the overall acceptance rate was 13% and the yield (or enrollment) rate was 75%, higher than some of the nation's top universities.[6] Students from 24 states and 11 countries across five continents matriculated to Thacher in the 2023-24 school year.
Thacher students engage in a rigorous, college preparatory curriculum and are required to complete four years of Mathematics and English with three years of Science, History, and a foreign language of choice, plus two years of Art. Students must take five solid courses (defined as classes with substantial written homework) each term. Students are placed in and choose from more than 80 courses, ranging from English I to Advanced Music Theory. Classes such as Latin, Global Crises and Solutions, Astronomy Research, Modern Middle East, Advanced Actors Studio, Multivariable Calculus, Perspectives on Nature, Field Biology and Conservation are on offer.
Thacher uses the Harkness method[7] in its classrooms. "Daily preparation, thoughtful participation, analytical thinking and intellectual rigor" are part of life in the Thacher classroom.[8]
All seniors exhibit mastery on a topic by designing and researching a topic of choice. This Senior Exhibition must have an oral and written component and be presented to the Thacher community.
The Horse Program requires students to ride and care for a horse during all athletic seasons their freshman year at Thacher, while students who join at later grades complete the requirement during one athletic season.[9] An annual gymkhana event provides students the opportunity to demonstrate horsemanship in competition. Though Western-style riding is required, the Equestrian Program offers an English riding elective in grades 10-12.
As part of the Outdoors Program, students are encouraged to take weekend camping trips into the local mountains, in addition to week-long trips each fall and spring that include backpacking, rock climbing, cycling, sailing, horse camping, canyoneering, backcountry skiing and kayaking.
Thacher has an astronomical research program, where students participate in astrophysics research in collaboration with teams at Harvard University, Boston University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Las Cumbres Observatory.[10]
The observatory was brought to campus in 1965 by Caltech and UCLA as part of the Summer Science Program. It was renovated in 2016 into a state-of-the-art, research-grade facility and now houses a PlaneWave CDK-700 telescope with a 0.7m aperture and a fully robotic dome. The observatory uses a flexible dispatch schedule for full automation.[11]
On November 8, 2004, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the school received its largest alumni donation ever from Owen Jameson. The $10 million gift was part of the $82 million Campaign For Thacher,[12] concluded in 2007, that sought to improve Thacher's financial aid program and facilities, and raise its faculty salaries and endowment. Jameson's donation was specifically directed towards expanding Thacher's scholarship opportunities for youths from minority or low-income families.[13]
The campus, located in the foothills in the northeast corner of the Ojai Valley, about 85 miles north of Los Angeles, was originally the Casa de Piedra ranch.[14] Buildings reflect a variety of architectural styles, including California Craftsman and Spanish Colonial Revival. An $82-million capital campaign that concluded in 2007 added a new performing arts center and a student commons, two new dormitories, faculty housing, and numerous other improvements. In addition to the normal boarding school mix of athletic facilities like a gymnasium, tennis courts, track, three fields, fitness center, and pool (although the pool is not used for athletic events), the campus has barns, pastures, arenas, and fields for equestrian use, including a network of trails that links the campus to the adjacent Los Padres National Forest. There are also a game room, sand volleyball courts and two wellness centers.
The school maintains base camps in the Sespe Wilderness and the Eastern Sierra's Golden Trout Wilderness,[15] which it uses for backcountry trips, educational programs and alumni retreats.[16]
While The Thacher School's symbol has always been the pegasus, its mascot is the toad, chosen, according to the founder's grandson, Nick Thacher, for its quiet humility and persistence.[17]
In a report[18] posted on the Thacher website on June 16, 2021 the school publicly acknowledged decades of student sexual misconduct, harassment and “boundary crossing” (including violent rapes) by faculty members.[19] The 91-page report compiled by attorneys hired by Thacher "laid out episodes of alleged rape, groping, unwanted touching and inappropriate comments dating back 40 years in a level of detail surprising for a private institution,"[20] according to the Los Angeles Times. The document identified six alleged perpetrators by name, recounted accusations of misconduct and alleged efforts by former school administrators to cover up complaints and blame teenage victims. Thacher's board of trustees concluded, among other findings, that many students "suffered lasting harm not just from the sexual misconduct itself but also from the School’s handling of the misconduct." The board also concluded that the school "tolerated and at times fostered a culture that valued the experiences and voices of boys and men over those of girls and women and that allowed sexual misconduct to be minimized, ignored, and dismissed."[21]
The allegations, per further reporting in the Times, "sparked a broad criminal inquiry" by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. "Investigators were examining potential sex crimes as well as whether Thacher administrators committed crimes by not alerting police to suspected child abuse, according to the Sheriff’s Office."[22]
On July 28, 2021 the Thacher Board of Trustees unanimously voted to remove the name of its former head of school from the campus dining hall and athletic field.[23] In a letter to the school community, board chair Dan Yih wrote that “the high honor associated with a name on a building is fundamentally inconsistent with the gravity and serious consequences of Michael Mulligan’s failure to protect Thacher students from harm.” The trustees also voted to remove former headmaster Bill Wyman’s name from a hiking trail named for him. Wyman, who served as headmaster at the school from 1975 to 1992 and died in 2014, had engaged in “a pattern of offensive verbal conduct and improper touching” toward female students and staff.[24] Wyman resigned after the discovery.
In March of 2022, Head of School Blossom Pidduck announced that she would be taking a leave of absence through the summer. In a letter addressed to the Thacher community,[25] the administrator wrote that she had not been prepared for the personal ramifications that would come with Thacher's investigation of historic sexual misconduct. Pidduck stated that she wanted to spend time healing from sexual trauma she experienced in her own time as a Thacher student in the early 1990s.[26]