Crossroads headmaster announces his departure
Roger Weaver, who has led the arts and sciences prep school in Santa Monica for the last 15 years, says he plans to leave next year.
In the 15 years that he has headed Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, Roger Weaver has shepherded the Santa Monica campus from its origins as a funky, laid-back hippie school to its current status as one of the most respected and challenging prep schools in the nation.
Last week, Weaver announced plans to leave Crossroads next year, having expanded the private school's enrollment, endowment and operating budget. He is only the third headmaster in the school's 37-year history and his departure will usher in a rare transition at a school with an image as the quintessential Southern California alternative campus.
During Weaver's tenure, Crossroads maintained its urban character, attracted a student body rife with celebrity offspring, weathered criticism of alleged student drug use and obstreperous parental behavior, and became one of the first local schools to drop Advanced Placement classes.
Crossroads School: A Feb. 19 story about Crossroads School head Roger Weaver stepping down included a comment from Weaver that the book "Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity" -- which includes allegations of student sex- and drug-fueled scandals at Crossroads -- was filled with fabrications. The article should have included comment as well from Mark C. Eb- ner, one of the book's authors, who denies that the book contains fabrications. The Times regrets the error.
What has remained consistent, Weaver said, is the school's commitment to a progressive education, to social and economic diversity, and to producing young adults whose heads are filled with humanistic ideals as well as facts and figures.
"Many institutions have statements of philosophy that sit in a drawer," Weaver, 63, said in a recent interview. "The thing I take greatest satisfaction in is giving the school clarity of purpose and clarity of identity that serves us and our clientele well. . . . It is most manifest in our students when they go off to college. They take with them an academic understanding, of course, but also a sense of self and a willingness to engage with the world."
Weaver joined Crossroads in 1983 as its assistant headmaster under Paul Cummins. The campus, founded in 1971 by Cummins and Rhoda Makoff, was a jumble of rented buildings in a semi-industrial stretch off Olympic Boulevard with an alley -- the focal point of student life today -- running through it.
Under Cummins the place was a percolator of new ideas and projects. Weaver, who had been principal at La Jolla Country Day School, instilled order.
"Roger came in and was able to make sense of it all and institute orderly procedures that were thought out," said Cummins, who went on to found the private New Roads School in Santa Monica. "He had the unenviable task, which he did brilliantly, of maintaining the institutional soul of the school and at the same time bringing in new, better management practices."
