Cubberley Community Center
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Cubberley Community Center is a community center in Palo Alto, California that is housed on the campus of the former Cubberley High School, which opened in the fall of 1956 and closed in 1979 as a result of declining enrollment. Cubberley High School, best known as the setting of Ron Jones' teaching experiment The Third Wave (later turned into a novel and one-hour television show for ABC), was one of three public high schools in Palo Alto in the 1960s and 1970s, along with Gunn High School and Palo Alto High School, both of which are still open. The high school was named after Ellwood P. Cubberley, an influential authority in the development of institutionalized education.
Now home to local interest organizations including a ballroom dancing club, wildlife rescue organization, and a Chinese reading room for Palo Alto's large Asian minority, the Cubberley Community Center (known as simply "Cubberley" to locals) has become a prime community area for residents in southern Palo Alto.
The Friends of the Palo Alto Library hold their used book sales at Cubberley on the second Saturday of every month and the following Sunday, filling three entire rooms. They also accept donated books and other items at their Main room on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 2 to 4 pm.
Cubberley also once hosted rock shows by local bands and touring artists including Buffalo Springfield, Santana, William Penn and His Pals, Cake, Third Eye Blind, blink-182, Daniel Tsai Band, and Frank Black.
Its most distinguished tenant includes an extension campus for Foothill College. Community and junior college classes are held at the Cubberley site and are becoming increasingly popular.
The land actually belongs to the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), and is leased to the City of Palo Alto, which has been criticized by local residents for mismanagement of its funds and subleasing agreements.
Remnants from academia, it boasts a track, a grassy school "amphitheater," and a gym; now used as sites for public running, recreation, and community athletics respectively.
Due to an increasing Generation Y teenage population there had been recent talk of reopening the site as a local high school again. This seems to have fluttered and disappeared due to funding problems, and school district reforms and reconstruction.
