Cate School

Cate School is a highly selective, coeducational university-preparatory school for boarding and day students in grades 9-12 located in Carpinteria, California, eleven miles from Santa Barbara. In 2012, the school had 270 students, who came from 31 states and 18 foreign countries. In 2022, Niche ranked Cate School the best boarding school in California and the 13th-best in the United States. History Beginnings Cate School was founded in 1910 by Curtis Wolsey Cate, a 25-year-old graduate of Roxbury Latin School and Harvard University. Originally called the Miramar School, its classes were held in the Gane House, a leased private residence in Santa Barbara's Mission Canyon. (The Gane House, would be destroyed in the Jesusita Fire in 2009.) A prep school for boys in grades 7 to 12, its first academic year enrolled 12 students. In 1911, Cate moved his school to the Stewart Walcott Ranch in the Carpinteria Valley and renamed it the Santa Barbara School (or SBS). The extra space allowed him to pursue a program he had admired in his year of teaching English at the nearby Thacher School: each student was given a horse to care for, and much of the school's early campus and activities were based on horseback riding. Cate would later write, "The horse was as much a part of our lives as the book. Afternoons, mounted for a canter before baseball or for practice on the gymkhana field; Saturdays and Sunday, off for long rides or camping…learning from nature and the care of an animal larger than one's self, lessons not taught in the classrooms."