John Swett Elementary School - Oakland

View Edit

John Swett Elementary School was constructed in 1926 and opened in January 1927, and closed in 2004 while OUSD was under state control. Since 2020, the upper portion of the site has been used by the Urban Montessori Charter School under a lease with OUSD. ¹ The John Swett site is located in the Oakland foothills in a residential neighborhood near the junction of I-580 & CA-13, and Mills College is just on the other side of the I-580 freeway.

The lower portion of the site was the site of the Tilden Child Development Center, which itself closed in 2010. OUSD has entered into a long-term lease for this portion of the property to Eagle Environmental Construction & Development, which is in the process of entitling and constructing an affordable and workforce housing development on the site.²

The school was named after John Swett (July 31, 1830–August 22, 1913), who is considered to be the "Father of the California public school" system. The school was a replacement for a smaller school building originally named the Beulah School, located at 4620 Tompkins Avenue, but the old school and then-proposed school were both renamed after Mr. Swett in May of 1925.^3,4 Mr. Swett is buried at Mountain View Cemetery, although he is not known to have ever lived in Oakland.

The school's most famous alumnus is Tom Hanks.

In the 1950s, the school had a "station" of the Oakland Public Library. One Twitter user has fond memories of the librarian, Mrs. Anna Ona Batchelor. "[She] made the long missed John Swett branch library such a perfect place for kids in the 1950s."