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For other schools of the same name, see Crossroads School

Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences is a private K-12 school in Santa Monica, California, United States.

The school was founded in 1971 by Dr. Paul Cummins (an educator) and Dr. Rhoda Makoff (a biochemist) as an effort in progressive private education. Dr. Cummins, dissatisfied with the direction the school had taken, went on to found New Roads School in Santa Monica, California. Although the founders, and many of the school's original students, came from the former St. Augustine By-the-Sea [[Episcopal Church
in the United States of America|Episcopal]] Day School in Santa Monica, Crossroads School has always been a secular institution. The school is known for its artistic curricula such as music and film, as well as its upper school newspaper, Crossfire, consistently ranked among the top 10 high school newspapers in the country. Crossroads' academic curriculum is considered competitive with those of America's top private schools. Admissions into Crossroads School is highly selective.

Human Development is a fundamental part of the Crossroads curriculum, holding equal weight with conventional departments such as Math and History. It is meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence, important aspects of life that are often neglected in a public school education. Advanced Placement (AP) classes were recently excluded from the curriculum, as the faculty felt the required topics for certain AP classes were too narrow, and taught students to merely pass a test rather than truly understand the subject. Students address teachers by their first names. Some question this untraditional approach, but many at Crossroads insist that this practice fosters friendship and trust between the authority figure and the pupil. Classrooms also have names, not numbers, and are dedicated to important figures in history: Einstein, Mead, Frost, Chavez, and Neruda are examples.

The 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner (ISBN 0-471-45051-0), dedicated a large section to Crossroads; it depicted the school (and the celebrities who send their children there) in a negative light. The article focused mainly on a handful of high-profile parents and "drug problems" stemming from the 1980s. The school was also featured in a May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair; like Breitbart's book, it also focused on the school's celebrity clientele.

• J. A. Adande
• Sean Astin
• Michael Bay
• Whitney Port
• Hahn-Bin
• Jack Black
• Max Brooks
• Spencer Pratt
• Jake Busey
• Gary Coleman
• Austin Croshere
• Baron Davis
• Emily Deschanel
• Zooey Deschanel
• Zack Fleishman
• Tanya Haden
• Jonah Hill
• Kate Hudson
• Oliver Hudson
• Alex Kurtzman
• Alexandra Kyle
• Roberto Orci
• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Amy Pascal
• Seth Rogen
• Maya Rudolph
• Blake Schwarzenbach
• Natasha Gregson Wagner
• Gillian Welch
• Jess Whedon (brother of Joss Whedon)
• Evan Smith
• Rob Schnieder
• Andrew von Oeyen
• Tommy Rogers

The Crossroads Fight Song, "Burn Up the Road," was selected to be the school's official fight song after an open contest in the fall of 2007. It was written by student Jeremy Fassler, in collaboration with composer Scott Hiltzik, and will premiere at the Crossroads Sports Extravaganza on January 11th, 2008. The lyrics read as follows:

"Burn up the road, roadrunners!
We can outrun them all!
No other team can defeat us
Back to their schools they'll crawl!
We're scholars and artists and atheletes
All other teams take note
Hey, Crossroads! Crossroads!
Let's emerge victorious
And we'll keep burning up the road!"

• http://www.xrds.org/