Ribet Academy to Move to Pater Noster Campus

A tony college preparatory school in La Canada Flintridge will relocate this fall to the site of the former Pater Noster High School in Glassell Park, school officials announced this week.

Ribet Academy, which serves just under 600 students from preschool through 12th grade, will move to the 8.5-acre campus at San Fernando Road and the Glendale Freeway because it has outgrown the facilities it leases from the La Canada Unified School District.

“We’ve been very happy here, but we’ve been short of space most of the time and we have no way to expand,” said Marie Jones, headmaster of the 10-year-old academy.

Ribet, pronounced rib-BAY, is one of five schools that share classroom space at the former Foothill Intermediate School, which was closed by La Canada Flintridge school officials when enrollment dropped some years ago.

Pater Noster is nine miles south, a quick clip along the Glendale Freeway, Jones said. She said Ribet is looking into offering bus service from La Canada Flintridge and the Sunland-Tujunga and Pasadena areas into Glassell Park.

Parental reaction to the move is mixed, she said. “Some are delighted; others are unhappy because of the longer drive, but I think our enrollment will hold pretty steady as people drop out and others join,” Jones said.

She said the Pater Noster campus offers a larger site with more facilities for less money than Ribet is paying in La Canada Flintridge. The new site includes a football field, science labs, a large library and an assembly hall, none of which are available at Foothill Intermediate.

Ribet has signed a 10-year lease for the Pater Noster site with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which owns the land. Brothers from the Irish Order of St. Patrick had run Pater Noster for mainly inner-city, minority boys for 31 years, but the archdiocese closed it last June because of dwindling enrollment.

Ribet was founded in Glendale in 1982 by Jacques Ribet, who is originally from Mauritius and attended the University of London. The nondenominational school charges tuition from $6,000 to $6,400 per year. Ribet has scheduled an open house at the Pater Noster campus from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday for students and their parents.