Page Academy is a K-8 school where the arts are how the academics are taught. Children learn by performing what they study, building what they study, writing what they study, and shipping finished work to a real audience. The making is the curriculum, not a wrapper around it.
Page Academy is a private K-8 school for the arts in Costa Mesa, California, with a sister campus in Los Angeles in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Larchmont. Across both campuses, the school teaches core academics through arts-integrated, project-based learning, and offers a specialized Creators Program in performing arts, visual arts, design, production, and the business of creative work.
What that means in practice is that fifth graders studying California history do not write a five-paragraph essay and turn it in. They research a figure, write a monologue from that figure's point of view, and perform it on stage to an audience. Third graders learning about ecosystems sculpt the species they are studying out of clay, paint the watercolor backdrop, and write the field guide that travels with their exhibition. Eighth graders finishing the school produce a capstone creative project that ships to a real audience before they leave. The work is the learning. The making is the method.
A child who grows up at Page leaves the school as a creator. By eighth grade, they have performed in front of an audience every year since kindergarten. They have built, written, and shipped finished work that real people came to see. They have spent nine years in classes small enough that their teachers know their drafts, their growth, and their name. The pages that follow describe how that happens.
Page Academy is one school across two locations. Curriculum, faculty standards, and the Creators Program are consistent at both. Each campus has the character of its neighborhood and the scale of its footprint, and we lean into those differences rather than smoothing them over.
657 Victoria Street, Costa Mesa, California. Infants through 8th grade on a 7.5-acre campus with three buildings, 1.5 acres of outdoor play, a swimming pool, a learning garden, and full Creators Program facilities. Solar powered, minutes from the 55 and 405.
565 N Larchmont Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Age 2 through 8th grade. A neighborhood walk-up campus inside Larchmont Village, plugged directly into Los Angeles's working creative community.
This enrollment guide is for the Costa Mesa campus. A separate guide is available for Hancock Park. Families considering both are welcome on tour at either.
The arts are not enrichment around Page's academics. The arts are how Page teaches its academics.
At most schools, project-based learning means students study a topic, then make a poster about it. At Page, the project is the topic. Students perform the historical figure, build the scale replica, write and produce the documentary, sculpt the artifact, design the brand. The creative output is not a wrapper around the lesson; the creative output is the lesson, and the rigor lives inside the making. This way of teaching is harder than a worksheet, and it produces deeper retention, more original thinking, and stronger writing.
Historical figures, scientific processes, original arguments, all delivered out loud, on stage, in front of an audience. By the time Page students reach middle school, public speaking is not nervous; it is a skill they have been practicing since kindergarten.
Sculpture, painting, scale replicas, set pieces, costumes, prototypes. Whether the unit is Mesoamerican civilizations, the human body, or a Shakespeare play, students build something with their hands as part of understanding it.
Monologues, short fiction, scripts, copy, criticism, journalism. Page students write across a wider range of forms than most middle school programs ask for, because creative writing is treated as a discipline.
Almost every major project at Page culminates in something a public audience sees: a performance, an exhibition, a publication, a presentation. Real audiences raise the standard.
A specialized K-8 curriculum spanning performing arts, visual arts, design, production, and the business of creative work. Taught alongside core academics. Deepening with grade level.
The Creators Program is Page's signature program, built into the school day, not bolted on as enrichment. Every student is in the program from kindergarten on. The program covers four domains, sequenced to grow with the child.
Theater, musical theater, voice, movement, dance, instrumental music. Anchored by the annual all-school production at each campus, in which every student performs.
Drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, digital illustration, graphic design, set and costume design, basic 3D and printmaking, exhibition.
Lighting, sound, stage management, video production, editing, the digital tools working creative professionals actually use. The part most schools skip; we lean into it.
Age-appropriate exposure to how creative professionals earn a living: copywriting, advertising fundamentals, brand and identity, intellectual property, the entertainment business. Heaviest in middle school.
Every fall, the Costa Mesa campus mounts an all-school musical theater production. Every student in the school is in it. There are no auditions. No student is cut. No student is sidelined. Every child takes a real role.
For some children, that means a speaking part on stage, or a singing role in the ensemble, or a featured dance. For others, that means stage management, or running the lighting board, or working sound, or building the set, or designing the costumes, or painting the backdrops, or running the front of house. Every job is a real job. We staff our productions the way a working theater staffs a working theater, and we treat the eight-year-old running a follow spot the same way we treat the eighth grader on opening monologue: as someone doing real work.
Costa Mesa is 35 miles from Hollywood. Hancock Park is in the middle of it. The professional creative world is not a field trip at Page; it is part of the schedule.
Throughout the school year, working creative professionals come into Page on a regular cadence. Actors, directors, designers, art directors, copywriters, agency owners, gallery owners, working artists, photographers, music producers, post-production engineers. They share work, they run workshops, and, increasingly as students grow older, they mentor and critique student projects.
The cadence is monthly during the school year for upper elementary and middle school students, with quarterly all-school assemblies that the youngest students also attend. Some sessions are large gatherings; others are smaller and more focused, with a working professional sitting in on a specific Creators Program track and giving feedback the way they would in a working studio.
"Performing arts school" is a category claim. "This month our seventh graders did a working session with a production designer from a film coming out next year" is proof. The speaker series turns the school's positioning into evidence on a monthly cadence, and it shapes how students think about the creative life as a real life, not a hobby.
The youngest learners are not running productions. They are building the foundations a creators school depends on, in the way young children should: through play, music, movement, color, sound, and story.
Low ratios, sensory exploration, early language, music and movement, and warm consistent caregivers. The classroom is calm, the day is structured, and the youngest children are introduced to making and listening from the start.
Play-based curriculum with intentional instruction in early literacy, pre-mathematics, social skills, and creative expression. Young learners spend significant time on visual making, dramatic play, music, and storytelling.
For children not quite ready for kindergarten, a structured year that introduces foundational academics alongside creative practice. Phonics-based literacy, early math, and creative-process habits.
The final early-childhood year. Students arrive in kindergarten with strong foundational skills and a creative practice already underway: comfortable on a stage, comfortable making things, comfortable working in front of others.
In lower elementary, every Page student moves through all four Creators Program domains, every year. Performing, making, producing, writing. There is no specialization yet; the work at this stage is to give students broad exposure and to build the habit of public, finished, creative work.
Core academic instruction is mastery-based, with real-time differentiation inside the classroom. Reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies are taught directly and rigorously, and they are also constantly braided into the creative work students are doing. A unit on community helpers becomes a series of student-written, student-performed monologues. A unit on plant life becomes a series of botanical illustrations and a class-built terrarium. Performance and exhibition happen as part of every project, not just at year-end.
Reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies. Direct instruction, small groups, real-time differentiation.
Spanish from kindergarten on. Daily physical practice. Music and visual art integrated through Creators Program rotations.
Every student rotates through all four Creators Program domains across the year. No specialization yet; this is the foundation.
The years where students start choosing what kind of work they want to do, while keeping their hands on every domain.
Upper elementary at Page is when depth begins. Students still rotate through all four Creators Program domains, but they begin selecting emphasis areas. A child drawn to performance starts taking more demanding stage roles in the all-school production. A child drawn to visual work starts producing finished pieces for exhibition. A child drawn to production technology starts running cables, programming light cues, and operating sound during real performances.
Academically, upper elementary is when project work gets longer-form. A research project that took two weeks in second grade now takes five, with multiple drafts, peer critique, a formal presentation, and a published or performed final product. The expectation is that students think harder, write more, and own the quality of their work.
This is also the first stage at which students sit in on relevant Industry Speaker Series sessions. A fourth grader who is becoming serious about visual art starts attending sessions with working artists; a fifth grader interested in writing sits in on a session with a working novelist or screenwriter.
Concentration tracks, real production responsibility, the business of creative work, and a capstone project that ships to a real audience.
Middle school is where the Creators Program reaches full depth. Students choose concentration tracks across the four domains. They take on real production responsibility on the all-school musical: not as participants any longer, but as designers, writers, stage managers, and student producers.
The Business of Creative Work content lives heaviest here. Seventh and eighth graders take age-appropriate sessions on creative writing as a profession, on copywriting and advertising, on intellectual property, on how creative businesses actually work. They sit in on Industry Speaker Series sessions monthly. Academic expectations rise sharply; Page middle schoolers prepare for placement at top-choice high schools across Orange County and Los Angeles, with a strong placement record.
Every Page student finishes eighth grade by producing a capstone creative project across one of the four Creators Program domains, presented to a real audience. A short film. A staged play. A gallery exhibition. A published collection of writing. A produced album. A designed brand for a working business. A finished thing, shipped, with the student's name on it.
Creative work needs feedback, attention, and trust. None of those scale. The 8:1 ratio is not a marketing claim; it is the only way the school's pedagogy actually works.
Page maintains an 8:1 student-teacher ratio across the entire school, infants through eighth grade. The same small cohort of children moves through grade after grade together, with deep multi-year relationships with the same faculty members. This is the configuration that makes the school's approach to teaching possible at all.
A child who is going to perform a monologue she wrote needs a teacher who can read her drafts and give specific notes. A student building a sculpture needs a working artist over his shoulder, not a worksheet check. A young actor needs a director who actually saw him in rehearsal yesterday and can name what to work on tonight. None of that scales to twenty-five students per class. At eight per class, the work is real, the feedback is specific, and the child is impossible to lose track of.
The Costa Mesa campus sits on 7.5 acres at 657 Victoria Street, a few minutes from the 55 and 405 freeways. Three Spanish-style buildings, brick pavers, wrought iron, Spanish tile roofing. A 1.5-acre outdoor play and gathering space. A swimming pool used year-round for the school's swim program. A learning garden where students plant, tend, and harvest food that connects to the curriculum. A solar-powered campus that takes its environmental footprint seriously.
Significant footprint for a private K-8 in Orange County. The space matters; creative work wants room.
Daily physical practice, recess, outdoor classrooms, and room for the kind of unstructured time young children need.
Year-round swim instruction. A working learning garden. STEM and computer labs with 1:1 device access for every student.
A school is its faculty. The Creators Program is only as strong as the working artists, performers, designers, and writers in the building.
Great-great-granddaughter of the school's founders, Robert and Della Page Gibbs. Leads the school across both campuses and is accessible to families directly, not behind an assistant or a voicemail. Page is a school where the President shows up at the front of house on opening night.
Page faculty include classroom teachers across every grade and a growing roster of teaching artists across performing arts, visual arts, design, production, and writing. Many of our teaching artists work professionally in the fields they teach.
Page Academy has reinvented itself before. The reinvention is the tradition.
Founded in 1908 by Robert and Della Page Gibbs as a private military academy for boys, Page Academy is one of Southern California's oldest private schools. The school has been in continuous operation for more than a century, and in that century it has done the thing institutions are not supposed to do: it has changed itself, with intention, more than once.
Founded by Robert and Della Page Gibbs to educate young men in the discipline, character, and academic preparation expected of leaders. For more than five decades, the school's graduates served in the military, in business, and in public life.
The school transitioned into a college-preparatory model focused on personalized academics, whole-child development, and lifelong learning. Coed, no longer military, organized around the small-classroom model the school still uses.
The school's third chapter. Page is now a school built around creative work, with a Creators Program in performing arts, visual arts, production, and the business of creative work, anchored by an arts-integrated academic program. Same school. New chapter.
Each chapter has been a response to what its students needed and what the world they were entering looked like. The school's longevity is not the result of standing still; it is the result of evolving on purpose. We are still here in 2026 because the school changes.
Page is committed to being honest with families about cost. Tuition for the full K-8 academic program at Costa Mesa is set out below, alongside our infant, toddler, preschool, and junior kindergarten rates. Payment plans, sibling considerations, and a limited financial aid pool are available; please contact the admissions office to discuss your family's situation.
Full academic program. Core academics, the Creators Program across all four domains, specials, project-based learning, and the annual production.
Foundational academics, phonics-based literacy, pre-mathematics, and creative-practice habits.
Play-based curriculum with intentional instruction in early literacy, social skills, and creative expression.
Low-ratio, sensory-rich early learning environment with consistent caregivers.
Tuition is set annually by the Page Academy board. Figures shown are for the current academic year and are subject to change. Payment plans and sibling discounts are available; financial aid is limited and awarded on a rolling basis. Please contact admissions to discuss your family's situation.
The school is hard to describe accurately on paper. Tour a working day, see the classrooms, watch a rehearsal, sit in on a lesson, and meet the people. Then decide.
One-hour tours of the Costa Mesa campus during a working school day, led by the head of admissions.
Sit with the President and the campus admissions team. Bring your questions. We will not rush.
If Page feels right for your family, the admissions team will walk you through the application process step by step.
Page Academy, Costa Mesa Campus
657 Victoria Street, Costa Mesa, California 92627
pageacademyca.com
Page Academy. Create today, lead tomorrow.