For the first time in more than 50 years, Fountain Valley School will welcome eighth-grade students to its campus, the school announced Tuesday.

Currently serving grades 9-12, the private boarding school will welcome an initial class of 15 students in the 2026-27 school year. The students will only attend classes during the day and not board at the school’s campus.

Fountain Valley Head of School Megan Harlan said the decision to expand was partly due to local families’ expressed interest in challenging students, academically, at an earlier age through the school’s interdisciplinary and discussion-based curriculum and experiential learning.

She also recalled her prior experience working at an 8-12 boarding school in Massachusetts and saw its potential at her current school.  

“And I really thought that this model could work here,” Harlan said, now in her fourth year. “So, it took me some time to get my feet set and I thought the time was now for expanding.”

Opening in 1930, Fountain Valley originally offered grades 7-12 to male students. The seventh and eighth grades were phased out at the school in the late 1960s, with the eventual goal of accommodating a co-ed campus. The school officially became co-ed in 1975.

Harlan said the hope is for the incoming eighth-grade students to learn the foundational skills taught at the boarding school, like critical thinking, and get introduced to more advanced material, like physical science, to ease them into high school.

She also hopes that future ninth graders will act as guides going forward.

“We want to take a cohort that enters the ninth grade who have a greater understanding and can be mentors to the next eighth graders.”

Core courses will include English and ancient history, along with placement in higher-level math courses like algebra I or geometry. Classes that students may take alongside upper school students will include Spanish, French or Mandarin language and art courses including studio art, music and theater.

The school will not add teachers, with its current instructors adjusting their materials for the younger students, but will add a new team leader to oversee the progress and implementation of the new instruction.

Although they won’t live on campus, Harlan said the eighth graders won’t be isolated from the other grades on campus and will have full access to clubs, weekend programming and community activities. In the years ahead, Harlan said the plan is to slowly grow out the cohort by sections of 12-15 students.

“We want to do it right and we don’t want to grow it too fast,” she said. “We want to do it with intention.”  

Tuition for the 2026–2027 school year will be $35,000 and the priority application deadline is March 8. Fountain Valley will host an in-person parent information session 6-7 p.m. March 2 for interested families.