Why a Boys’ School?

21st Century Approach

The East Bay School for Boys is a new middle school model in which all kinds of boys become engaged, thoughtful, and courageous young adults. Based on the latest research about how boys learn and what they need to succeed, we strive to build intellectually curious and emotionally intelligent youth who are catalyzed to challenge stereotypes and bring powerful, positive, and peaceful change to our world.

Compelling Advantages

EBSB provides a learning environment that is uniquely tailored to the education of middle school boys. We…

  • Encourage active participation and healthy risk-taking within a safe, structured environment.

  • Emphasize working with tools—from computers to carpentry—to make things and share ideas.

  • Promote self-expression and respect for the many different paths to adulthood.

  • Provide a setting for important conversations, including about gender and sex-related issues.

  • Reduce potential gender-based distractions to focus on academic and personal achievement.

  • Attract and hire diverse, skilled staff—including many who are male-identified—who love teaching middle school boys.

  • Create an intentionally diverse community so that students learn that power comes from being their authentic selves instead of from taking power away from others.

  • Build friendship and camaraderie with peers and teachers so that the impact of positive male role models can have its fullest effect.

  • Redefine masculinity from self-assurance to self-advocacy, through an emphasis on growth mindset, high stakes exhibitions of learning, and student-led goal-setting and reflection.

Key Ideas

The following are integral components to our work:

Embracing Diversity

We strive to create a community of students and families that reflects the incredible diversity of the East Bay, so that our students to develop a sense of identity—not from what a “man is supposed to be,” but instead from their authentic selves. Students at EBSB collaborate with and learn from peers and adults of different races, gender expressions, abilities, and socioeconomic and family backgrounds. It is our goal to radically expand the concept of manhood as defined by popular culture. At EBSB, being a great young man means challenging oneself, learning from mistakes, expressing emotions with respect, caring for others, and standing up for justice. 

“What do we mean by all kinds of boys? Our program is designed to serve children who, upon enrollment, identify primarily as male through sexual orientation and/or gender expression. Understanding the fluidity of gender, we respect, embrace, and support each student’s gender development throughout his/her/their time at EBSB; any student already enrolled will be invited to re-enroll, regardless of their gender expression.”

Interrupting Misogyny

In our single-gender environment, we have a unique opportunity to empower our students so they don’t have to take power away from others. We challenge students to use respectful language, unlearn messages of misogyny inherited from the larger culture, and reflect on their gender identity in relation to power and privilege. We develop students’ awareness of male privilege and provide opportunities for them to engage in meaningful social justice conversations and actions. Our staff also continually grapple with  these issues and reflect regularly on ways to be allies to our female-bodied, gender fluid, and trans-identified community members, thereby modeling how to do this for our students.

“If EBSB is trying to undermine the gender binary, why is it single-gender? We believe that by bringing boy-identified students together, we can actually expand their notions of what it means to be a boy. With a fiercely loving and accepting school culture founded on feminist principles, boys tend to let go of “acting like a man” and inhabit their authentic selves; they pay more attention to academics, take better care of each other, and display more ways of being a boy.”