Headmaster's Welcome

Flintridge Prep values academics, excellent college placement, service, sports, and arts. It's a tightly knit community, a network of intimate connections. Here, strong bonds are forged between student and student, student and teacher, study and dreams. It’s a place where students have nearly unlimited opportunity to discover and cultivate their creative and athletic gifts. In this cooperative and caring environment, we nurture critical thinking and intellectual curiosity to prepare each student to embrace lifelong learning.

The school bears a philosophical resemblance to the island of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and our teachers are not unlike the play's hero, Prospero, who provides the characters on the island with an opportunity to realize their potential for learning. Just as the characters reach the end of the play ready to leave the magical, sheltered island and enter the larger world with the lessons of the island now a part of them, our graduates take Flintridge Prep with them.

As for me, I feel so fortunate to have the freedom in my role as headmaster to do what I love best—teach. I still feel the same thrill each time I step into my Great Books seminar classroom or American Identity lecture course that I felt 30 years ago when I first started teaching here. The intellectual debate, the shared humor, the influential relationships, the spectacular development of our students during their time here—that’s what I look forward to when I wake up each morning and what makes Flintridge Prep the vibrant and important school it is.

Peter Bachmann, Headmaster, History Teacher 

Find out about Prep’s Idea Lab.