Pacific School of Religion (PSR) is the oldest Protestant seminary west of the Mississippi River. It has a stately gothic building, a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay and, since 2020, 75 middle schoolers who show up for class every day.
That’s because the interdenominational school on Graduate Theological Union’s “Holy Hill” leases one of its buildings to Berkwood Hedge School, a private elementary school that opened a middle school in 2020.
“As COVID increased, I saw the culture of fear taking over everywhere,” said Love Weinstock, head of school at Berkwood Hedge. School leaders wanted to open a middle school where young adolescents would learn to love, trust, honor, and value themselves in community.
Within days Weinstock’s team saw a listing for the PSR space, and it seemed to check all their boxes. The initial meeting with David Vásquez-Levy, PSR’s president, convinced her.
Vásquez-Levy had been looking for not just a tenant, but a partner. He uses the term “double bottom line” – financial viability and missional alignment — to explain what PSR wanted: to work with another educational institution and build an intergenerational, cross-disciplinary community.
Some parents expressed concern about security on PSR’s open campus, so the two schools worked to ensure the safety of the students. Shared events and activities have the two groups mingling; at Halloween, costumed middle schoolers trick-or-treat in PSR’s Hogwarts-style Holbrook Hall, and last year Vásquez-Levy and PSR Dean Susan Abraham dressed up as Dumbledore and McGonagall.
PSR also opens its conference room to the Berkwood Hedge Student Council for its meetings. “They change when they walk into the building,” Weinstock said. “There’s immediate reverence for the space and that it’s a spiritual environment. It’s helped them see the importance of leadership.”
Deeper collaboration is happening on a curriculum level: For the ancient world unit in social studies, fifth graders visit PSR’s Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology and have donned gloves to handle some of the artifacts in the collection, which inspired museum director Aaron Brody to develop a middle school curriculum.
Berkwood Hedge and PSR’s other tenant, U.C. Berkeley’s Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, have 10-year renewable leases. Leaders from each school are part of a site council of leaders that shares calendars and communicates resource needs for events. “Living in community takes work,” Vásquez-Levy said. “We are always trying to be intentional about clarifying what’s in the lease, what we can and cannot do.”
PSR is achieving its double bottom line, and may even offer a triple bottom line: financial, missional, and theological.
“We often talk about the idea that what we do now matters for generations to come,” Vásquez-Levy said. “We know that the struggle of the Church is to figure out how to transfer our faith and our traditions to the next generation.” By sharing space with young people, the PSR community sees reason for hope.
