After months of nail-biting among Oakland parents and teachers, the nearly 100-year-old Mills College Children’s School, once slated to close at the end of the 2025-26 school year, has a new path forward. The historic lab school will live on in a new form through a partnership with Rockridge’s Aurora School, shifting students and many staff off the Mills campus and into an expanded Aurora program that begins by adding a full-day transitional kindergarten next school year.
Aurora announced the deal in a Dec. 11 press release, confirming that Mills College Children’s School will officially close on June 30, 2026 and that Aurora will "welcome many" of MCCS’s students and educators. The release also names Jenny Bond, currently assistant head at MCCS, as stepping into the same role at Aurora, and says the two schools will integrate Mills’ curriculum into an expanded Aurora program, according to Aurora School.
Aurora Will Add TK and Build a Preschool
In the first phase of the transition, Aurora will add a full-day transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds in the 2026-27 school year, with plans to develop a preschool modeled on Mills’ program over the following three years. School leaders also say they intend to build out a lab-school model that partners with colleges and universities to support professional learning and research as part of the expansion, as reported by The Oaklandside.
MCCS History and Enrollment Concerns
Founded in 1926, Mills College Children’s School has long operated as a laboratory school that trained teachers and hosted education research while running programs from toddler through fifth grade, according to Mills College Children’s School. The school’s community began sounding the alarm earlier in 2025 after new admissions were frozen and tours were canceled, a move that parents and staff feared signaled deeper trouble for the program, as reported by KQED.
Aurora head of school Lynsey Kamine told The Oaklandside that the expanded program expects to enroll roughly 20 students from Mills in the first year of the transition, and that several MCCS educators will move to Aurora. Families will be asked to apply through Aurora’s admissions process while the schools sort out capacity, staffing and financial-aid planning during the rollout.
“The magic of Aurora School is that each child is deeply known, challenged, and supported,” Kamine said, casting the partnership as a way to keep Mills’ hands-on, inquiry-based approach alive within a school that has room to grow. The announcement also notes that the combined program would make Aurora one of the few preschool-through-8 schools in Oakland and aims to preserve Mills’ lab-school legacy at a new, expanded site, according to Aurora School.
