The Cambridge School, a private Christian school in Rancho Penasquitos, is gearing up to build a larger campus on 6.5 acres of vacant land in Del Sur.
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Earlier this month, a city of San Diego hearing officer approved a conditional use permit for the pre-K-12 school’s campus project at the southwest corner of Camino Del Sur and Coyote Bush Drive in the Black Mountain Ranch Community Plan area.
The project includes a 182,868‑square‑foot, three-story classroom building; a 10,904‑square‑foot single story multipurpose building, 386 parking spaces; and a track and sports field atop a parking deck. The campus can accommodate up to 663 students and 125 staff members.
The school is designed in the Spanish modern style to match the surrounding neighborhood. It is meant to provide ample space for a growing student body and the school’s many extracurricular activities.
“We intend for this to be our permanent campus … and so we’re really making sure that it can be flexible to grow as needed,” Arlene Tendick, a consultant for The Cambridge School who helped lead community outreach, told the Union-Tribune.
With the city’s approval, The Cambridge School will finalize project construction documents and is aiming to break ground in 18 to 24 months, Tendick said. Construction of the campus is anticipated to take around two years. The school declined to provide a project cost.
Started 20 years ago with just nine students, The Cambridge School offers a classical Christian education across junior kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school grades. Annual tuition is $31,980, not including fees. The nonprofit academic institution is currently located at 12855 Black Mountain Rd., where it has operated for most its existence.
The school’s current enrollment is 406 students, and its expansion comes amid a statewide decline in public K-12 enrollment. Cambridge School Founder Jean Kim said families are drawn to the institution’s dual focus on academic rigor and character formation, small class sizes, tight-knit community feel and approach to technology.
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“Since our founding in 2006, we have been intentionally no-tech in the elementary years and deliberately low-tech in the middle and high school years because we value face-to-face interactions, learning to listen carefully and charitably to each other, and learning to respond thoughtfully,” Kim said in an emailed statement. “This has become an even bigger attraction in recent years due to the growing awareness of technology’s impact on young people and the growing lack of civil discourse in our society.”
In December 2023, DSTC Venture LLC, an entity affiliated with the school, submitted an application to the city for a conditional use permit for the new campus project on three parcels of vacant, previously graded land. The parcels — acquired between 2022 and 2024 for $9.1 million, according to property records — are in a mixed-use commercial zone that allows for school use. A discretionary permit is required because enrollment will be more than 300.
After applying for the permit, the school engaged in what Tendick described as a robust community engagement process. The campus design, she said, already reflected a thoughtful approach to student dropoff and pickup logistics to avoid queuing issues, but feedback from area residents resulted in a major change. The school reworked the project to include a third level of parking in the partially subterranean parking garage to create room for 150 additional spaces.
“We spent all of (2024) doing community engagement … and we spent 2025 until this summer refining the application. The biggest change that we made was the addition of more parking,” Tendick said. “We worked really hard on outreach. We addressed every comment. We addressed every concern. Changing the parking was significant. It delayed us a year.”
The campus is expected to generate 2,181 average daily car trips, and lead to a daily increase of 12,064 vehicle miles traveled in the region, according to a transportation analysis prepared for the addendum to the community plan’s environmental impact report.
In July, the project received a unanimous recommendation for approval from the Black Mountain Ranch Community Planning Group, with one member abstaining from the vote. On Sept. 9, San Diego Hearing Officer Antoinette Gibbs approved the permit during a public hearing. No one spoke in opposition to the project. The hearing officer’s decision is final unless appealed to the San Diego Planning Commission.
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