School History

Cornerstone Academy was founded in 1975 as an outreach of the Cornerstone Evangelical Baptist Church. The following is a brief history of the school as recounted by Genevieve Lau, Executive Director of Cornerstone Academy:

1975 – A small faithful group of people under the direction of Rev. Chanson Lau first started the church as Cornerstone Community Church in the Sunset district (1925 Lawton) in San Francisco. It was Dr. Genevieve Lau, his wife, who noticed a need to help young families with little children by providing childcare. Within a year and after much prayer, we started our preschool, known as “Little Lights School.” The preschool slowly increased because of the reputation of our caring teachers. It was at the urging of our parents that we started our first kindergarten.

1981 – We had a chance to expand our preschool to the corner lot: 1947-1955 Lawton. This opened up more preschool classes.

1982 – The church officially changed its name to “Cornerstone Evangelical Baptist Church.”

1985 – We needed a place for our growing grade school. We bought a theater called “Surf Theater” and started our school. At this time we hired our first principal, Mr. Donald Langendorf. Since we now had grade school students, he gave our school a new name, “Cornerstone Academy.”

1986 – The school enrollment multiplied so fast, we found another location a couple of blocks away to house our kindergarteners. This was known as the Judah site.

1989 – By a miracle of God, we purchased an enormous building, Simpson College. This became our Silver campus. With the additional rooms, the school really flourished and expanded to middle school. However, due to a new earthquake law, the building had to be retrofitted. Fortunately, God provided an architect to help us redesign the building so we could have a new school building. While waiting for the new building to be built, the school rented bungalows, temporary rooms for classrooms. We stayed in these bungalows for two long years.

1999 We had a new school building with a large cafetorium. But before we moved in, we were given an opportunity to purchase a school three blocks away. After much prayer, we took another step of faith and purchased the Cambridge campus. This opened the door for us to start a high school.

In 2017, the Upper School of Cornerstone Academy changed its name to Cambridge International Preparatory School to better reflect the international diversity of its students and the global focus of its curriculum.

 

In 2019, after 20 years, Cornerstone Academy closed it's high school division.

Cornerstone Academy has been accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges since 2001.