Indian Creek School is a coeducational, university-preparatory school in Crownsville, Maryland. It serves students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12.
History
Founding
Indian Creek School was founded in September 1973 by educators Anne Coleman Chambers and Rebecca Randolph. Both Coleman Chambers and Randolph had been teachers in the Prince George's County, Maryland, public school system, and they sought to establish a school with smaller class sizes in order to better challenge students. Coleman Chambers's parents donated land for the new school, which was constructed on a campus on Evergreen Road in Crownsville, Maryland. Her brother, Tracy Coleman, Jr., assisted in construction and later served as Indian Creek's Director of Transportation and Physical Plant. Indian Creek School had an initial operating budget of $40,000.
Indian Creek started with 33 students across pre-K, kindergarten, and first grade, and four teachers. Anne Coleman Chambers served as the school's founding headmistress, and Rebecca Randolph served as Indian Creek's first assistant director, later becoming head of the Indian Creek Lower School.
Expansion
In 1977, Indian Creek added a middle school, increasing enrollment to 184. In 1977, the school had four buildings, six buses, 22 staff members, and a budget of $250,000. Indian Creek's first eighth-grade class graduated in 1979. By 1981, enrollment at Indian Creek had reached 230 students.
In 1983, beginning with the class of 1993, class size was doubled to 40 students per grade.
In 1993, a board of trustees was established and received ownership of the school to facilitate future institutional growth.
From its construction in 1973 through the early 2000s, Indian Creek's Evergreen Campus building gradually expanded, from about 5,000 square feet of space to about 80,000 square feet. This included a doubling of space in 1998, as Alumni Hall, locker rooms, and fourteen classrooms were added. With a staff of over 100, Indian Creek School was by 2004 one of the largest employers in Crownsville.
Construction of an Upper School
In August 2004, Indian Creek opened an upper school for students in grades nine through twelve. Indian Creek's founders had not originally planned to establish an upper school, focusing instead on pre-K through eighth-grade students. However, eighth-graders leaving Indian Creek often found it difficult to find the right high school, and many parents wanted an Indian Creek upper school, believing there to be no high school in the area with a similar educational philosophy. Population growth in Anne Arundel County first made this expansion feasible in the early 2000s. At first, sixteen original upper school students occupied one room on Indian Creek's Evergreen Campus, but in October 2004 these first upper school students relocated to vacant space at the Crownsville Hospital Center.
In 2004, Indian Creek School began construction of a $17 million, 96,000-square-foot Upper School building on a second campus in Crownsville, five miles away from the original campus. The site of the new campus was once a 114-acre tobacco farm owned by the Durner family. A portion was set aside for conservation. Indian Creek Upper School students moved to the new campus in September 2006, and Indian Creek graduated its first Upper School class, of 29 students, in 2008. The road constructed to provide access to the new Upper School building was named after founder Anne Coleman Chambers.
Eileen Mattingly served as the first Upper School Head until 2009. She was succeeded by Gerard Connolly, who had previously served as head of Severn Upper School in Severna Park, Maryland and assistant headmaster of Washington Latin Public Charter School. In 2009, the Indian Creek Upper School had 170 students.
Lower School Head and Indian Creek co-founder Rebecca Randolph retired in 2007. In 2010, founder Anne Coleman Chambers stepped down as headmistress, after more than 37 years in that role. She taught psychology and human development at the Indian Creek Upper School for one year before retiring in 2011. Coleman Chambers was succeeded as head of school by interim head Lila Lohr. In 2011, Rick Branson, former headmaster of Hokkaido International School in Sapporo, Japan, became head of school.
In 2017, Indian Creek moved its seventh and eighth grade students from the original Evergreen campus to the new Upper School campus. In 2019, the school sold the Evergreen campus to Rockbridge Academy while continuing to lease part of the building to house students in pre-K through sixth grade for two years until fall 2021, when the student body was unified on the Anne Chambers Way campus.