Saklan Valley School was founded in 1954 originally as a Lafayette preschool as the Gertrude Nielsen Learning Center. In 1966, Mrs. Nielsen moved her school to the present site in Moraga, and then passed ownership to the then Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Mary Elena Straub (now Dochterman). Over the course of the seventies, Mrs. Straub re-named the school the Carden School of Moraga and expanded its program to include elementary education through fifth grade. In that era, the Pre-School was separately organized and went by the name of Moraga Country Day School. In 1978, Mrs. Straub arranged for the Carden School to be incorporated as a not-for-profit company, and it became governed by a Board of Trustees. While transferring ownership of the school proper, she retained title to the physical property of the campus, with the school as her tenant until 2003.
In the late eighties, Mrs. Straub retired, and the Board and Faculty determined to merge the Pre-School and Elementary programs into a single entity with a new name, reflecting the evolution of the curriculum away from the Carden philosophy. After an exhaustive community-wide process, the new name of Saklan Valley School was chosen, in honor of the Native Americans of Contra Costa County, who were known to be peaceful and prosperous people.
In the mid-nineties, under the leadership of Pat Corlett, Head of School 1992-1998, the school took several new steps forward, earning Saklan’s first full term of accreditation by the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS), and launching its middle school program, bringing the school to its current Pre-School through Eighth Grade configuration. In 1999, Jonathan Martin became Head of School, and under his leadership the school has secured membership in the prestigious National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), staged a successful capital campaign, purchased the long-rented campus, and achieved a second full term of accreditation from CAIS and WASC.
