Our Community

The Bellarmine community has one focus—to educate young men to use their God-given gifts to their fullest potential as they become men of competence, conscience, and compassion—“Men for Others.” From our gifted faculty and staff to the outstanding resources at our disposal, Bellarmine is dedicated to engaging the mind, spirit, heart, body, and imagination of each student in the educational process over four years.

The school enrolls more than 1,500 students from an extensive geographic area: north to Burlingame and San Francisco, east to Fremont and Livermore, west to Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz, and south to Watsonville and Gilroy. While 100 percent our graduates attend colleges and universities throughout the country, several graduates attend military service academies or chose to study abroad and work with international social action agencies. Bellarmine offers a challenging college preparatory curriculum taught by a talented and professional faculty with degrees from some of the leading colleges and universities in the country.

Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit secondary school, was founded by Father John Nobili, S.J., in 1851 as Santa Clara College, a school for secondary and college age students. In order to separate the two schools in the early 1920’s, Santa Clara College was renamed Santa Clara University and Santa Clara Prep. In 1925, Santa Clara Prep moved from the grounds of the University to our current location on University and Elm Streets in College Park. In 1926, Santa Clara Prep became Bellarmine College Preparatory in honor of Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, a Jesuit of the sixteenth century who recently had been canonized a saint and recognized as a Doctor of the Church. Bellarmine is the oldest Catholic, Jesuit school west of the Mississippi.