Richmond Prep

Yvonne Jones Bibbs opened the Sixth Baptist Christian School (as Richmond Prep was then known) in 1983 as an initiative in urban Christian education. She began her project in the basement of Sixth Baptist Church with 5 students enrolled in a before and after school program. While the church provided some material support for the program in its init... ial stages, the project from the beginning was a proprietary operation. Just 10 years after the project opened its doors, the school project had expanded incredibly. By 1993, Sixth Baptist Christian School operated a before and after school care and summer day camp program for primary grade students, and a pre-school division with well over 200 students being served every year. As the school grew in numbers, it also expanded it's campus. Sixth Baptist Church was filled to capacity and additional sites were opened at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church and modular classrooms were opened on a plot of land nearby. During the 1993 school year, a well-known Richmond educator joined the faculty as director of the pre-school division. Dr. Mary Gordon West had already established herself in the Richmond community as a dynamic and effective teacher of mathematics and English at the high school level and as the director of the First African Baptist Church child care center. In 1995 when the school added elementary grades, Dr. West moved from directing the pre-school division to become the first principal of Sixth Baptist Christian School. By 1998, Sixth Baptist Christian school expanded from pre-school all the way through 9th grade. In the year 2000 major changes began to take place for the school that Yvonne Bibbs established 17 years earlier. The school closed its satellite locations and moved the primary campus from Sixth Baptist Church to a location on W. Main Street. The school was renamed to Richmond Prep - the name by which it is still known today. In the summer of 2005 the property the school was leasing was unexpectedly purchased by Virginia Commonwealth University for ...Read More