Mill Creek Academy is a well-established business located in the heart of Mission San Jose, a district of Fremont. Begun as a writing school in the summer of 1998 by a former Mission San Jose High School English teacher, Cheri Block Sabraw, the academy has burgeoned into a full service tutorial and SAT preparation center.

Although most of our 300 students per session come from Mission San Jose High School and its feeder junior high and elementary schools, other motivated students from as far away as Danville, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Milpitas, Union City, and San Jose attend our courses. 

We offer English writing classes from grades 3-12, math and science high school tutorials, SAT preparation, and an assortment of other classes which range from elementary public speaking to reading comprehension to advanced literary analysis.

Our name, Mill Creek Academy, is certainly not a typical one for the nature of our business (no pun intended).

Many people have asked me about the origin of Mill Creek Academy, LLC, so I have decided to answer the question on our website.

I live on Mill Creek Road in Fremont, a long windy single lane country road that snakes up about 4 1/2 miles behind Mission Peak. On the property that we purchased in 1992, called by locals The T.K. Rancho, were several rickety old buildings built in the 1920’s by the original owners of the land, Tom and Kayti Palache. In the 1940’s, the property was eventually sold or given to Ed Chadbourne, son of Joshua, for whom Chadbourne Elementary School is named. Ed and his wife Margaret owned the property from about 1940-1992 until Ed decided to sell a small piece of it to my husband Ron and me.

Many of the old buildings had names, such as “The Annex,” a 200 sq.ft. house that the Palache’s cook would stay in when the Palaches would come for the weekend from San Francisco, where Kayti was a doctor and Tom, an insurance agent. One of the buildings was not named, so we jokingly called it, “The Mill Creek Academy, LLC,” the place where I would continue to tutor students in writing and vocabulary after my teaching career at Mission San Jose High School was completed.

Having students drive Mill Creek Road was impractical, to say the least, so when I decided to leave Mission in 1998 to open my own school, the natural name for it was the Mill Creek Academy, LLC.