Northridge’s Founding: Ordinary Parents, Extraordinary Vision

On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Northridge celebrated its 50th birthday. Fifty years after opening its doors in 1976, the school now serves more than 360 students and has been ranked the top all-boys school in Illinois for nine consecutive years. It is an achievement its founders and first students could only have dreamed of.

When 33 teenage boys walked through the doors of 805 Burning Bush Lane one drizzly September morning, they may not have been aware they were making history.

September 9, 1976 was their first day of school. But more than that, it was the inaugural school day of Northridge Prep, a three-grade, eight-teacher operation in a rented building with still-drying paint.

“In the beginning, we had very little to offer, except a vision and a hope,” Daryl Glick, an early Northridge teacher, said. “Really, we were selling a dream.”

Northridge started under the leadership of a young headmaster recently from Washington, D.C., by the name of Dr. James “Jim” Stenson.

“I had eight weeks to put together the whole school—the whole program and everything,” Stenson said. “When I went out to Chicago, all that existed of Northridge Prep was a leaflet.”

 

A group of Chicagoland parents—Gene and Judy Carter, Jerry and Anne Marie Dempsey, George and Geraldine Herman, John and Cathy Hunt, Chuck and Mary Ann Presberg, and more—had become dissatisfied with the educational options available to their children.

“This was immediately following the Sexual Revolution, and at the same time you’ve got the Vietnam War, malaise, people upset politically, and also the total collapse of people’s belief in orthodox theology,” said Tom Carter ’83, Gene and Judy’s son.

The combination of these factors weakened both public and private education, Carter said.

“There were a lot of disgruntled parents at the time. People were very concerned with what was going on in the schools and what information was being given to students,” said Mary Ann Presberg. “Parents began gathering together and talking about it.”

At a pizza outing after one such get-together, a priest friend suggested that, rather than just complain, they do something about it. Someone raised the idea of founding their own school.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a brilliant idea,’” Presberg said. “I went home and started making phone calls. Of course people thought I lost my mind.”

Presberg described it as a “switch going on” as the movement gathered steam first among the small group of parents, and later their broader community.

Beyond their more surface-level concerns with political and sexual messaging within the existing public and even Catholic schools, the parents were motivated to educate their children in the spirit of Opus Dei, which emphasized the calling of every Christian man and woman to work, study, and holiness.

“Saint Josemaria emphasized that parents were in charge of their kids’ education,” Carter said. “That was ultimately the deepest energy behind the founding.”

The group decided to start by establishing an all-girls’ school.
After successfully founding The Willows Academy in 1974, the parents turned their energies to an all-boys school. They chose the name Northridge Prep. To run Northridge, the parents recruited Stenson from D.C., where he had played a role in founding Northridge’s brother school, The Heights, in 1969 and served as a teacher and administrator.

“I said to the parents, ‘Why do you want to do this? This is a tremendous operation. It’s expensive. It’s hard,’” Stenson said. “They said, ‘We realize we get only one chance to raise our children right. Just one. And if we blow that, we could spend the rest of our lives regretting it.’”

The parents told Stenson they were determined to proceed, so he agreed to the venture.

“The know-how to found a school was all Jim Stenson,” Carter said. “Nobody else knew what they were doing.”

Stenson had just one summer’s notice to assemble students, faculty, and a curriculum. He sent out letters of application with no return address, because Northridge didn’t have a building yet.

“We were praying very hard for a place to set up shop, to have an address, to have some place to start,” Stenson said.

As the summer passed, the founders were unsuccessful in their search. One promising opportunity in Evanston fell through.

“About a week and a half before we were supposed to start classes, we found a closed-down elementary school (Park View School) in Mount Prospect,” Stenson said. “The address was 805 Burning Bush Lane. They say when you start praying, you start noticing coincidences. And we had a lot of prayers going out from everybody. Sure enough, we signed the lease the day before we started classes.”

 

Another challenge included recruiting students to a brand-new school. In the pre-internet era, the parents relied on word-of-mouth persuasion.

“People of course are quite reluctant to send their children to a school that they don’t know much about,” Stenson said.

Because of the problems that were rampant in education, Carter said, Northridge was able to attract some families who were willing to take a gamble on an alternative.

“They were willing to sacrifice what was considered a ‘good education’ for that education,” Carter said. “Because it was a little bit of a goofball show.”

Stenson’s eight weeks of frantic work paid off. On Thursday, September 9, 1976, 33 boys entered the doors of Northridge Preparatory School. They were the first Northridge Knights.

“It’s a work of love and a work of endurance to bring into being something that is nonexistent,” said Warren Diem, one of the first eight teachers at Northridge.

For the Carters, Dempseys, Hermans, Hunts, and Presbergs, Northridge went from a suggestion over pizza to a name on a flyer to a rag-tag, fledgling school.

“The 1970s was a time when people were disinclined to make risks,” Stenson said. “But the parents said, ‘We’re going to take a risk here.’ It’s true—risk-taking for the sake of love is life.”

“There were people who were willing to buy into the Northridge dream,” Glick said. “And it worked.”

Today, Northridge is thriving, with more than 360 students and recognition as the top-ranked all-boys school in Illinois. We are deeply grateful to our founders for their ambition, their trust in Our Lord, and their prayers throughout the past 50 years.

To celebrate this milestone, Northridge will host its 50th Anniversary Gala on Saturday, April 17, 2027, at Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace. Click here to learn more.