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Thirty years after it closed as a high school, Cubberley Community Center lives on as a campus of another sort, a place whose dozens of programs reflect the global nature of the city's present and future.

Students young and old can study Arabic at the Bay Area Arabic School, or Hebrew at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center.

Russians -- still behind the Iron Curtain when Cubberley High School closed in 1979 -- roam the corridors where they hold lectures and socialize at the Jewish community center.

Each day year-round, more than a hundred children come for Acme, an intensive language, homework and cultural program all in Chinese.

Opened in 1956 to educate a rising tide of post-World War II Baby Boomers, Cubberley was the high school picked for closure when enrollments declined in the late 1970s.

At the time, school superintendent Newman Walker reasoned that the financially hard-pressed school district could earn $9 million to $11 million by selling the campus, whereas it could not sell Paly or Gunn, whose land belongs to Stanford University.

Rather than selling Cubberley, the school district ultimately worked out a novel arrangement with cooperative city leaders, turning Cubberley into something of a cash cow for education.

Palo Alto pays the school district millions each year -- the current figure is $4 million -- to lease the campus, which it maintains as a community center.

Kathy Espinoza-Howard, a division manager for the city, is the "principal" of Cubberley, sitting, literally, in the principal's office of the former high school.

"I love it here. In the past I've always worked in a city or a county building. Here, you hear children singing. It's a human place, where you see all of humanity expressing itself," said Howard, the city's division manager for Cubberley Community Center and human services.

Among Cubberley's varied sub-tenants are a dozen dance and theater groups, including a Congolese dance school, a Russian language theater and a Mexican folklore dance school. There are two preschools and the Friends of the Palo Alto Library, which collects donated books and sells them at a monthly book sale, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Palo Alto libraries. More than a dozen youth and adult sports leagues play in the gyms and on the fields.

The two "anchor sub-tenants" are Foothill College, which maintains a major satellite campus at Cubberley, and the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, which is vacating this summer for its new home at the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life on San Antonio Road.

Even with the departure of such a major tenant, Espinoza-Howard says she has prospective replacements lined up to fill the space.

The Foothill College lease, which has provided $800,000 a year toward the $4 million the city must pay its school landlord, is currently on a month-to-month basis and under renegotiation.

Foothill had hoped to purchase the campus but it is not for sale, City Council member Sid Espinosa told the city's Parks and Recreation Commission this week. Foothill is looking to relocate elsewhere, a move city officials fear because they want to keep the tenant, and the revenue stream, Espinosa said.

In addition to Foothill's $800,000, other sub-leases provide another $1 million a year toward the city's $4 million rental payment, Espinoza-Howard said, adding that there are differing rates for nonprofit and for-profit subtenants.

The 53-year-old campus is showing its age, Espinoza-Howard said, noting that the theater's dimmer system recently failed. She hopes to get Cubberley into the city's queue for renovation.

"We keep the rouge and lipstick on but she is a dowager, constantly in need of patching and maintenance," Espinoza-Howard said.

Three decades after Cubberley's closure as a high school, former students often come back to poke around, or hold reunions in the grassy amphitheater, she said.

Last weekend, the class of '79 -- Cubberley's last graduating class -- held its 30th reunion at the Sheraton Palo Alto.

Though parents, worried about rising enrollment at Gunn and Paly, occasionally suggest Cubberley be re-opened as a school, that scenario seems unlikely any time soon. It is not at all clear how the school district would come up with the tens of millions it would take to renovate and operate the school.

Lynn Torin, former PTA president at Cubberley High School, Wilbur Junior High School and Ortega Elementary School -- all gone now, though Wilbur has become Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School -- lovingly maintains a display case about Cubberley in the main corridor of school district headquarters on Churchill Avenue. It includes trophies, an old feathered band cap, a copy of "The Catamount" newspaper and a book that drew national attention to the school, "Hassling" by Sylvia Williams.

"Things in there have faded but when I dust it, almost always someone stops by and says 'Thank you' for keeping up a place where they can stop by and reminisce about what a wonderful school it was," Torin said. "And it was indeed."

Torin was among the parents who fought in the 1970s to prevent Cubberley High School's closure, which was successful for a year or two. For some time after the closure, she organized reunions for the staff.

In the decades since, Torin has sat on the Cubberley Advisory Committee, which meets monthly with tenant groups at the community center.

"It was a wonderful high school but in just thousands of ways, Cubberley is still serving the community," Torin said. "You can take classes at Foothill and there are so many other groups.

"I once happened to go there on a Sunday morning and there's a small church that meets there. They had the greatest spirituals going, and it just made me tap my feet."