San Francisco Community School

San Francisco Community School is a small, K-8 school in the Excelsior neighborhood. Since its inception in 1972, the school has been committed to reflecting the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of San Francisco. In our work, we intentionally take the backgrounds and circumstances of students, educators, and the community into account. The explicit mission is for ALL students to achieve high academic standards and have a positive school experience. We believe that to ensure success, we must measure our progress and hold ourselves accountable for our roles in the results. Our teachers meet twice each week, once as a full staff and once in grade level teams. They plan collaboratively, create assessments, analyze student work, and provide support for adjusting instruction to meet students' needs.

Teachers make learning relevant and interesting through science-based, challenge-driven projects. Students experience a strong sense of community because they are in multi-age classrooms. They participate in daily class meetings and schoolwide conflict resolution and a strong, unified adult culture. We support personalized learning and relationship-building by limiting class size to 20 in grades K-3 and to 25 in grades 4-8. Students in K-5 at SF Community participate in two nine-week, science-based, challenge-driven projects each year. We want all of our students to find joy and success in using powerful ways of thinking, performance skills, academic confidence, and habits of organization and discipline to learn from meaningful tasks and issues. We are committed to ensuring that every student leaves our school well-prepared for high school, college, and for their lives beyond school. To that end, we promise to communicate and collaborate with families regularly and frequently about their children's academic progress and school experience. We promise to solicit and respond equitably to the ideas, needs, and opinions of the families and students we serve.