ADDITIONAL INFO

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The San Francisco School is committed to the highest standards of institutional responsibility.  One of The School’s overarching strategic goals is:

"To be an exemplary community in environmentally and socially responsible policies and actions at the student, adult, and institutional levels."

The School's Public Purpose Committee is charged to work with the head of school to carry out this broad and challenging mandate:

• Institutionalize the Commitment: The School develops, promotes and sustains policies and organizational structures that institutionalize and ensure ongoing attention to public purpose, civic engagement, and institutional responsibility.
• Model throughout the Community: The School promotes and assures adult activities that teach and model social and environmental action.
• Teach the Children Well: Faculty develops student expectations and educational programs, including service learning and social action across the grades.
• Initiate and Collaborate: The School initiates and collaborates on public-purpose programs that serve The San Francisco School neighborhood, the city, and the broader educational community.

Institutionalize:

As clarified in our most recent round of strategic planning, A Broad and Adventurous Look at the Future, The San Francisco School's commitment to institutional responsibility is rooted in an understanding that responsible institutional policies and actions have global impact just as clearly as they inform individual local behaviors. Examples of institutional action in this arena include establishing a Board Committee for Institutional Responsibility, explicit board commitments to green and sustainable buildings and socially responsible investing, and actions such as a school-wide commitment to "almost zero waste" (The San Francisco School received the NAIS 2007 Award for Environmental Sustainability), and the installation of a 24 KW solar system.

Model:

Being cognizant of the fact that adult behaviors teach and model social and environmental action, another aspect of Institutional Responsibility is sponsoring parent and faculty activities that model for students the role that engaged and responsible citizens play in their communities. Our summer faculty preparations now begin with a faculty service-learning project, and a core responsibility of our traditional room parents is to co-host a school-wide (parent-teacher-student) community service project, so that we can be assured that our students see their parents and their teachers taking action in the community. On the fund-raising front, the school annual auction has a sliding-scale admission, and the annual walkathon fund-raiser is budgeted to devote a percentage of the profits to public purpose initiatives.

Teach:

The San Francisco School mission includes the "celebration and cultivation of the humanitarian promise of each student," and we strive to engender in every student "the awareness, skills, and courage to take action in the interest of equity, justice, multiculturalism, sustainable living, and peace." Every teacher is expected to seek and develop service-learning projects that are integrated into the core curriculum. For instance, the second graders, who study food, recently harvested vegetables at a local farm, and then delivered the produce to a local food bank, where they subsequently helped in the serving — all of which became the source of experience for their study of both the technology and fairness of food distribution. Fifth graders partner with a public newcomer school, using their Spanish to communicate with recent immigrants, just as the recent immigrants have the opportunity to practice their English with our students.

Initiate and Collaborate:

Traditional public-purpose activities fall within the realm of initiating and collaborating in the civic and educational world. Over the recent years, The San Francisco School has initiated and funded within the school's operating budget a free community arts program for neighborhood children, collaborated in the founding of a teacher-training program that awards a California State Credential, and is partnering with Friends of the Library to raise money and furnish a new district library.

At the heart of all these initiatives is the core belief that The San Francisco School has an institutional responsibility to both teach and model all that we hope our children will strive to create in society. Whether the activity is public purpose, social action, environmental sustainability, socially responsible investing, the head of school's challenge is to see that institutional responsibility is embedded in school organizational structure, policy, budget, curriculum, and daily behavior of both the student the adult community.