Is Community School a Good Choice for Your Family?

Considerations for parents and children

When parents choose Community School, they join a community whose common beliefs drive our choices in everyday decision making and guide our methods of teaching and learning.

A Community School girl enojying a Camp Seabeck creation.Some values we have in common are:

  • Process and not merely the end result is acknowledged and valued. Mistakes are recognized as a natural part of the learning process.
  • We appreciate and expect children to grow at diverse individual rates academically, physically, emotionally and socially.
  • Rich academic, social, and emotional growth is achieved through experiential learning in multi-age situations.
  • We make conscious daily efforts to nurture mutual trust and sustain a non-competitive learning environment.
  • Our cooperative work promotes a sense of responsibility to the community and to ourselves.
  • Teachers and parents ultimately aim to build children's self-esteem, self-empowerment and internal motivation without using external rewards.
  • Our parents are actively and visibly involved.

Logistical Considerations for Prospective Parents

Important Considerations

  • Choosing to attend Community School comes with some logistical considerations. For instance, your child will attend Kindergarten and perhaps other grades at a different school and need to make the switch to Community School in first grade or later. Is your child emotionally prepared for such a change?
  • You will need to arrange to drop off and pick up your child daily since there is no District busing for Community School. We encourage car pools.
  • The school parents contribute volunteer hours to assist with learning, enriching excursions and the well-being of the student body. While there is no set minimum per family, it is widely accepted that parents and children benefit from additional adult presence on and off campus.