Our Community School
Celebrating our 19th Year of Excellence!
Mission Statement
Our Community School guides our students to be Empowered, Ethical, and Informed community members. Our diverse and caring community integrates academics with creativity, thereby fostering independent thinkers, problem solvers, and leaders. We nurture multiple aspects of a child’s development: physical, emotional, intellectual, artistic, and social.
Vision Statement
OCS staff members, students, and families strive to create a culture of acceptance and belonging where all students are honored. OCS Community members will be given the tools and support to positively impact their local and global communities by being Empowered, Ethical, and Informed.
Who We Are: School Non-profit Organization
Our Community School (OCS) is an award-winning, tuition-free, public charter school founded in 2005 serving grades TK-8. Our diverse and dedicated community of educators balances academics with creativity, thereby fostering independent thinkers, problem solvers, and leaders who are guided to become ethical, empowered, and informed members of our society. The OCS Board of Directors is a group made up of parents and community members who have community advisors representing the OCS faculty, administration, and community members who have legal and fiduciary responsibility for the school. The Executive Director, Director of Staff & Student Services, Director of Curriculum & Instruction, and Director of Operations oversee the day-to-day operations of the school. The Executive Director answers to the Board of Directors. The school receives its charter approval through the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school must teach to the California State Standards and students 3rd-8th grade take all required state standardized tests and are funded directly from the State on a per pupil basis. We are a 100% lottery school, and all interested families are encouraged to apply for our school through the prospective families page.
Our school program is based on three main themes:
1. Constructivism: Students learn through connecting new ideas to prior learning. Each experience is an opportunity to construct new meaning through discussion, collaboration, and reflection to integrate new concepts.
2. Responsive Classrooms: Through a variety of activities, students learn organizational, problem-solving, and conflict resolution skills, while developing and improving their creativity, independence, cooperation, responsibility, and self-discipline.
3. Integrated Hands-On Learning: Integrated curriculum enables students to understand concepts at a deeper level and to connect learning across content areas. Students are more engaged and more apt to use critical thinking skills and retain information when content learning is integrated with technology, classroom projects, field trips, service learning the arts, and in our garden program.