The easiest way to define our community is to talk about our students, staff, and the student-teaching staff.
The areas below describe what students will learn by the time they leave O'Farrell in the eighth grade and the way students will learn them.
- Social commitment: School is an extension of the students' family and community. Students engage in learning experiences that extend beyond the school site and school day by performing service for others. Working towards common goals in school, family and community, students learn their role as citizens in a global society.
- Personal challenge: Achievement of personally established and significant goals attained through intensive, sustained efforts assists students in becoming successful, responsible adults. By setting academic, social/emotional, and personal health goals, students learn to accurately evaluate and assess their own performance.
- Making connections: Working cooperatively in teams, students actively participate in their learning by exploring and analyzing concepts and ideas from different areas of study. Through the evaluation process students search and provide evidence for logical connections between those areas. Using the skills of conflict resolution, mediation and teaming, students also develop standards of appropriate behavior.
- Applying learning: Through participation in cross-curricular studies students define and analyze a problem, its context and aspects from different perspectives. Students recommend solutions for the problem and justify their reasoning by gathering information from diverse materials, multiple technologies, resources and experiences.
Staff
Teachers and classified personnel have assumed new roles in planning and operating the school program. Leadership and administrative duties, traditionally taken on by a vice-principal and head counselor, are shared by the teaching staff. Those positions were eliminated and their district allocation "cashed in" to pay teachers for taking on additional leadership responsibilities. The position that normally would be described as the principal is now held by the Chief Educational Officer (CEO) who is the leader for all the educational families, and the advocate for the students while fulfilling school-wide administrative duties. A full-time social worker, the Family Advocate, along with the support of an instructional aide, is on site to provide additional support for students. School-wide decisions are made by the Community Council which meets weekly and consists of the team leaders, CEO, a classified staff member, the magnet resource teacher, the administrative aide, a student and parent representative, the family advocate, and a media/technology representative.
Students are divided into educational families. Students receive interdisciplinary instruction during a "core" block combining the curriculum areas of computers, language arts, mathematics, physical education, social studies, and science. Each family has a teacher assigned to one of three leadership roles: team leader, curriculum leader or social/emotional leader.
The Student-Teacher Staff
Twenty-five student teachers in the Teaching, Technology and Restructuring Partnership (T2ARP) program participate directly in the life of the school. Students selected for the T2ARP program come with undergraduate degrees ranging from History to Biology to Music. They are attracted to the program because of its emphasis on technology and on the new roles teachers play in a restructuring school. Many will have had significant teaching experience as aides and tutors before they begin the program. All have indicated a commitment to urban middle school education as a career. The T2ARP curriculum aims to prepare teachers to work on an interdisciplinary team and become adept at the use of a variety of software applications. Our ideal graduate embraces change and enters the profession with the conceptual and technological tools needed to manage change.
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