School Vision

Vision: Education for Liberation

Mission:

In order to ensure all learners at Richmond Cal Prep have the skills to thrive, we:

• live our core values as a means to create more just and equitable communities for generations to come,
• exercise our core competencies to solve the challenges our communities face,
• ground educational practices in our core pedagogies as we seek to understand and transform the world,
• practice the four agreements as we humxnize one another in the process of lifelong learning.

Core Values: We wish to live, promote, and celebrate our school core values at Cal Prep.

• Community: We organize ourselves in the spirit of collaboration and care for one another. To thrive, we work in solidarity and as one. In Lak’ech: You are my other me. Tu eres mi otro yo.
• Curiosity: Our ability to learn and grow within society is dependent on our curiosity about other possibilities and perspectives outside our own. To thrive we constantly learn new academic knowledge, develop our social-emotional intelligence, and develop our critical consciousness. Our questions are as important as the answers.
• Empathy: Our actions with one another are directly related to our ability to bridge our understanding and share the feelings of others. We are compassionate and understanding.
• Equity: Our actions and beliefs interrupt and dismantle root causes of systems of oppression at interpersonal, institutional, and internalized levels (racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, age-ism, able-ism, etc). All members of our community thrive.
• Growth Mindset: We learn and grow so that we become better people for ourselves and our community. To hold a growth mindset in a results driven world, we keep a sacred learning space for us all. To grow, we learn.
• Integrity: Our actions and words are honest, humanizing, and ethical. We are what we do when no one is looking.

Core Competencies: We wish to measure and support the development of the following core competencies that we believe are integral to our community achieving our mission and vision at Cal Prep.

• Critical consciousness is our socio political understanding of power, privilege, and oppression in our world as a tool to take transformative action against systemic inequalities.
• Voice is our ability to communicate our thoughts and opinions with self-confidence and authenticity.
• Agency is our capacity to act on our current condition.
• Leadership is our ability to share with, learn from, and guide others.

School Goals:

• School: All of our students deserve a quality education where they are challenged and their strengths and interests are honored.
• Students: We exist for and in service of our young people at Richmond Cal Prep. The health of our community is correlated with the health of the student body.
• Assessment: As humans and as an organization, we always seek a counter narrative that humanizes our experiences within an educational system that often looks for clean data sets that measure our progress in K-12 education. At this moment in education, we look to learn and understand new standards and systems within Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. As a school community we value balanced assessment and will value student portfolios in parallel with any outside standardized assessment that universities or colleges use for admission. We value assessment because students thriving in college and in society includes the navigating of a system in which they will be met by assessments like these. Assessment should not be a gate keeper for our students. With this in mind, we do not want our students to base their intelligence or self-worth solely on these assessments and systems because our identities and value in this world are much more complex.
• Families: We value all members of our community and we believe each member is integral to the success of our whole community. We value purposeful and authentic relationships with our families.
• Educators: We hold true to the belief that our community thrives when each individual person thrives and is valued. Every year, we create a community of educators that humanizes us and pushes us toward excellence.