Announced in Spring 2023
Unify Around
a Common Purpose
We will build consensus around the School’s mission and purpose, developing a shared understanding of our ethos across all members of our community.
Our mission is what we are made of, and it has always provided the foundation, the animating force, that has propelled the growth of our unlikely and inspiring project—to bring together a community of students that reflects the vibrant diversity of our city, to cultivate a space that nurtures souls and minds, allows students to form uncommon bonds, develop an understanding of who they are and what they care about, and hone the tools they will need to make a difference in the world.
The School of Los Angeles has always attracted mission-driven students, families, faculty, and benefactors. Our mission is the kernel that unites all of us. As the School has evolved dramatically during its early years—growing from a handful of rented classrooms to a substantial urban campus, navigating our current political and economic circumstances as well as a global pandemic—all the specific, concrete ways our mission is made manifest in our programming have also evolved. Growth, change, experimentation, iterative improvement—these, too, have been fundamental to our shared project. At the outset of almost every year of the School’s first decade, roughly 30–40% of our student body was brand new to our community.
With so much rapid growth, particularly for an institution working in unique ways against the grain of the private school ecosystem, it can sometimes feel challenging to maintain a shared understanding, a shared language, of all the ways our mission connects directly to our daily practices. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a major obstacle to some of our most important programming—the use of our city as a classroom, our dedication to sustained, pedagogical engagement with our broader community through service work and reflection. For a school that was only seven years old at the outset of the pandemic, a two-year hiatus had an outsized impact on our ability to feel and articulate what it is we do and why we do it—though it also provided us a new context in which to innovate.
Now we have an opportunity once again to engage our city—our home, our namesake—and continue unifying around our common purpose. We will celebrate all the ways our mission connects to the daily accomplishments of our students, and we will empower all members of our community to uplift that mission and share it with others.
We will:
Conduct a review of our mission statement to ensure it reflects the School’s current ethos and continues to provide a path for future growth.
Promote a common language that empowers all constituents to communicate and uplift our mission and values.
Strengthen and celebrate connections between a) our stated goals and values and b) our programming and daily practices.
Grow a Transformative
Academic Program
We will develop and enhance the School’s academic identity, continuing to refine a clear philosophy that aligns with the School’s mission and propels further curricular development, innovation, and alignment across grades and departments.
Curricular innovation has always been at the bedrock of our project. The School of Los Angeles began as a series of tuition-free afterschool programs, embracing many of the most forward-thinking pedagogical practices in experiential and project-based learning. In 2012 we opened our doors full time with a group of 28 students in grades six through eight, and that small middle school program has grown into one of the most dynamic secondary academic programs in the city, graduating students to some of the most exceptional colleges and universities across the country and the globe.
We have dramatically expanded our visual and performing arts offerings, including myriad curricular and cocurricular options in theatre and studio art, as well as our unique, small-band, project-based music curriculum. We have rolled out advanced and elective options in the STEM fields, including courses in some of the most essential fields for our young students, like ecology and computer science. Perhaps most strikingly, we took advantage of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—as well as the urgent calls to action accompanying the national uprisings in the summer of 2020—to redefine what an Upper School core humanities curriculum can accomplish. Each semester, our students in grades 10–12 select a pairing of literature and history courses from a broad array of disciplines, including Black Studies, Environmental Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian Studies, Class Studies, Queer Studies, Indigenous Studies, and European Studies. This provides students substantive choice in their trajectory through Upper School. Moreover, it affirms our commitment to a breadth of study that reflects our student body, our faculty, our city, and our world—as well as our commitment to a truly rigorous college-preparatory education. And within this framework, there is much more to develop and refine.
We have always embraced the city of Los Angeles as our classroom. Our students have organized direct outreach to our unhoused neighbors in Hollywood. They have lived at the mission on Skid Row. They have conducted site-specific lab work to study the ecology of the L.A. River, and have interrogated the relationship between river “revitalization” efforts and the displacement of working-class communities. They have marched and participated in mass direct actions downtown in support of climate justice and other student-led social movements. They perform plays and musicals at venues in Hollywood’s historic Theatre Row, just blocks from our campus. They engage in the vibrant cultural life of the city, exploring its many neighborhoods and participating in the intellectual and aesthetic lives of its people.
During this crucial stage of growth for our institution, we will continue to expand and strengthen our focus on experiential learning, advancing the cutting edge of secondary education in our city. We will provide our students with the skills and real-world experiences they need to succeed in college and make an indelible impact on the world beyond.
We will:
Expand an academic program that equips students with the skills, analytic frameworks, real-world experiences, and empathy to transform the institutions and communities they participate in.
Provide further opportunities for faculty and staff to collaborate, develop a shared understanding of pedagogical practices, and build continuity between grade levels, divisions, and disciplines.
Strengthen the use of our city as a classroom and sharpen our pedagogical focus on experiential learning.
Support faculty and staff in their continued professional development and learning.
Nurture Our
Vibrant Community
We will care for and grow the School’s community—a community in which all members share a sense of purpose, seek opportunities to collaborate, and find joy in the student experience.
Bringing together an uncommonly diverse community has always been about cultivating lifelong—and life-changing—relationships. Everything we do, ultimately, is in service of the student experience. A more connected community—of students, parents and caregivers, faculty and staff, alumni, and benefactors—provides both a more nurturing and a more dynamic environment for intellectual, social, and spiritual formation.
The people who make the School of Los Angeles what it is—those who participate directly in its daily life, and those in our broader community who continue to make that life possible—come from all walks and from all corners of our sprawling (and gridlocked) city. The role of our School, then, is to make unlikely connections and transformative relationships more and more possible every day, to hold open the time and the space that strong communities require—through celebration, stewardship, and collective study.
Through the years, we have hosted brunches, barbecues, and coffees on campus, invited guest artists to present to our community, or to facilitate bilingual poetry workshops for our students, parents, and caregivers. We have incorporated live, simultaneous translation into every major event and developed programming for our monolingual Spanish-speaking families, facilitated grade-level picnics at parks in the neighborhood and special events at nearby venues. We have experimented with after-school seminars for parents and caregivers, guest lecture series, and have invited families to participate in our service and justice programming.
With this groundwork, we will focus on expanding unique programming for our families, faculty, and friends to share their wide array of talents and experiences with one another and with our students. Part of the work of nurturing a vibrant community is also to provide a window into daily campus life through which parents, caregivers, and benefactors can look and see the accomplishments and joy of our students. Moving forward we will be increasing our formal communications through the website, printed publications, email campaigns, and social media in order to share out and celebrate our students’ remarkable endeavors on campus and out in the city.
We will:
Continue to cultivate a community in which students develop an understanding of who they are and what they value.
Take time to celebrate and share student work and accomplishments.
Expand resources to promote every student’s mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
Develop systems in which faculty and staff are empowered to contribute meaningfully to the growth of the School.
Further involve families, alumni, friends, and benefactors in the communal life of the School, creating opportunities for all constituents to share their talents and experiences.
Create an environment in which families from all backgrounds feel comfortable and are eager to engage with the School.
Support a
Sustainable Mission
We will steward the School’s long-term future, developing the resources and strategic partnerships needed to build a sustainable program aligned to our mission.
This is both an exciting and a pivotal moment in the development of the School of Los Angeles. After navigating the headwinds of the pandemic and celebrating our 10th Anniversary Year, we have stepped confidently into our second decade, transitioning from our early startup stage into a critical growth stage.
We are still young, still experimenting and innovating—but we now have an established track record, a proven product. Our seniors continue to matriculate to an incredible diversity of undergraduate institutions, including some of the most highly selective research universities, liberal arts colleges, and visual and performing arts programs in the world—and our students receive, on average, over $130,000 in scholarships toward their undergraduate educations. Moreover, our oldest alumni are out in the world making an impact in myriad fields—education, politics, community organizing, the sciences, and the arts.
Our task, then, is to scale our operations, grow enrollment, and steward the long-term financial sustainability of our programming. We will continue to expand our campus resources, and this will require accelerating our advancement and fundraising efforts even beyond what we have already accomplished, nurturing our culture of giving, and expanding our circle of major benefactors. We are ready for this challenge, and our mission is more than worth it.
We will:
Diversify revenue sources and develop an endowment to ensure the School’s long-term commitment to its tuition assistance program.
Leverage the involvement of all constituent groups in the communal life of the School to further develop a culture of philanthropy.
Partner with mission-aligned organizations, businesses, and foundations to advance the programming, profile, and fundraising capabilities of the School.
Develop a robust grant research, writing, and reporting program.
Procure and develop facilities that are aligned to our programming and support the teaching and learning needs of our students and faculty.
