The Community Preschool
Background
In 2008, Grace Cathedral and its board of trustees established The Community Preschool. They envisioned every child to have equal access to high-quality education, regardless of their family's socio-economic status.
Our goal is to influence the lives of young people and their families and communities in a meaningful and substantive way, and to shape how they think, how they view the world and how they engage in it.
Thanks to generous supporters, The Community Preschool provides students high quality education to develop just, independent, creative, empowered and respected lifelong learners.
About The Community Preschool
The Community Preschool seeks the richness of a diverse classroom by intentionally enrolling families from the varied socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, religious traditions, gender identities, cultures and abilities represented in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our aim is to enable students to appreciate different perspectives at an early age and to equip them to contribute to a diverse society.
The Community Preschool is a lifeline for its families.
The school operates year-round and full day, with extended care before and after school, to accommodate working families. We serve a population of children from San Francisco counties whose parents are either working from home, attending school full time, or who have lost their jobs entirely during the pandemic. These families depend on our program so that they can work and/or attend school themselves.
The Community Preschool serves marginalized communities.
This school year (2020-21), 58% of our families are low income. 42% of our families pay no fee to attend our program full time and are considered priority enrollment families, which means they are either homeless, domestic violence survivors, have active cases with Child Protective Services, are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, immigrants, undocumented, and/or are children with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for children who have mandated instructions to receive special education. 50% of our students speak a language other than English at home. These families rely on our school to support their child with their English language development.
The Community Preschool and the Pandemic
For the five months of school closure from March to August 2020, our teachers provided daily student instruction and weekly parent meetings through Zoom, YouTube and other platforms, and we provided laptops to the families that needed them. Grace Cathedral invested significant resources to remain fully staffed and to modify our physical space to ensure a safe and compliant environment for in-person classes. We provide personal protective equipment for children and teachers and purchased individualized instruction materials for each student. We installed hardwood floors and windows in the classroom and created an outdoor classroom by renting a large fence structure to cordon off a large instruction and play area on the cathedral property.
