Our Community School guides our students to be empowered, ethical, and informed members of our community and, therefore every community. OCS staff members, students, and families collaborate in the ongoing process of education. 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. OCS is a model for student-centered TK-8 education and a leading example for educators. We envision sharing our expertise throughout the educational community. 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 and Developmental Design: 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.