New Designs for School
New Designs for School

We’ve all had the experience of truly purposeful, authentic learning and know how valuable it is. Educators are taking the best of what we know about learning, student support, effective instruction, and interpersonal skill-building to completely reimagine schools so that students experience that kind of purposeful learning all day, every day.

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Primary Contact Name:
Daniel McLaughlin
daniel@onepurposeschool.org
Award Date:
April 2014
Grant Type:
National Planning
Start Date:
Fall 2015
Startup Type:
New School

School: OnePurpose School
Grades Served: PK-12 (starting with PK-1)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Operator: OnePurpose School, Inc.
Operator Type: Charter
Setting: Urban
Students at Start: 120
Students at Capacity: 900

Hallmark Feature: Project-based, blended learning model serving an ELL population

  • The first school for this new charter organization will open with students in Transitional Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st Grade, growing one grade each year up to 12th grade.
  • The vision for OnePurpose School is that its students—who will hail from the Mission District of San Francisco and are predominantly children of color, English language learners, and low-income—will break the cycle of poverty for a new life trajectory, graduating college at seven times the rate of existing high schools in the Mission.
  • The model employs blended learning within a project-based learning model in a STEM-focused curriculum.
  • The school model incorporates intensive social-emotional supports to serve an extremely high-need population. Student agency and control over what and how they learn is a key element of that support.

Photo by Wendy Harman, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons