Mission Statement: 

Hillcrest Charter school and our staff work to promote a respect for learning and an understanding of the value of education to produce life long learners and productive citizens.  We strive to create a school culture that is infused with technology-enriched instructional strategies and learning opportunities.  There is a strong focus on promoting equity and on improving relationships among diverse cultural communities. 

Beliefs and Goals:

• Our staff is committed to providing educative experiences throughout the school for all students to succeed. 
• Our school is dedicated to providing strong bilingual education to its Limited English Proficient student population. 
• Facilitate positive and active school/home communication.
• Improve literacy and academic achievement by encouraging parental leadership within the school and community.
• We provide our students differentiated instruction and a variety of resources given that students have different learning styles and learn at different rates. 
• Staff embraces high expectations for learning and is committed to providing daily, meaningful instruction.

Services Provided:

• Parents are able to attend ESL classes during the evening, which are taught by a member of the school's faculty.
• Multi-lingual and cultural diversity workshops regarding various topics of interest to schools, parents, and community stakeholders, as ways to involve international families in the educational community.
• An online-language dictionary and translator are available. 
• Class sizes have been reduced to 18 students in each class of all grades.
• The school day is extended to include enrichment activities, small group activities, tutorial opportunities, and a quiet study hall with individualized teacher supervision. 

The Learner:

Erik Erikson- If a chld believes that success is related to who you are rather than to how hard you try, then why try? (paraphrasing of stage 4 industry vs. inferiority from Eriksons' 1959 Identity and the Life Cycle [Psychological Issues vol 1, #1]. )

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/erikson.html 

Paulo Freire- "Hope is something shared between teachers and students.  The hope that we can learn together, teach together, be curiously impatient together, produce something together, and resist together the obstacles that prevent the flowering of our joy."

http://freire.de/PFGlobal.htm

Jean Piaget- "To present an adequate notion of learning one must first explain how the individual manages to construct and invent, not merely how he repeats and copies."

http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Piaget.htm

Social Milieu:

• Famous Hispanics in the World and History  http://coloquio.com/famosos/

• Scholarships for Hispanics  http://www.scholarshipsforhispanics.org/

• Educating Minority Children  http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9214/minority.htm

• Multicultural Education and Ethnic Groups:  Selected Internet Sources  http://wwwlibrary.csustan.edu/lboyer/multicultural/main.htm

The Teacher:

• Teachers assume active roles of school leaders, participating in school governing counsils with other educational investors.
• Our faculty see themselves as deeply invested in the learning process, an investment they stive to model for their students, rather than seeing themselves as authorities whose duty it is to impart knowledge to students. 
• Teachers use textbooks and other supplemental instructional materials important in providing multicultural education. Teachers recognize subtle as well as blatant forms of bias such as invisibility, stereotyping, selectivity and imbalance, unreality, fragmentation and isolation, and language.
• Teachers work on curriculum is collaborative and interdisciplinary rather than fragmented and isolated. 
• The teacher provides a safe place where students feel comfortable and encouraged as they experiment with varying uses of thier developing education.