sue townsend

The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is the State of California's most improved urban school district over the past eight years, as measured by Academic Performance Index (API), California's primary metric for measuring student achievement. During this time, the District's 46,000 students have benefited from 130 points of API growth and a focus on the whole child embodied by OUSD's "Community Schools, Thriving Students" vision of a full-service community school district. In this model, every school site offers high levels of learning along with physical health, mental health, dental and eye care; nutrition, physical education, recreation, before-school and afterschool programs; housing, employment, parenting and language acquisition courses and a range of other programs. Social and human services are not seen as extra or add-ons in these schools. Instead, collaboration in service of the well-being of children and families is how they consistently behave. To learn more about "Community Schools, Thriving Students", please visit: www.thrivingstudents.org.