Our mission at the The Children’s Community School is to create a learning community that honors and empowers children to engage their whole selves in education. Utilizing progressive education, we build a better society by fostering creativity, problem solving skills, communication skills, a sense of initiative, and a capacity to listen. We encourage students to engage their bodies, minds, and emotions, to make meaning, form relationships, and to develop an understanding of themselves as active members of community.

To accomplish our mission, members of the CCS work with integrity and professionalism to support families and lay foundations for people who will care for and innovate in our world. We believe that:

• Practicing democratic values teaches children to participate in the life of the community.
• Empathy leads to compassion, and these values create caring, helpful individuals who can be activists and stewards in our school communities and in the world.
• Children not only need to learn about living, working, and playing together, they learn by living, working, and playing together.
• Lifelong learners construct knowledge, seek out answers, take risks, and reflect on their own experiences. They are flexible thinkers who approach learning with action and commitment.
• Active and receptive practices are of equal value in learning and in building relationships.
• Exploration of the body, mind and emotions in the educational experience creates a more grounded individual, able to relate to others more compassionately.

The Children’s Community School is a learning community in West Philadelphia that is rooted in a progressive approach to education, in which children and adults are valued as learners and teachers. The emphasis at our preschool, is on utilizing practices that educate the whole child, the emotional, social, physical, and intellectual being. At the CCS, we encourage students to use all of their learning resources, visual, kinesthetic, auditory, emotional and interpersonal to explore, develop an awareness, strengthen connections and express understanding. We honor childhood and nourish students’ strong sense of connectedness and engagement.