Mountain View Community School
Issue 7 Spring 2025
A publication of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, featuring multimedia public scholarship to inform the collective struggle for democracy, justice and public education.
We are excited and honored to serve as Issue Editors for the Mountain View School issue of the Community Schooling Journal. Located in Southeast San Diego, Mountain View School has served students from TK-8 grade for the past 13 years. As a pilot school and community school, Mountain View has created a community of learners and changemakers that is grounded in values of equity and justice. With deep roots in family and community organizing, Mountain View’s story provides a picture of what is possible when schools are truly community-led, and when the voice of families, students and the educator teams not only matter, but collectively drive the vision for the school.
The stories in this issue remind us that Community Schools are about paying attention to how we do the work of schooling. Through the work at Mountain View, we see California’s Capacity-Building Strategies in action. From Sustaining Staffing to fostering Collaborative Leadership and a steadfast movement towards the implementation of Community-Based Learning – these strategies promote alignment and sustainability of the community schooling strategy.
The perspectives through which the four features are told include school-based voices, district staff, and union advocates, who together create the necessary conditions for Mountain View’s long-term success. The School Case outlines Mountain View’s origin story. After several years of initial success as a charter school, Mountain View faced significant challenges and the possibility of closure. Fueled by parent advocacy and embraced by district supporters, the Mountain View community fought to become the first pilot school in San Diego Unified, which provided the necessary flexibility to innovate and maintain a vision of equity and justice. The Teacher Scholarship feature enumerates Mountain View’s success in creating and implementing curriculum grounded in Project- and Community-Based Learning for even the youngest students. The article features projects from various grade levels, and highlights the district support and coaching that the community schooling strategy has provided. The Youth Research feature shares the story of how Mountain View’s community-school coordinator leans into the classroom to advance youth voice through youth-led projects and research. Finally, the Policy ABCs feature situates Mountain View within a larger strategy of coalition-building and shared commitment between schools, districts and unions. The authors illustrate how the promise of community schools is made real with an approach of local empowerment and structural flexibility, paired with aligned district support and responsiveness.
We are so grateful to have been welcomed into Mountain View’s doors and classroom spaces. Seeing young kids engaged in learning and the adults who truly love them and see them, fills our hearts with hope. To San Diego Unified School District Central office staff who contributed to this piece, we are grateful for the relationships they’ve built and the support they pour into schools and for sharing their voice in this piece. We see the power of what happens when all folks come together to realize the dream of public education.
If you have ideas for how we can help the century-old community schools movement focus on the big ideas and the journey of public education, please drop us a line!
Thank you,
Wendy Salcedo-Fierro & Lauren Kinnard, Issue Co-editors
CS Journal as a Learning Tool
Our aim for each issue of the Community Schooling Journal is that practitioners, researchers, families, and students find it to be an impact learning tool. To this end, we’ve provided a discussion guide that spans the four features of the issue and includes discussion prompts related to the issues’s main themes.
Cover Photo by Mountain View Students
Mountain View STEAM Enrichment Teacher, Christopher Millow, fostered meaningful partnerships with local artist Paola “Panca” Villaseñor and the New Children’s Museum. This mural “Kindness” emerged as a vibrant collaborative endeavor, uniting the creative energies of numerous students at Mountain View School. Through the dynamic medium of spray paint on canvas, this piece became a playground for exploring diverse artistic techniques. Embracing the spirit of World Kindness Day, the students reveled in the liberating experience of free-form creation, visually translating the core values of Mountain View into a tangible expression of unity and goodwill.
Three student artists were asked “What does community mean to you?’ Angelica Fernandez shared that community “means we’re all in this together, like one big familia… there’s always someone here to help out, because we know what it’s like. That feeling of support makes me feel safe and strong.” Ariz Cristal shared that “community here means feeling understood. We come from similar backgrounds, so there’s a shared understanding of the struggles and the joys in our lives”. Finally, Antonio Altamirano said community involves “celebrating our different heritages together makes me feel proud of who I am and connected to everyone else.”