San Carlos Charter Learning Center

Note: I am a current board member at this school. I have children in 6^th and 1^st grades as of the time I write this review.
CLC is a small K-​8 charter school in San Carlos that uses its independence to experiment with new ideas in an attempt to constantly innovate and improve in the way it prepares students to be life-​long learners.
Some ways it is different from many other schools:
— K-​8 school, with targets of 44 kids per grade level.
— Multi-​age classrooms allow for every student to have opportunities to both lead and follow, help and be helped by peers.
— A strong focus on experiential learning includes lots of hands-​on work in and out of the classroom. Many field trips help to ingrain what the students learn with experiences in the real world.
— Social and emotional learning (SEL) is treated as a core tenet. Students are learning how to deal with others, not just academics.
— Spanish language exposure beginning in Kindergarten
— Smaller class sizes than typical. Volunteer help in the classrooms (especially at the Elementary levels) reduces the effective student: teacher ratio even further for portions of the day.
— Less rigor around memorization in the early years, with more focus on skills development.
Our family has been associated with the school for 6+ years now and we’ve been thrilled with the education our kids are receiving. The staff here is dynamic, creative, and extremely motivated to provide the best environment for the students.

This is not the school you are looking for…
It’s next door, or around the corner.
As a parent of a two children at this school for 4 years, I think I know enough about the school to give an educated opinion.
Ask yourself this — how can a charter school of 300 students surrounded by great public schools even exist in an reasonably affluent community? I am very pro charter school, but the entire purpose of charter schools is to provide educational choice in districts that have poor preforming schools; that simply is not the case in San Carlos. The only reason this school exists is because public schools in the district are not progressive enough politically for the hardcore progressive cultist parents that send their children here.
This school is nothing more than a progressive-​Leftists-​hippie indoctrination camp where they are far more interested in imparting their social agenda then the academic success of their students.
If you are more interested in indoctrinating your children than educating them, then this place is perfect for you…
I had to send my kids to an outside after school education program to keep them at grade level… Guess what? The majority of the kids in this after school program are from this school because the school just can’t do their job.
They don’t believe in phonics.
They don’t believe in memorizing the times tables.
PROVEN education techniques are thrown out the window in favor of group think indoctrination.
It as if the teachers, parents and Board of Directors are actually the Borg… they have been assimilated — they share the same brain and progressive/​leftist social vision. It’s like a bad Stepford Wives version living here on the peninsula.
I get it; the peninsula is a hotbed of progressives. The dripping Irony is that we live in an area where education, capitalism and individual achievement rule and where the majority of the parents make six figure incomes based on their education and abilities NOT their social beliefs. Yet for some reason, this school and seemingly the majority of parents, want to POUND and forge their children into progressive/​leftist automatons unprepared for the real world.
It is not the role of public schools (Charter schools are publicly funded schools) to indoctrinate children on social issues (and this is their stated primary goal) their role is to educate children. If you would rather have other people forge the ethics, values and morals of your child, than this school is perfect for you and will take a load off your shoulders.
No thanks, they can keep their utopianism, I simply want my children to be successful and achieve academically.
That being said, I am truly not a partisan. I refuse to get caught up in the Left-​Right paradigm; I detest both political parties and am just calling this place out because their political beliefs affect their ability to educate children. Regardless, whatever my political beliefs are, I want my children EDUCATED and ready for the real world, and this indoctrination experiment simply refuses to be interested in preparing children for the real world.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If your child has any form of special needs — You do have choices:
1) Don’t put your children in this school
2) Do as other parents do and pull them out of this school
3) Fight with them constantly and memorize the state Department of Education’s phone number, because it’s the only way you’re going to get this school to provide any services.
4) Join Parents Helping Parents — an advocacy group for parents with special needs children.