Canandaigua City School District

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One Community, Transforming Lives

Canandaigua City School District One Community Plan

Vision: One Community, Transforming Lives

The Canandaigua City School District believes in building a community rooted in inclusion and love, where everyone recognizes the active role they play in educating our children and helping them find a sense of purpose in life.

Mission: Explore - Enrich - Empower

The Canandaigua City School District is dedicated to creating enriched, world-class educational experiences that engage all learners, foster meaningful exploration, and empower our school community to have their voices heard.

A Core Value: One Community

Defined directly, value is the regard that something is held to deserve; importance, worth, or usefulness of something. Value is also a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.

To that end, the Canandaigua City School District endeavors to demonstrate and uphold the value of every person who is a part of our learning community as well as greater society. One Community is achieved through valuing each individual for who they are and the strengths they possess.

We know, unequivocally, that Canandaigua staff and community members believe in educating all students as individuals who matter. We need to look no further than our district’s mission and vision statements to realize the importance we place on this idea in our educational community.

First and foremost, we need to ensure all students know they belong in our classrooms, school buildings, and community. This is paramount not only to student academic success but also to their well-being, their civic engagement, their professional and economic success, and their sense of self-worth. The same can be said for our staff. Students have shown the correlation between a sense of belonging and professional productivity and achievement. How could making people feel valued ever not be the right choice?

Furthermore, we must prepare students for the world outside of Canandaigua’s borders. Communities tend to exist, to a certain extent, in a vacuum based on their population. While this is not a new phenomenon, it is one that we have the power to shift. To send our students into a world with limits on their understanding and appreciation of people unlike them is irresponsible and may limit their ability to participate in an expansive world and contribute to a society where differences are valued and recognized as something which makes us better.

In order to reinforce One Community, we must be willing to:

Affirm the dignity and humanity in all people
Explore historical and present-day realities of all people in order to develop understanding and perspective
Recognize and confront anything that inexplicably reduces the inherent value of any individual in our community

Student Experiences

For all students to achieve, they must encounter a welcoming and affirming environment, see themselves as valued and valuable, and encounter a rigorous and multifaceted curriculum.

Teaching & Learning

The classroom should be a place where each individual feels seen and valued, and the curriculum should reflect a broad range of perspectives and information such that critical thinking and deep understanding can flourish. This is accomplished by using the learning standards and any supportive documents created by the New York State Department of Education.

Leadership & Staff

Work to proactively hire and retain a highly qualified faculty and staff while also providing meaningful, ongoing professional development opportunities for all educators to learn more about issues we face both locally and globally.

Policy & Procedures

Review all district policies and procedures through a lens of valuing each individual and the unique value they add to our school community.

Family & Community

Work to ensure that all families are engaged in meaningful and accessible ways with the school community and that our community partnerships share and reinforce the same perspective of our One Community.