Schafer Park School is located in Hayward, California, one of 23 Elementary Schools in the Hayward Unified School District. On the left is a photo taken of our school by Mr. MacFarlane from a commercial airliner in the mid 1990's. On the right is a picture taken from the same flight in 2002. You'll notice the addition of 7 portable classrooms to where there used to be a strip of playground. You'll also notice that the school was painted a depressing shade of bluish-purple. Finally, below and on the left, you'll see a picture taken from the same flight in August, 2007. You'll notice that now we have ten portable classrooms, but the school was thankfully repainted and is now golden "happy yellow".
For 2007-2008, Schafer Park School has over 600 students, ages 5 through 12.
The student body is culturally diverse, though much less so than in years past. The majority of our student population is Hispanic, so Spanish is a common language heard on campus. However, there are still a few members of other language groups, such as Tagalog, Vietnamese, Chinese etc. Most students have at least some basic fluency in English, though there are many who do not.
Students enter and leave our school each year at the rate of about 25% or more, which is fairly typical ofschools in our area. On standardized tests, our students generally have scores comparable to (or better than!) the California state averages. Although the average student's test scores continue to improve each year there are a couple student groups (second language learners and economically disadvantaged) who did improve, but not enough to satisfy the state last year, putting us in danger of future sanctions for all students under the No Child Left Behind Act, even for the majority who are already improving sufficiently.
In addition
to the principal, there are 5 office positions (including principal and v.p.),
and 2 custodial positions (with overlapping schedules). There are at least
26 regular classroom teachers (one position is shared) and 3 special needs
classroom teachers at Schafer Park. There are also 5 para-educators
for the special needs classes, as well as music, library, science and
instrumental music teachers. There are six noontime supervisors, a wonderful
cafeteria coordinator with her assistant, a speach teacher, resource teacher,
gardening and afterschool coordinators, etc. In total, around 60
people work full or part time at our school in addition to many parent volunteers
from the PTA, etc. (and we still have only 16 regular parking spots!)
Most classes have 20 students or fewer, because the State of California has been helping to reduce class size in Kindergarten through third grade. Grades four through six still have 32 students or more per class, though. Because of the smaller K-3 classes and additional staff (including special-needs classes) at those grades, K-3 staff now outnumbers 4-6 staff by about 3 to 1 (which most likely accounts for the reduction in time allocated for parent conferences, etc.).
Our school mascot is the panther. We are the Schafer Park Panthers!
If
you would like to see a wider-angle photo taken by Mr. MacFarlane from that
mid-90's airline flight (It's a bit large - about 175K bytes),
click on the thumbnail at the right or click
here.
To locate our school on a map, courtesy of Yahoo! Maps, click here.
updated February 2006
Because of the Schafer Park Computer Club, Sponsored by The Diamond Lane, Schafer Park School was the first K-12 school in the Hayward Unified School District to have a site on the world wide web (in March, 1996)
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