Our School

Every child, Every minute, Every day

The Mission Preparatory School equips students with the knowledge, skills, and strength of character needed to succeed in college and serve as leaders in their communities.

Our Mission

Our mission is mighty and urgent, and it takes an exceptional school to achieve it.

At the Mission Preparatory School, the quality of education and learning outcomes is excellent; the consistency of our top notch test scores proves it. Our teachers are tremendously committed to their profession and potential for impact. We are supported by an unwavering community and families who entrust us with the hearts and minds of their children.

Yet, at Mission Prep, we know that the work we do is never ending. We cannot rest on our past accomplishments and we must continue to raise the bar for our constituencies.

Mission Prep is an exceptional school because we make no exceptions. “Every Child, Every Minute, Every Day” is our guiding principle. This principle, along with our mission statement and our core values — prepared, respectful, engaged, persevering —are the pillars of our school.

Our Stats

Why Mission Prep stands apart

School uniforms

100+ minutes of daily literature

Symbols for addition, subtraction, division and multiplication

70+ minutes of daily mathematics

Nightly homework

Longer school days and school year

Children in a classroom working on educational worksheets about words and pictures, with colorful teaching materials on the tables.

Child in a classroom holding up an open worksheet with written math problems, smiling at the camera, with other children working at desks in the background.

490

Students from K to 8th grade

1:6

Staff to student ratio in the classroom

27

Average number of students per class

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Every child.

Every minute.

Every day.

Every child. Every minute. Every day.

Our Values

Prepared. Respect. Engaged. Persevering.

Prepared.

We arrive at school on time everyday with our minds, methods, and materials prepared to perform our respective roles and participate fully in the Mission Prep community.

Respect.

We demonstrate our respect for our students, families, and colleagues by creating and maintaining school and classroom environments that are achievement-focused, peaceable, professional, organized, and effective and by treating everyone in our school community with kindness and dignity.

Engaged.

We focus our time, talents, and energy on our urgent work; we follow through on all commitments and expectations; and we soak in and seek out feedback and knowledge to improve our practice continually.

Persevering.

We uphold our commitment to our mission by taking initiative to improve on our own and our school’s performance and by tackling challenges with optimism and personal responsibility especially when the work is difficult.

Your child’s safety.

From earthquakes and fires to health emergencies and lockdowns, your child’s safety is our top priority. Read our Health and Safety Plan to see what policies and procedures we have in place.

Read our Health and Safety Plan

Students and a teacher sit in a room with desks and couches

Mr. Abraham Joshua’s Learning Commons

Portrait of a young man with glasses, a mustache, and a goatee, smiling at the camera. He has short, curly hair and is wearing a khaki jacket over a white t-shirt, with a gold chain around his neck. The background is a plain gray studio backdrop.

He allowed them to come as they are into the classroom, and Mr. Joshua modeled that well.

If you enter through the front door of Mission Prep and immediately take a sharp left turn up the stairs, the path will lead you directly to the Abraham Joshua Learning Commons, a space dedicated to our late seventh and eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Joshua.

Dra. Jerez, our school’s executive director, shared that the work his family is doing in creating spaces to expand science opportunities for youth of color cemented our school’s decision to name this collaborative space after Mr. Joshua. It was also his hope that we build a community of support, collaboration and access. That's what that space provides for us day-to-day, a space to allow teachers to plan and collaborate and for students to get additional support.

In his first year of teaching, Mr. Joshua had already envisioned what the space could be for our school community. For many of us, during our first year of teaching, that’s something we probably wouldn’t have thought of or have the capacity to think about. However, I’m not surprised because of how he envisioned his classroom community to be.

I had the honor and privilege of working closely with Mr. Joshua because we shared the same physical classroom space. So, I got to see him grow and develop as a first year teacher and bring joy and excitement into the classroom. He cared so much about his students and wanted to ensure that they had a rigorous, culturally relevant and fun learning experience in science. Most importantly, he allowed them to come as they are into the classroom, and Mr. Joshua modeled that well. He was proud of his Eritrean heritage and wasn’t afraid to share his lived experiences and passion with students. Any time Mr. Joshua sang and danced at school, it brought joy to our community, because he was incredibly talented, and he invited students to bring their passions and talents to school as well.

Abraham Joshua was born on Nov. 25, 1998 in Texas. After moving to Washington, D.C., his family eventually settled in Morgantown, West Virginia. Mr. Joshua attended Morgantown High School where he found a passion for chemistry and singing, competing in the school quiz bowl and performing in choirs and dance shows. During his time at Princeton, Mr. Joshua studied chemistry, materials sciences and engineering. After graduating, he joined Teach for America and moved here to San Francisco to teach at Mission Prep. Mr. Joshua shared that he wanted to make a difference because representation matters and that his ultimate goal was to go to medical school to open up his own clinic to serve underprivileged communities.

We love and miss you, Mr. Joshua.

— Levi Lovang, former colleague

A man wearing a suit sings at a microphone

Our History

A Mission Prep faculty member talks to a parent about the school

A student reads from a book while two younger kids watch, one of whom raises her hand

The Mission Preparatory School opened in August 2011 with two classes of kindergarten students. In the 2019-20 school year, that first cohort began 8th grade.

The school educates students from throughout San Francisco and surrounding Bay Area communities, with a particular focus on students in the southeastern part of the city.

Mission Prep serves families who desire a rigorous college-preparatory academic program and highly-structured environment for their children. We provide an extensive, research-based literacy program to meet the needs of all students, including targeted support for English Learners and students with special needs.

The entire school program provides the systems, support, and clear, consistently reinforced expectations needed for all students to focus on academics, maintain high stands of behavior, acquire social-emotional competencies, and develop the core values of being prepared, respectful, engaged, and persevering.

Our team and our families work together to ensure that our vision of “every child, every minute, every day” is a reality for our Prepsters.

Our Vision

The Mission Preparatory School addresses the need for a free, public, college-preparatory school that provides a rigorous, high-quality K-8 education in San Francisco.

With an uncompromising commitment to upholding the highest academic and behavioral expectations for all children, Mission Prep is designed specifically to address the learning needs of an underserved and underperforming student population.

Through an intensive focus on literacy and the implementation of strategic academic support structures, we ensure mastery of essential skills and content knowledge, accelerate student achievement, support student acceptance to top high schools, and lay the foundation for every child to excel in and graduate from college.

Mission Prep is non-religious in its programs, admissions policies, employment practices, and all other operations; does not charge tuition; and does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. Admission is open to all children whose ages meet the current California Education Code requirements and who reside in California.