Santa Fe South High School is a high school serving grades 9-12 on the south side of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This charter school opened in 2001with support from the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its diverse student body of 430 students is comprised of 60% Hispanic students, 24% White students, 13% Black students, and 13% Native American students; 85% of these students are eligible for free and reduced lunch and 35% are English language learners.
The mission of Santa Fe South High School is to support its students to achieve post-secondary education through rigorous academic and social support. The diverse needs of this student population have required the staff to take a highly personalized approach to their academic and social development. Santa Fe South High School staff have created and implemented a unique “advisory” time structured around getting to know their students’ current personal and academic struggles and designing interventions to address them. Advisory teachers, or team leaders, are grouped with the same students for all four years of high school. During this time, team leaders conduct home visits to meet with parents, assess the students’ academic progress, and often become a students’ chief adult advocate at the school.
This charter school has implemented some unique academic practices to support a personalized and rigorous learning environment. Its content teachers loop with their students; in other words, they follow up on students through their high school years, grade by grade. This enables teachers to work with the same group of students over time, and through a deep knowledge of students, provides more academic personalization where it is needed most. They have also tailored their academic program to meet the needs of their students by adding classes such as “Spanish for Native Speakers” to provide a rigorous academic experience for students who wish to further develop their native language. The school works in conjunction with the community to support its students and have an active parents committee and a bilingual parent committee.
Due to its focus on post-secondary education, Santa Fe South High School has established relationships with local higher education institutions to grant dual credit (high school and college) for classes taken at the college level while still in high school. This enables a student population that is historically underrepresented in higher education institutions the opportunity to earn college credit while still in high school.
Also, despite being a small school, Santa Fe South High School has a robust athletic program, including soccer, football, and basketball teams, and has acquired its own athletic facility in a space once occupied by a YMCA.
Santa Fe South High School’s principal and founder, Chris Brewster, along with a core group of teachers decided that they really needed to start the academic process sooner for the students in south Oklahoma City. In 2005, they founded Santa Fe South Middle School.
