Jewish Community High School of the Bay

At JCHS, we encourage students to take healthy risks, cultivate new and existing passions, and become the best version of themselves. Our academic and extracurricular programs have been designed to inspire students to stretch their capacities inside and beyond the classroom. The JCHS community is small by design, allowing us to embrace each student's distinct strengths and provide the kind of attention that helps each student to thrive. Our remarkable educators affirm, encourage, and challenge all students to integrate varied perspectives and sources of wisdom.

At JCHS, we celebrate our students' diverse backgrounds, and teach students how to engage others in respectful debate, appreciate divergent points of view, and advance the critical thinking skills essential for becoming engaged citizens. Our community is built upon the belief that the knowledge, leadership skills, self-assurance, and personal connections built in high school create a strong foundation that lasts a lifetime. After four years at JCHS, our alumni stand out for their unique capacity to integrate a deeper sense of their identity, their delight in lifelong learning, their empathy for others, and their passion for improving the world.

At JCHS, our students are inspired by teachers who challenge them to explore and open their minds, through a blend of classroom and experiential learning that inspires creativity, critical thinking and a deeper understanding of the world. Learning with others has a long tradition in Judaism and is embodied in the practice of chevrutah, or partner study. Through a process of talking, listening, questioning and mutual support, students learn the content of their classes, and more importantly, how to become independent learners. While not all JCHS classes use the traditional chevrutah method, this spirit of collaborative and student-centered learning is at the heart of our program.

In our Arts, Humanities, Jewish Studies, Math, Science, and World Language classes, students engage in a broad-based curriculum of required classes and have the opportunity to explore interests more deeply through diverse elective offerings. Many classes are designed with opportunities for students to integrate their knowledge across disciplines in ways that deepen students’ understanding of course content and of themselves. Through working together in classes, on playing fields, traveling on Journeys, and in the theater, JCHS students and faculty create a genuine community of learners.

Our academic philosophy embraces the use of technology to support learning and enhance creativity, communication, and collaboration. Our integrative approach introduces students to the myriad of ways that innovative hardware, new software apps, handson tinkering and even social media crowd-sourcing can be used to advance our understanding of traditional subject areas like algebra, Tanach and theater arts.

Inclusion at JCHS means valuing the unique gifts and supporting the distinct challenges of each student in order to deepen the vitality of our community. In the Jewish tradition, universal access to learning means that we embrace each member the community regardless of financial resources, physical abilities, or learning differences.

JCHS is a unique high school experience that offers teenagers an engaging and inspiring learning community that encourages them to affirm and embrace their Jewish identity, even as it empowers each individual on their journey toward becoming a responsible, informed, thoughtful, empathetic citizen empowered and inspired to improve the world.

At JCHS, education is not just about learning facts and figures. We want our students to look deeper, to really engage meaningfully with the subjects they study, whether it’s chemistry, or history, Tanach or Spanish, robotics and engineering or playwriting. We want them to be unafraid to ask big questions. In the tradition of a Jewish culture of inquiry, we teach our students ways to ask the world why, even as they explore the ways in which they can ask themselves, “why not?”

We are committed to creating a truly pluralistic community, an environment in which students can follow their passions, challenge themselves academically, try, fail, succeed and learn--all in a warm and balanced school in which every individual is seen and respected for the things that make them unique. Our students identify as Jewish in many different ways. We welcome students with a variety of Jewish backgrounds, religious observances and practices and JCHS students come from all over the Bay Area, a variety of public and private schools, and a diversity of family configurations.