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=**Our Mission**=

The **Social Justice Charter School of Philadelphia** is a college preparatory high school and early college program serving grades 7-12. The mission of Social Justice Charter is to prepare students to become ethical leaders. The school prepares students through a rigorous program of study and action, based on three principles: **Responsibility**, **Awareness**, and **Critical Engagement**. Social Justice Charter believes that the first step toward a just world is to accept our **Responsibility** to ourselves, to our families, to our communities, and to the world. That responsibility demands **Awareness**. We must understand how our actions affect the people around us and how the world around us colors and limits our awareness. Accepting Responsibility and gaining awareness, however, is not enough to ensure a just world. We must also **Critically Engage** with it. As Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us, "to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system ." Therefore, Social Justice Charter's community of students, teachers, parents, and friends seek to identify and actively address social problems.

=About Us=

Social Justice Charter School was founded in 2004, by a collection of educators, parents, and community activists working in the Philadelphia region. The first class was made up of just 29 7th grade students, but with the addition of a new group of students each year, it has since grown to its full-enrollment size of 300. The school is open to all Philadelphia residents, and due to its unique program and central location at Broad and Spring Garden Streets, it is made up of students from every corner of the city. Due to partnerships with Temple University and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, students are concurrently enrolled at Temple or another university during their junior and senior years.

=Points of Pride=


 * Early college program that allows students to earn college credits while completing their high school diploma
 * Yearlong sophomore, junior, and senior year service projects, with summer internships
 * Modern curriculum that dispenses with traditional subjects and replaces them with programs of study that examine problems and develop problem-solving skills
 * A diverse faculty and student body
 * Ongoing school-wide projects that critically address United States war, prison, and drug policies
 * Online newspaper with full participation of the student body
 * Nationally ranked debate team
 * Ongoing conversion of existing facility to a "Green" building
 * Morning physical education program to develop life-long health
 * Healthy (and tasty) school lunch program with emphasis on local ingredients.