555 Portola Drive, San Francisco, CA 94131 xx415 - 695 - 5700

Welcome to SOTA!

We warmly welcome all visitors to the SOTA website, especially those who are here for the first time. We are very proud to be part of such an exciting group of students, staff, parents, and community which is so united in its commitment to furthering the artistic and educational excellence of this school. We offer the opportunity to benefit from an extraordinary program unique to San Francisco.

High school is a very exciting and challenging time. Students who take advantage of what is available here at SOTA will be prepared to enter fine universities or conservatories by the time they graduate. As young artists, students must learn to work hard. They must apply themselves equally to their art and to their academic studies. Students who do this discover the art that is in all learning as well as the academic basis of art. All real knowledge is interdisciplinary.

You will find that students here are very nurturing and supportive of each other. Being a small school, we have a strong sense of community and are more like a family than a student body. Extend yourself in friendship and your effort will be warmly repaid. Welcome!

Mission of the School of the Arts

The Mission of the SFUSD School of the Arts is to provide a specialized high school program and learning environment which are conducive to creative and independent thinking and artistic and academic excellence for promising students of the arts.

Goals of the School of the Arts

1. Provide San Francisco Bay Area students with a specialized visual and performing arts high school of the highest quality.

2. Seek and recruit for the School of the Arts talented and gifted students representative of the diverse San Francisco Bay Area population.

3. Provide instruction to the SOTA students by highly qualified educators and artists in the school and in community settings.

4. Provide a program of instruction in which content from the arts is integrated into traditional non-arts subject areas and includes attention to multi-cultural arts.

5. Provide a balance between process and product and between discipline and creativity.