The Discovery Center School

I went to this (apprently now defunct) school for grades K-​8^th. It was a small, private school located in the Excelsior at Ocean and Cayuga, with small class sizes of about sixty kids per grade.
DCS definitely lacked fancy facilities (kids may remember the lack of gym/​auditorium/​school lunches, and the overall ghetto facilities/​textbooks, having middle school dances in the hallways, and severely slanted blacktop… we used to have to drive to an extremely shabby public gym to have our sports games) but it was a relatively diverse, positive experience and far from the typical snooty private or rigid Catholic private school. It was, after all, located on the site of a former shopping center with a former supermarket, parking lot, and «Tic Toc Taco» making up what later became DCS’s classrooms and «playing field.»
I had lots of great and devoted teachers with innovative discussion-​based classes (didn’t realize this was so unique until I went off to public high school at the prisonesque Lowell), interesting field trips, and small class sizes.
Apprently DCS was run into the ground at some point, and I don’t think it ever had very much money to begin with, which is a pity because it offered an alternative to the sometimes awful SF public school system. I have pretty fond memories from this time, aside from the usual childhood emotional torture inflicted upon myself by other children, but we can’t blame the school for that.