Yorkville Community School is a neighborhood elementary school that opened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in September 2009. We opened our doors with four kindergarten classes, and have been adding a new grade each year. Our school is located in a neighborhood that is rich with cultural institutions, parks, historic landmarks, family run businesses and community based organizations. We pride ourselves in the relationships that we have been developing with these organizations and community businesses in order to meet the needs of our students. Each unit of study is enhanced by the meaningful connections that these amazing neighborhood sites provide our students, within and outside the classroom.
YCS is proud to have been honored as a Showcase School for four years in a row, 2015-2019. We were selected to showcase and share with other educators across the city how we Design Cross-Curricular Thematic Units of Study. Our thematic units of study provide our students with continuous opportunities to participate in whole class discussions and investigations that encourage verbal and written communication, collaborative studies, and student directed research. We focus on the vertical alignment of curriculum from kindergarten through fifth grade in order to deepen content knowledge and promote student ownership over the learning process.

What is a Showcase School? The Showcase Schools Program was designed by the NYC Department of Education to promote the collaboration and sharing of strong practices. Schools that excel in a specific learning focus area host educators from other schools to share their successful structures and strategies, and discuss the path they took to develop those structures and strategies. A Showcase School hosts three learning focus tours for educators from other schools. With tailored support and guidance from the DOE Office of Interschool Collaborative Learning, the Showcase Schools will build their own capacity to share strong practices and plan to execute learning focus tours.