The Davis Waldorf School

The Davis Waldorf School (DWS) was founded in 1986 by a group of parents who wanted Waldorf education for their children. The first kindergarten opened in the fall of 1986 in the living room of a parent’s house in Dixon, California. The school soon moved to a temporary site in a farmhouse west of Davis. In 1992, a generous gift of land from enabled the school to move to its current five-acre site. The campus and buildings were carefully designed to harmonize with the ecology of the landscape and the principles of Waldorf education.

Our school offers a developmentally appropriate, experiential and academically rigorous approach to education. We integrate arts in all academic disciplines for children from preschool through eighth grade to enhance and enrich learning. We aim to inspire life-long learning in all of our students and enable each child to fully develop their unique capacities. Imagination, creativity and social responsibility are emphasized.

The Davis Waldorf School recognizes three adult spheres of responsibility which provide essential support for the healthy functioning of our school and community. Although each sphere carries its own specific tasks and responsibilities, there are many areas of partnership and cooperative effort. Parents, Faculty and Administration work side by side as members of the Board and they share the work of most of the school’s essential committees. The Parent Council serves as a facilitator to enhance communication within the classes, in the school community and with the Faculty and Administration.

Parents, administrative staff, and teachers work together to co-create many of the school’s festivals and to support the education of the children in the classroom. As a community, we are committed to working together with mutual respect, goodwill, and an earnest desire to help our school and Waldorf education thrive while providing an excellent experience for our children.

Our school is an established community is its 37th year and offers a Waldorf curriculum for 1st through 8th grade and a licensed child care center that has three preschools, two kindergartens and an after-care program. We have a strong and experienced faculty dedicated to working out of Anthroposophy. Our parents are invested in their children's education and in the school and bring great enthusiasm and energy to any project. We are accredited by and a full member school of AWSNA (Association of Waldorf Schools of North America) and WECAN (Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America).

Our school is focused not only on developing healthy, creative, and justice-minded individuals who see themselves as stewards of the environment and their communities, but also working collaboratively to develop our program, policies and operational systems.

We also have a strong festival life and many community events, as well as a beautiful, treed 5-acre campus with rammed earth classroom buildings, a large garden, and many outdoor natural play spaces in which children can explore and develop their capacities.

We offer a generous benefits package, including employer-paid medical, dental, vision and mental health benefits, a 403(b) employer matching program, tuition remission for employees, professional development, peer mentoring, bonuses, annual COLAs, and merit-based pay increases. We are located in a small, charming college town in the Sacramento Valley that is known for its wonderful farmer's market, gorgeous UC Davis Botanical Gardens, and hundreds of miles of well-utilized bike lanes.

We invite you to visit our website to learn more and schedule a tour to experience the wonder of Waldorf education up close. We look forward to hearing from you.

Our Mission:

Through a balanced and developmentally-aligned curriculum, the Davis Waldorf School builds a strong academic, artistic and social foundation in which each student cultivates a capacity for independent thinking, compassionate feeling, and responsible action.

Our Vision:

To create a diverse and inclusive community to educate our children with love and care, with imagination and in freedom, to allow them to realize their full potential as free human beings who will serve humanity through their deeds.

The cornerstone of Waldorf education is the active commitment and practice to honor the sacred being in each of us as we work in community together. We prioritize values that foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the daily academic lives of all students and faculty members in our community.

We acknowledge that racial biases are embedded in the very fabric of our culture and support systems of privilege and oppression. In our striving to cultivate an anti-racist and culturally responsive school community we are actively engaged in the ongoing evaluation of curricular content, teaching practices, and institutional policies to find and eliminate racial biases. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive community that respects and affirms each of our members, honoring our diversity of culture, ethnicity, race, religion, family structure, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical abilities, and unique learning styles.

We are opposed to any form of racism or nationalism and find that these are in complete contradiction to the mission of Waldorf education and to the modern change in consciousness.

As a result, our aim is to establish a community that reflects Steiner’s Social Motto: The healthy social life is only found when, in the mirror of each human soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the community, the virtue of each one is living.