We Are Not Alone: A Gathering for Educators and Communities to Focus on Healing, Disruption, and Transformation
The San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS) invites you to the San Francisco-Bay Area as we bring back the Fall Forum on November 7-9, 2025 in San Bruno, CA.
The Fall Forum is an annual, national convening for practitioners to have powerful exchanges of innovative practices and democratic policies to increase equitable student achievement. This year’s theme comes as an intentional and thoughtful response to the national narrative forming around education.
REGISTER HERE – it takes just a couple of minutes. Note: Pre-conference/School Visits require a separate registration.
If you are not ready to register, please consider taking 2 minutes to support our planning by expressing your interest.
Silent Auction
Saturday, November 8, 2025 – BUY TICKETS HERE
Coming Soon: Silent Auction Virtual Bidding Opens October 15th!
Conference Outline
Friday: Pre-conference/School Visits (all day; separate registration and cost)
- Option A: Full Day School Visits (watch your email or come back for updated sites)
- Option B: Full-Day Specialized and In-Depth Workshops
Saturday: Main Sessions (all day)
- Keynote and Sessions From the Field (8:00am – 4:00pm)
- Evening Event and Awards Ceremony (5:30 – 8:30pm)
Sunday: Taking It Back (8am – 1pm)
- AM sessions designed to support participants to take their learning back
- Closing, interactive lunch
Call For Proposals
You are invited to submit proposals! Students are encouraged to present or co-present. To help you prepare, see our proposal rubric and sample proposal.
SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL
This Year’s Theme – from our Executive Director
As the word “Coalition” in our name suggests, we value the gathering of community with common foci and goals. Our coalition is focused on our mission and vision, which simply put are about equitable education. And, while we trust that equitable education will require committed and difficult work across many areas, an essential component requires democratic processes within our public educational system and beyond.
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As an organization that started as a regional center for the National Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), we always found tremendous opportunity in CES’ annual meeting – The Fall Forum. When CES closed its doors, we often contemplated reigniting this powerful space for educators and allies. Our plan was to begin in 2021 – but COVID 19 paused our efforts. More recently, we decided to do the year-plus planning to bring back the Fall Forum in 2026. But, as a result of the most recent national elections and ensuing national narrative that demonstrated more division than unity, we made the bold commitment this past December to expedite our effort simply because we believed educators and allies would need a place to come together. We committed to creating that space whether for 50 or 500 in response to our current need. Thus far the reception has been only positive.
A word about our theme: We Are Not Alone: A Gathering for Educators and Communities to Focus on Healing, Disruption, and Transformation. Guiding SF-CESS’ work is its Framework for Transformation. This framework outlines four domains of work that must be supported for individuals and communities to engage in the constant and continuous work of transformation. Our theme derives directly from our third domain which states that we, in order to make new meaning of the inequities that persist, must commit to doing our own work in three different spaces: Alone – In Affinity – and Across Difference. Again, given growing and intentional division across our country, we heard the need for people to come together in community. In this space, we hope you will bring and be able to attend to the individual (alone) goals you have for improvement and transformation. We also believe our theme and extended community of educators and allies who share (affinity) enough basic beliefs about children, schools, and communities will support fostering a brave space for the challenging work facing us. Finally, we are building on thirty years of previous Fall Forum that always demonstrated the power of educators and allies sharing promising practices from diverse contexts and perspectives (across difference).
Once again, we are bringing back the Fall Forum – earlier than originally planned – because we believe we need a space to come together, to be together, to learn, to heal and strengthen, to learn and grow, to know in this time… we are not alone.
Sincerely,
Gregory Peters, Ed.D.
Executive Director, SF-CESS
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