About Birch Lane

Welcome to Birch Lane Elementary School!
Birch Lane has deep roots in the Davis community having served students for 56 years.
The first thing I noticed when I joined the school as principal four years ago was the open space. The campus is on 10 acres filled with trees, extensive playground, lawns, a chicken coop, outdoor science areas, and gardens.
Over 50 years ago Margaret O’Brien, the school’s principal, had a vision for an outdoor science area and converted what was then a vacant field into what is now a mature arboretum. Our PTA is in the midst of a rededication to better serve students complete with a Peace Bench and California native plants and support a Garden Coordinator to monitor and improve our school and classrooms gardens. Our PTA also supported a new outdoor science area in 2016 and installed a fruit orchard and new gardens for classrooms to use, study, plant, taste, and enjoy fruits and vegetables.
A core belief of Birch Lane is learning should art and music. Our PTA supports our school with two art teachers who work in classrooms and do multiple art media including ceramics which are fired in our school’s kiln. You will see student artwork throughout the campus.

A unique element of Birch Lane is that we serve our community with two educational programs which support high academic rigor and differentiation. About 60% of our students attend a traditional neighborhood school with two classes in each grade level. About 40% of our students attend a public Montessori program with multi-age classes in primary and intermediate. This allows our school to support students in the learning style that best fits their needs. Classes for both programs are intermixed at our school and all staff work together to support every child and our tagline is “One Great Place to Learn”. Birch Lane won a Distinguished School award on 2014 and our “Read a Picture Book Month” is an incredible school event. This year we read over 40,000 picture books in the month of February!

We are a very diverse campus having approximately 100 students whose home language is other than English and those families speak more than 30 languages. We are a Title ! school as approximately 25% of our students are from socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Our school has veteran teams working in our reading room and our EL (English Learner) programs to support students. We are a Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) school which is our framework to support explicit instruction of behavior expectations and our full time counselor provides lessons for every class on problem solving, tolerance, acceptance, and self-esteem.

Again, welcome to Birch Lane Elementary School!