GEF supports the students, teachers, administrators and families in The Goleta Union School District. GUSD covers the Goleta Valley with a population of approximately 80,000 in the City of Goleta and a large unincorporated area of Santa Barbara County.
GEF’s support spans the GUSD area, which includes nine K-6 elementary schools, and a family school. Three of the campuses have transitional kindergarten classrooms, two schools have State-funded preschool programs, and one state preschool is housed at the district offices, adjacent to the GUSD Learning Tree Preschool, which serves special education students and general preschool students. The more than, 3,700 students in GUSD are diverse in both socioeconomics and ethnicity.
The Goleta Education Foundation offers support to schools in the district, with the goal of creating parity across all programs for a variety of learning groups, regardless of an individual school’s ability to raise funds to augment the district’s resources. GEF is currently an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff.