Pine Point School
Stonington, CT
Paul Geise, Head of School
David Smith, Director of Service Learning

 

Pine Point School is a community of some 250 students (pre-Kindergarten through ninth grade) in partnership with their parents and a committed faculty to nurture “strong minds and caring hearts.” But at Pine Point, partnership is even more richly nuanced than that: the school has forged relationships with over thirty organizations whose missions are admirable, from the local Pawcatuck Neighborhood Center and the Dolphin Communication Project, to the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, to broader-based organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Pine Point’s service learning program has forged similar formal relationships with over two dozen other organizations.

Respect, integrity, moral courage, and excellence stand out as core values at Pine Point, and the school has a variety of avenues for students both to participate and to practice these values. Through the school’s G.I.V.E. committee (generosity, involvement, volunteering, and education), for example, students help oversee 'good' at the school via what is, in a sense, a philanthropic board. 

Worth special mention at Pine Point are the eighth grade performance assessment program a and the ninth grade moral leadership program. The latter relies on both resources at the school and outside visitors with the goal of inspiring deep inner deliberation over “essential, ethical, eternal issues of life and living” before students graduate and go on to continue their high school studies elsewhere. Despite a number of essential questions—often offered monthly by guests from outside—the overarching question for Pine Point students is “What difference will you be making in the years to come?” See more about Pine Point School.

 

Kent Denver School
Denver, Colorado
Todd Horn, Head of School

 

Kent Denver School is a community of some 750 adults and students working together for excellence in both scholarship and character.

Community life at Kent Denver is imbued with five core values that run in filigree through academics, athletics, and other activities. Students are empowered to play meaningful roles in  a variety of ways, the school works to build relationships of trust and support both within its own walls and in the larger Denver community.

Kent Denver’s core values— integrity, respect, personal growth, community, and wisdom —were determined through a broad-based community consensus process that synthesized the thoughts and opinions of teachers, students, trustees and parents. The school’s trustees regularly affirm, and in a variety of ways, their support for Kent Denver’s character work and values. Students likewise keep in mind the character traits selected to be defining characteristics of the community. The fact that 80% or more of juniors and seniors could name all five values—an estimate offered by students and faculty and confirmed during a campus visit—attests both to Kent Denver’s determination to live out its mission for character, and to integration of the values throughout the life of the school. As one senior explained, even “the coaches are always talking about our values.”

Worth special mention are at least three specific aspects of Kent Denver’s commitment character. One of these is an extensive service “program” that sees the school (at its own expense) making a noticeable impact in a dozen of the lowest-funded schools in the Denver public school system. Students from these schools come to Kent Denver for six weeks of work and play during summers, in a program that has increased the rate of college admissions in these schools and shown students to make a year’s progress in academic areas during a six-week program. Kent Denver also has an impressive student  mentoring program, in which seniors and eighth graders work as mentors to freshmen and sixth grade students, smoothing transitions into their respective divisions and passing the torch of the community’s values to a new class. In a third initiative, all Kent Denver students write a “this I believe” essay each year: an initiative that both focuses students on key values in their lives and triggers deep ethical reflections, apologies, and acts of kindness and compassion. See more about Kent Denver School