Saint Ann's School (New York City)

History

Saint Ann's School was founded in 1965 with 63 students and seven teachers in the basement of the St. Ann's Episcopal Church under the aegis of the vestry of the church and several interested parents. In 1966, the Church purchased the former Crescent Athletic Club House, a building designed by noted Brooklyn architect Frank Freeman, for the sum of $365,000, which has since served as the school's main building.

Stanley Bosworth (1927–2011) became its first headmaster. In 1982, Saint Ann's School formally disaffiliated from the church, having been granted a charter from the Board of Regents of the State of New York. When Bosworth retired in 2004, Larry Weiss, formerly the head of the upper school at The Horace Mann School, American University scholar, and president at Friends World College, began his tenure as head of school at Saint Ann's. In September 2009, it was announced that Weiss would not return to Saint Ann's for the 2010–2011 academic year. In May 2010, Vincent J. Tompkins, Jr., the Deputy Provost at Brown University, and formerly associate dean of academic affairs at Harvard University, was named Weiss's successor. A graduate of Brown, he received his PhD from Harvard, and taught American history there before entering academic administration. He assumed leadership of Saint Ann's beginning with the 2010-2011 academic year.

Academic program

The school has no grading system; its pedagogy places great value on individuality and does not believe in giving numerical values to personal academic journeys. Instead, teachers write full-page anecdotal reports for each student. Saint Ann’s curriculum emphasizes education in the arts including dance, music, theater, and the visual and recreational arts, as central elements of its academic curriculum, while high school students also attend a seminar program taught after hours at the end of the school day. Seminar topics include community service, philosophy, social justice, poetry, extracurricular literary studies, and debate & rhetoric, among others. Instruction at Saint Ann's is departmentalized from fourth through twelfth grade. The teaching faculty is made up of scholars, researchers, mathematicians, musicians, artists, and writers.

The school allows its high school juniors and seniors to essentially design their own curriculum. In a 2004 survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Saint Ann's was rated the number one high school in the country for having the highest percentage of graduating seniors enroll in Ivy League and several other highly selective colleges. In late 2007, The Wall Street Journal again listed Saint Ann's as one of the country's top 50 high schools for its success in preparing students to enter top American universities. Advanced Placement courses are not offered at Saint Ann's. In 2012, the New York Observer ranked Saint Ann's as the number one high school in New York City.

Arts

The school's visual and performing arts program includes:

Languages

Saint Ann's offers courses in:

Extracurriculars

The high school seminar program at Saint Ann’s is a unique series of offerings presented by teachers outside the domain of their departments and in addition to their regular teaching load. They are given at odd hours, often at the end of the regular school day, because in the busy schedules of the instructors and the students, no other time is available. The seminars are intense two-hour periods in which students undertake enormous amounts of self-study and/or creative work.

Recent offerings have included: Ancient Greek Literature in Translation; America in the 1920s; The Art of Debate and Rhetoric; Artificial Intelligence; Community Service; Enlightenment, Romanticism and Realism; Film Adaptations; High School Literary Magazine; Internship at the Preschool; Kite Making; Mathematical Art; Portuguese; Open Art Studio for students to achieve brilliant paintings or drawings whenever they want; The Middle East; Mock Trial; Modern Social Thought; Nietzsche; Philosophical Problems; Poetry Writing Workshop; Shakespeare in the World; Space Colonies; Technology and Society; True Stories; Go; “It Ain't Over ‘Till The Fat Lady Sings!” Art, Politics and the Philosophy of Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelung; Radicalism and Feminism in Art; AIDS, Art & Activism: The Plague Years; Cut, Dye, Resist: Graphic Art on Fabric; Fire Works; Spain's Artistic Legacy; True Stories; and Yearbook.

Divisions and demographics

The school is organized into four divisions: preschool, lower, middle and high school. The vast majority of the students are from Brooklyn and Manhattan, although other boroughs are represented. Approximately 22 percent of the student body receive some level of scholarship aid (8.5 percent receive tuition remission; 13.5 percent receive financial aid); nearly 10 percent of Saint Ann's students are faculty children. Approximately 21 percent of the student body are students of color.

Community

The school maintains a list called The Growing Shelf, which documents all published community members.

Notable people

Notable faculty include:

Notable alumni, sorted by profession, include: