| Horace Mann School | |
|---|---|
| Motto | Magna est veritas et prævalet (Great is the truth and it prevails) |
| Established | 1887 |
| Type | Independent school College preparatory school |
| Head of School | Dr. Thomas M. Kelly |
| Students | approx. 1,750 |
| Grades | Nursery 3's-12th |
| Location | 231 West 246th St., Bronx, New York City, New York, 10471, U.S. |
| Campus | Urban and Suburban |
| Colors | Maroon and white |
| Mascot | Lions |
| Yearbook | The Mannikin |
| Newspaper | The Record |
| Website | HoraceMann.org |
Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City, founded in 1887 . Horace Mann is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League, educating students from all across the New York tri-state area from nursery school to the twelfth grade. The Upper, Middle, and Lower Divisions are located in Riverdale, a neighborhood of the Bronx, while the Nursery School is located in Manhattan. The John Dorr Nature Laboratory, a 275 acre (1.11288 km2) campus in Washington Depot, Connecticut, serves as the school's outdoor and community education center. Tuition for the 2011-2012 school year is $37,275. Forbes Magazine ranks Horace Mann as the second best preparatory school in the country.[1]
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The school was founded in 1887 by Nicholas Murray Butler as a co-educational experimental and developmental unit of Teachers College at Columbia University.[2] Its first location was a building at 9 University Place in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The school moved in 1901 to 120th Street in Morningside Heights.[2] Columbia University followed suit soon afterwards, moving northwards to its present campus. The name of the school can still be seen on the northern-most building at the Columbia campus, named Horace Mann Hall, after education reformer Horace Mann. However, Horace Mann was becoming a school in its own right instead of a teaching laboratory, and it became more independent of the Columbia University and Teachers College. The Teachers College therefore created the Lincoln School, located on 110th Street, across the street from Central Park, to continue its experiments in teaching.
The school split into separate all-male and all-female schools and in 1914, the Boys' School moved to 246th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and during the 1940s it severed formal ties with Columbia University and became Horace Mann School.[2] The Horace Mann School for Girls remained at Teachers College, and then merged with the Lincoln School in 1940, and finally closed in 1946.[2]
The New York School for Nursery Years (founded in 1954 on 90th Street in Manhattan) became the Horace Mann School for Nursery Years in 1968, and was co-ed.[2] In 1972, Horace Mann merged with the Barnard School, next door in Riverdale, to form the Horace Mann-Barnard Lower School for kindergarten through grade six, located on the former Barnard School campus. At that point, only the lower school was mixed.[2] In 1975, the Horace Mann School returned to its roots as a co-educational learning environment and began admitting girls to the Upper School.[2] The Class of 1976 is Horace Mann School's last all-male class. In 1999, the sixth grade moved from the Horace Mann-Barnard campus to the main 246th Street campus and formed a distinct Middle Division along with the seventh and eighth grades.
The school's motto is "Magna est veritas et prævalet," a Latin phrase meaning "Great is the truth, and it prevails." The phrase comes from the King James version of the Old Testament, whose contemporary translation is "Magna est veritas et prævalebit," or will prevail. The school mascot is a lion, possibly a holdover from the days when the school was associated with Columbia University, whose mascot is also a lion. At the same time, the school colors are maroon and white, which are reminiscent of the colors of Harvard University. The Swim and Water Polo Teams have adopted the Sea Lion as their unofficial mascots, as the Varsity Ski Team has the Mountain Lion.
There are four divisions of Horace Mann, all co-educational: a Nursery Division (three year olds through kindergarten) located on 90th Street in Manhattan, a Lower Division (kindergarten through fifth grades) on the Horace Mann campus on Tibbett Avenue in Riverdale, a Middle Division (sixth through eighth grades) on the 246th Street campus in Riverdale, and an Upper Division (ninth through twelfth grades) also on the 246th Street campus. There is also the John Dorr Nature Laboratory, located on 275 acres (1.11288 km2) of land in Washington Depot, Connecticut, used for extended field trips for classes of students starting in second grade and an orientation program for new students entering the Middle or Upper Divisions. The Dorr facility was recently renovated and is currently LEED-certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Current tuition for students in the Lower Division through the Upper Division is approximately $40,000 a year.[3] Financial aid at the school is based on need; no merit scholarships are awarded. For the 2010-2011 academic year, 17% of the students received more than $7,400,000 in aid.[3]
Each division of the school has its own Division Head. The Middle and Upper Divisions have separate student government bodies. The entire school is overseen by a Head of School. The ninth and current Head is Dr. Thomas M. Kelly, who previously served as Superintendent of Schools in Valhalla, New York. Kelly succeeded Dr. Eileen Mullady (who is currently the head of the Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, CA), on July 1, 2005. Formerly of Princeton University and the Lawrenceville School,[4] Dr. Mullady was the namesake of one of the new buildings erected under her term. Prior to Dr. Mullady, the long-standing Head was the late R. Inslee Clark, Jr., previously Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale University.
The current Horace Mann Nursery Division Head is Marcia Levy, who replaced Patricia Zuroski when she was appointed to the position of Director of Diversity Initiatives. The current Lower Division Head is Wendy Steinthal, replacing Dr. Steven B. Tobolsky, who departed in June 2007 to run the Chestnut Hill School, an elite N-6 prep school outside Boston. The current Middle Division Head is Robin Ann Ingram, and the current Upper Division head is Dr. David Schiller. Glenn Sherratt is the current Director of the John Dorr Nature Laboratory.[2]
Horace Mann holds a large number of college level courses. The school offers 20 Advanced Placement courses and 10 foreign languages. Its 220 faculty members hold 210 master's degrees and 34 doctoral degrees.
Students in the Upper Division are required to study English, World History, United States History, Biology, Chemistry and/or Physics, Geometry, Algebra II and Trigonometry, and also meet various requirements in the Arts, Computer Science, Health & Counseling, and Physical Education. Students must go beyond these basic requirements in at least some, if not all, subjects. They are also required to take at least three years of either French, German, Japanese, Latin, or Spanish. Additional classes in Greek, Italian, Mandarin, and Russian are offered.
Starting in eleventh grade, students have more flexibility with their requirements and can choose from courses in Economics, Psychology, Classical History, Government, Religion, Political Philosophy, United States Legal History, Calculus, Statistics, Science and Public Policy, among other elective classes.
Independent Study and Senior Projects, where students create their own coursework and present their findings in weekly meetings, are also common. Additionally, many students develop original research projects with faculty at Columbia University, Cornell University Medical Center, NYU, and Rockefeller University.
The school's arts program includes courses in the performing and visual arts. At least 1.5 arts credits are required for graduation, with at least one half-credit course in performance/studio arts and one half-credit course in art history/appreciation.
Horace Mann has two major instrumental ensembles: The Horace Mann Orchestra and the Horace Mann Jazz Band. The Jazz Band program is also split into two ensembles: the Contemporary Directions Ensemble and the Creative Arts Philharmonic. Each ensemble performs at least three to four concerts per year, culminating in a trip abroad. Recent trips have taken the Glee Club and Orchestra to Prague, Germany, France and Spain. Horace Mann also has an established Glee Club, which performs several concerts each year, including past performances at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, and Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center. The Jazz Band has performed at many famous jazz clubs including Birdland and B.B. King's.
All students are required to take American Red Cross CPR certification, as well as a swim test, in order to graduate. Horace Mann students are also required to complete at least 80 hours of community service, with at least 40 hours in ninth and tenth grades and 40 hours in eleventh and twelfth. In eighth grade, one out-of-school project or three in-school projects are necessary for graduation to the ninth grade; in sixth and seventh grades a homeroom project is done cooperatively. In the Lower and Nursery Divisions, there is no community service requirement, although there is an annual "Caring-in-Action" day dedicated to community service that students and their families can attend.
Admission is selective with decisions based on recent grades, an interview, and the candidate's score on either the ISEE or SSAT test. The largest point of entry point is the Sixth grade, with between 50 and 55 places available each year. In the ninth grade, 40 to 45 new students are traditionally enrolled. A smaller number of students are accepted in other grades, although there are no admissions to the twelfth grade.
Forbes Magazine ranks Horace Mann as the second best preparatory school in the country.[5] The Wall Street Journal ranks it as the fourth best high school in the United States, as measured by student admission rates to exclusive colleges, and Worth magazine ranked it seventh out of all the nation's high schools based on the proportion of graduates attending Harvard, Yale and Princeton Universities.[6]
Co-curricular include clubs that provide the students with an opportunity to produce publications, hone their debating skills, participate in activism and much more. Among the many clubs are:
The new main branch of the school government is called the Community Council, an open forum that will include members of the Faculty, four elected officials from each grade, and leaders of certain clubs. In addition, there is an elected Student Body President (SBP) and Student Body Vice-President (SBVP).
Horace Mann also has a significant number of student publications. Many of them have won national awards. Prominent publications include:
The Record, established in 1903, is the weekly, student-run newspaper. Throughout its history, it has won national journalism awards and has been staffed by students who went on to become distinguished journalists and authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Lewis (class of 1944), Richard Kluger (class of 1952), Robert Caro (class of 1953) and David Leonhardt (class of 1990). In 1954, the school made national headlines for translating a copy of The Record into Russian and distributing it in the USSR. The purpose of the exercise was to show Russian schoolchildren what life in America was like. The staff purposely kept in an article about the Horace Mann soccer team's losing one of its games to demonstrate the operation of an independent free press.[7][8] The American Scholastic Press Association twice honored The Record as the "Best High School Weekly Newspaper" for 2001-2002 (Volume 99) and 2003-2004 (Volume 101). It was also named a National Pacemaker in 2004 (Volume 101) and in 2006 was a Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Medalist (Volume 103). The Record is published every Friday during the academic year[9] and can be found online here.
The Horace Mann Review, now in its twentieth volume, is a journal of opinion on current events, politics, public policy, and culture. The review covers issues from unique and otherwise unexamined perspectives. The publication has paying subscribers throughout the nation and abroad and has been the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in journalism. In April 2001, the American Scholastic Press Association (ASPA) honored the Review with its award for Best Magazine. The Review's 2005-2006 volume was honored with a first place finish in the American Scholastic Press Awards critique. The Review is a finalist for the National Scholastic Press Association's Magazine Pacemaker of the Year award for 2007, the highest honor in high school journalism.[10] The Review was again awarded the ASPA's Best Magazine Award in 2009 for its eighteenth volume.
The Mannikin is the yearbook of the Horace Mann School. Traditional sections include Student Life, Underclassmen, Seniors (each graduate receives a half-page to design as they wish), Athletics, Faculty, and Advertisements. At 560 pages, the Mannikin is one of the largest high school yearbooks in New York State. In addition, the Mannikin has won numerous awards from the American Scholastic Press Association.
Other school publications include: Folio 51, the magazine dedicated to gender issues, HM Voyager, the travel publication, Manuscript and Word, the creative poetry and prose publications respectively, Insight, the photography publication, Edible, the culinary publication, Images, an art magazine, the Thespian, a theatre publication, Cinemann, a magazine related to current movies, Lola's Kitchen, a one-page periodical published by the Gay Straight Alliance, and InsideOut, a health publication. In addition, a literary-arts magazine called Muse, featuring the work of Middle School students, is published each year.
Horace Mann School is a part of the Ivy Preparatory School League, a division of the greater New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS), which comprises all the private schools in the New York State. Fieldston, Riverdale, and Horace Mann together are known as the "Hilltop schools," as all three are located within two miles (3 km) of each other in the Riverdale-Fieldston section of the Bronx, on a hill above Van Cortlandt Park. The three also share a great interscholastic sports rivalry; Horace Mann's annual charity basketball game, the Buzzell Game, is almost always versus Riverdale, and sometimes Fieldston.
| Sport | Level | Season | Gender |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseball | V, JV, MD | Spring | Boys' |
| Basketball | V, JV, MD | Winter | Boys', Girls' |
| Crew | V, JV | Spring | Boys', Girls', Coed |
| Cross-Country | V, JV, MD | Fall | Girls', Boys', Coed (MD Only) |
| Field Hockey | V, JV, MD | Fall | Girls' |
| Fencing | V, JV | Winter | Boys', Girls' |
| Football | V, JV, MD | Fall | Boys' |
| Golf | V | Spring | Coed |
| Gymnastics | V, JV | Winter | Girls' |
| Lacrosse | V, MD | Spring | Boys', Girls' |
| Soccer | V, JV, MD | Fall | Boys', Girls' |
| Skiing | V | Winter | Boys', Girls' |
| Softball | V, JV, MD | Spring | Girls' |
| Squash | V | Winter | Coed |
| Swimming | V, JV, MD | Winter | Boys', Girls' |
| Tennis | V, JV, MD | Fall (Girls'), Spring (Boys') | Boys', Girls' |
| Track (indoor) | V, JV | Winter | Boys', Girls' |
| Track (outdoor) | V, JV, MD | Spring | Boys', Girls', Coed (MD Only) |
| Ultimate (Frisbee) | V, JV | Spring | Coed |
| Volleyball | V, JV, MD | Fall, Spring | Girls', Boys'^ |
| Water Polo | V, JV, MD | Fall | Coed |
| Wrestling | V, JV, MD | Winter | Coed |
^- boys' volleyball takes place during the spring, while girls' takes place in the fall
Category:Horace Mann School alumni
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Writer Jack Kerouac attended Horace Mann for one year of high school as part of the class of 1940 and played on the football team.[12] Hollywood agent and Broadway producer Leland Hayward also attended.
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