Waring School

Waring School
Location
Beverly, Massachusetts United States
Information
Type	Independent
Founded	1972 (1972)
Head of School	Timothy Bakland
Faculty	30
Grades	6-12
Number of students	165
Average class size	10 to 16
Student to teacher ratio	7:1
Campus	Suburban, 32 acres
Color(s)	Blue and White
Athletics	Soccer, Basketball, Lacrosse, Cross Country Running
Website	www.waringschool.org
Waring School Seal

Waring School is a progressive, co-educational, academic college preparatory school in Beverly, Massachusetts, United States, for students in grades 6-12. The School offers studies in Humanities; extensive music, art, and theatre options, mathematics and science courses, as well as a curriculum of French language and cultural exchange.

Waring's "House" building

Waring School's educational model cultivates the analytical mind and the expressive voice, at the individual and community level. As a school driven by diverse ideas and a love of learning, Waring blends a progressive educational pedagogy with a rigorous, traditional liberal arts curriculum. Students and teachers are asked to take risks and stretch themselves. Waring's pedagogy challenges the traditional notion of a classroom through mixed-aged experiences, experiential learning, travel, and community service.

Waring School's classrooms are small, with average class size at 11.5 students. Teachers are addressed on a first-name basis; humanities classes are often taught in a Harkness style method; and there are no letter grades given in favor of detailed narrative evaluations.

Some of Waring's School's unique features include: An all-school Camping Trip in September, All-School meetings 4 times per week, a tutorial/advisory system with mixed-aged groupings, an immersive French language program with travel for all students, and a 3-week Endterm in June consisting of experiential learning and project-based learning.

Mission and Core Beliefs

Mission

To create and sustain a community of lifelong learners who are working together for the individual and common good.

Core Beliefs^[1]

• Learning is an essential and defining human activity that involves the whole person throughout life.
• A learning environment should stimulate this powerful, inherently human desire to learn and to grow. Most learning in a lifetime takes place outside of school and one of the purposes of school is to prepare an individual to learn on his or her own.
• A supportive and stimulating learning culture affirms intellectual tolerance and social unity.
• Emphasis on community that occurs in all-school meeting, mixed-age tutorials, on camping trip and through the common language of French, validates shared experiences outside of the classroom.
• The ability to foster growth in others is the essence of leadership.Teaching and learning go hand-in-hand and most learning takes place within the context of relationships, including, but not limited to, faculty to students, students to students, faculty to faculty.
• Learning involves taking responsibility to develop and exercise one’s personal “voice” by publicly expressing what one is thinking and feeling. We seek to affirm the unique voice—spoken, written, and artistic—of each member of the Waring community.
• Learning compels us to use our knowledge responsibly in the service of multiple communities, both locally and globally.
• The liberal arts are those branches of knowledge that contribute to the liberation of the mind and imagination through risk-taking and through the application of our knowledge of the world and of ourselves.

Founders' Vision

“The principal goal of our academic program is not the mastery of the content or subject matter of the liberal arts. The acquisition of knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition of life here at this school. The particular genres and periods studied are, for example, less important than the intellectual skills that one acquires through their study`. In this sense subject matter is a means to an end, the end being the intellectual skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, calculating, problem solving, observing, estimating, and measuring.

But even the mastery of these skills is not the real end of a liberal education. We have seen students acquire knowledge of math and language, learn skills associated with these subjects, but still remain uneducated. Education, liberal education, should be measured ultimately in terms of less tangible goals: one’s ability to discuss books and events, the depth of one’s vision into a given problem, one’s active involvement in artistic activities, and finally, the growth of one’s understanding of ideas and values.” ^[2]

School Ethic

^[3]

As individuals, each of us shoulders the personal responsibility for what we say and what we do, both in and out of school. Waring School’s Guiding Assumptions are based on personal integrity and the values of the school community. We believe that learning is an essential and defining human activity that involves the whole person throughout life. We believe that a supportive and stimulating learning culture affirms intellectual tolerance and social unity. As a community of individuals, we continually reaffirm our mission and core beliefs through our ethic of meaningful ritual and participation, genuine discussion, and authentic relationships.

Our community is built on trust. At Waring, we students, teachers, parents and administrators have a responsibility to make our school a creative, productive environment for social and intellectual growth. We shape and maintain our culture, and it requires that we have integrity, that we be honest, that we be caring and that we be courageous.

Both as members of the Waring community and as individuals, we agree to take active responsibility for our school. We should do nothing to damage the community and if we witness someone else damaging the community in any way, we should take action in an appropriate way. On the daily level, this means accepting personal responsibility for our actions—being respectful to others in what we do or say while encouraging others to do the same, respecting the physical campus and cleaning up after ourselves, using technology responsibly, being good mentors to younger students, and so on. When serious issues arise, we are called to be our best selves: to take positive action, to use our voice to speak up in an appropriate way. Although it is not easy to do, whenever possible, we should speak to the person(s) directly involved in any situation. We may also speak to a friend, a tutor, a parent, a teacher or administrator. It is our responsibility to speak up whenever there is a breach of trust at Waring. When we fail to do so, we widen the breach and we may be held accountable for our own inaction.

Developing and exercising our personal voice is a key part of Waring’s Guiding Assumptions. We are called to exercise our unique voices—spoken, written and artistic—which, in large part, is what we mean by being personally responsible for our daily actions. Cultivating this ethic allows us to act responsibly in service to both our school and global community.

History

Waring School: a brief history^[4]

Waring School, originally known as La Petite École, was founded by Philip and Joseé Waring in their home in Rockport, Massachusetts in the summer of 1972. There were four students enrolled in what was originally a typical Open classroom of the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s.

A day in the Rockport school began with Morning Talk, the forerunner of our present All-School Meeting. Everyone would sit around a long table in the Grande Salle of the School building and listen to stories, read poetry, solve logic problems, read out loud from journals, and discuss history and current events. After Morning Talk there would be academic (French, math, music, drawing, history, science, writing) and not so academic (pottery, wood-working, gardening, animal care, school maintenance) activities until the school day ended at 4:00pm. The Warings rejected the notion that exposure to the great works of great minds should be deferred to the upper levels of high school or to college when students would be ready for them. The Warings held that the great ideas and images contained in our tradition should be presented to students “from the time they learn to read and count in order that they become familiar from the very beginning with the content of a liberal education.”

In the spring of 1974 the whole school went camping in the Smokey Mountains for three weeks, and the following year everyone set out for California in a G.M.C. diesel bus. These trips are remembered as legends of Waring even today, and have inspired elements of both our program and our campus. Numerous overnight trips and travel experiences remain vital parts of the Waring experience.

By 1975-76 it was clear that if the school was going to keep its older students for the high school years, it would have to move to a property with more space and more possibility for growth. In the spring of 1976 the school purchased the Edith Miles Coolidge Estate between the Prides Crossing and Centerville sections of Beverly, Massachusetts, and relocated that summer. The Coolidge property contained five structures: a large main house, a stable and carriage house, a barn, a farmhouse, and a large greenhouse. In addition, there were fields, gardens, and woodlands as well as a stream and small pond. The House was the first to be adapted to school use (also containing apartments for the Founders and Faculty, and even a bunkroom for a small number of boarders) The Stable and Carriage House, now known as the School, went through major renovations and now contain offices, the Grande Salle, and a wing of classrooms. The Barn was modified to hold a Library, classrooms, and the Pottery Studio (as well as the school’s original gymnasium).

The name La Petite École was officially changed to École Bilingue de Beverly, Inc., to emphasize the importance of French in the curriculum and to reflect the intention of the Founders to raise their own children and their students in two languages and cultures. But in daily use, and soon on almost all materials associated with the school, it was called the Waring School. There were 18 students at Waring the first year in Beverly. By the next year that number had doubled, and seven years later, at the time of our first New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation, there were 58 students in the school. The school continued to grow more or less steadily to its present size of about 150 students. Including the 2015 graduating class, the total number of alumni is now about 590.

Following the first NEASC accreditation in 1983, the Board of Trustees, which had previously been composed of members of the Waring family, was expanded to include parents and prominent North Shore residents who had an interest in the school. In the early 1980’s, the former Greenhouse was converted into a Theater, and a proper gymnasium was constructed. The large main House was significantly expanded in 1986, and the Theater building was expanded to include a larger Art Studio and two entirely new structures were added: the Gymnasium and, in 2003, a building housing three beautiful new Science Labs called the Forum, whose award-winning design was created by ISA Associates of Portsmouth, NH.

In 1991, Philip and Joseé Waring retired and Assistant Headmaster and founding Faculty member Peter Smick was appointed Headmaster. Peter Smick led Waring School for 21 years until his retirement in 2012, overseeing the expansion of the school in size and reputation, including our first capital campaign and the construction of the Forum building, but also overseeing new initiatives in curriculum, such as the Core Immersion Program, and the Angers Exchange.

In July of 2012, following a national search, Melville S. Brown was appointed Head of School. As part of the transition the school was reincorporated as Waring School, Inc. Under Mel’s leadership, the school was once again reaccredited by the NEASC and the Commission on Independent Schools, following an exhaustive self-study process. This experience has led naturally into the creation of a strategic plan for the future of the school which was adopted by the board in the summer of 2015.

In July of 2015, Waring installed its fourth Head, Timothy Bakland. Tim is the first graduate of the school to take on this leadership role, and has the distinction of having fostered close relationships with all three of his predecessors. He was a member of the class of 1994, and came back to teach at Waring in the spring of 1998.

The history of the Waring School has largely been one of transition from a little school that did everything de nouveau to an institution that has a rich historical tradition which belies its relatively short lifespan. When current Head Tim Bakland enrolled at the school in 1988, it was half the size that is now, and yet is recognizably the same. The school is, in the words of Philip Waring, a large family that has become a small community. The difference between 18 children and 150 is smaller than it would appear. All still gather as an entire school almost every day; All still believe that real learning can only take place in a community where every student is fully valued and respected as a person by both peers and teachers; it is still the hope that everyone will know the names and faces of everyone else in the school. Waring's underlying mission remains unchanged as always: to be a place where learners can flourish and encourage one another in the pursuit of learning.

References

^[1]

External links

• Official website

Coordinates: 42°34′9.6″N 70°50′42.8″W / 42.569333°N 70.845222°W / 42.569333; -70.845222

1. ↑ Waring School. "Waring Website". Main Website. Retrieved 21 February 2016.