Forming a strong sense of self.

Twice a year, each Upper Elementary student proposes a question, negotiates a scope with their guide, builds a schedule, and presents the result to the community. Past questions have included why Chicago reversed its river, how a cochlear implant works, and whether the school garden could feed the lunch program.

The proposal is the lesson as much as the project. Children learn to distinguish a question they can answer in six weeks from one they cannot, which is a skill many adults never acquire.

Upper Elementary keeps the school garden, manages the lunch rotation, mentors Lower Elementary children on materials they mastered years ago, and holds a weekly community meeting where genuine disputes get raised and genuinely resolved.

The adults in the building are careful not to take this work back when it is done imperfectly. A child who has been trusted with something real, and has occasionally dropped it, is building a different self-image than one who has only been trusted with practice.

In the final year we work openly on the skills a conventional secondary school will assume: note-taking from a lecture, managing a long assignment against a fixed deadline, sitting a timed written assessment, and talking about your own work in an interview.

Families begin secondary school conversations in the fall of the final year, and our Head of School writes for every applicant. Because our students leave at twelve they are applying for seventh grade, so the options are the CPS Academic Centers, the independent schools that take a middle-school cohort, the Montessori adolescent programs, and the neighborhood and magnet schools.