Slate Upper School

Our Upper School opened for Grade 7 students in Fall 2024! We will add one grade per year until we reach our capacity of 160 students in Grades K-12 in Fall 2029.

Join our diverse community of innovative, collaborative, compassionate thinkers, and world changers.

A Slate School student is intellectually curious, empowered, and excited to make positive impact through purpose-driven innovation.

As a student at Slate School, you’ll turn your interests into meaningful action, using your ideas and experiences to make a difference.

As you move into Grade 7 and beyond, you'll discover a vibrant culture of creativity, ingenuity, and lifelong learning. Our student-led learning approach includes interdisciplinary coursework, daily independent projects, and connections with local and global mentors to help bring your ideas to life.

Our classrooms serve as learning laboratories where you build problem-solving skills. We offer a robust curriculum of over 40 courses in Grades 9-12. Our educational approach is learner-centered, which allows course direction to be shaped by your work and ideas, while integrating rigorous benchmarks and curriculum. Collaboration is at the heart of everything that we do.

We embody the principles of Friends, For Others, Forgiveness, and Gratitude through community service and support for one another. Whether you’re gardening, mentoring younger students, designing inventions or creating experiments, removing invasive species from wetlands, or addressing a problem you’ve identified, you’ll be actively engaged in making the world a better place.

Learn more about our curriculum here.

We Reimagine Education

Curious

Our students explore widely, dive deeply, research, investigate, and collaborate. Their journey is guided by faculty and advisors who are creative thinkers who transcend typical approaches to teaching. While integrating rigorous benchmarks and a robust established curriculum, faculty are flexible to allow course direction to be learner-centered and therefore driven by the students’ own work and ideas.

Each student also puts their learning into action through an original research project, which is selected in a trimester format. If desired, students can string multiple trimesters together to create a year-long project.

Reflective

Our students soar well past conventional ideas about academic rigor. Modeled on unique undergraduate and graduate programs as inspiration, our students and mentors collaborate to complete portfolio reviews, comprised of narrative evaluations, essays and projects, reflective retrospectives, and other meaningful artifacts.

We evaluate and assess deeply, and our students engage directly in reflection, too. We use the narrative evaluation as a teaching tool. We know that a grade of an A or B can be subjective, arbitrary, and relatively meaningless, as it doesn’t share what a student has done well, or might have done better. When the focus is on a grade, students tend to have a ceiling, seeking to do what seems necessary to receive a desirable grade. We push our students beyond typical expectations, and our authentic assessment nurtures instead of hinders the learning process.

Committed

Our learning community is committed to reflecting on their learning, increasing their knowledge, and developing solutions for a complex world. Learners across all grades at Slate School identify goals and craft wise commitments to bring their goals to fruition. Cohorts support each other in their pursuits both academically and socially. The greatest growth comes when students refine and retool their commitments to help themselves make the most progress. This is a skill that is transferrable and critical to all future learning.

Imaginative

Dreaming and imagination are the foundation of great ideas. At Slate School, we honor the importance of inspiration and creativity. Imagination allows us to see beyond what’s presented, helping us refine our ideas and solutions while steering clear of unintended consequences. It also guides us on our individual paths to success, providing a clear vision that makes our hard work feel relevant and purposeful.

Experiential

We nurture and support our students to love to learn deeply and explore widely. Our 40-acre picturesque campus is their laboratory, the classrooms are incubators, and the collaborations and discoveries are limitless. Additionally, Slate Upper School provides ample opportunities for bringing ideas to life in the Idea Lab. There, students build and refine using tools and technology. Slate Upper School also employs a robust mentorship and internship program where students can begin to hone skills in the classroom and apply them as high schoolers in organizations and businesses.

Innovative

Our students enjoy challenges, take risks, learn from mistakes, and reflect. They have confidence to be creative, critical thinkers. Learning at Slate Upper School is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and integrated, fostering purpose-driven innovation.

In our community, we prioritize listening. We believe that truly understanding what is needed is the essential first step in crafting innovative solutions. When we grasp these needs, we collaborate boldly to achieve our goals, challenging norms and proposing vital solutions to the complex issues we face today.

Welcome to the Upper School

  • The Alma is a space created for conversation, contemplation, music, art, plays, and presentations of all kinds. It is also a stunning library of books to grow your dreams and learn from amazing minds, past and present.

  • The Idea Lab is filled with tools for creating and building.

  • The classrooms are entirely flexible, with spaces for big project work, listening and learning from each other, and plenty of natural light for reading and creating.

  • You will have your choice of warm and welcoming Reading Rooms tucked next to the Alma where individuals and small groups curate books and materials for further study.

  • Directly adjacent to the Grade 7-8 wing is a ​deck for observing the wetlands, working on a project, reading, or even engaging in some yoga or meditation.