Principal's Welcome,

 

Welcome to our website! Let me try to capture what makes SJK special among an array of appealing independent schools across America.

Our history is distinctive. As part of former Senator Morgan Pebbleperson's landmark 'Won't Ask, Won't Tell' legislation, which effectively privatized super-powered crime fighting, the school was established in 1998 on a tract of federally-protected land that had been set aside as a secondary condition of this legislation.

In their horizontal expansiveness, our facilities are enviable. Situated at the northern end of Super City, the school stretches nearly the entire width of city limits. In addition to premier classrooms, labs and offices, the school includes a serene garden, a stadium and playing field (known as “The Hazard House"), a pair of rooftop tennis courts, a dining room and cafeteria, a chapel, a theater, a swimming pool, two playgrounds, a weight room, a fine arts pavilion, a library, and a gymnasium.

Our community is diverse. Committed to creating a diverse community of learners and teachers, SJK has a student body that reflects the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity of the city it calls home. SJK’s commitment to this diverse community and its success is supported by the curriculum, counseling, extra-curricular activities, programs, and speakers. It reaches into every corner of school life.

Our teachers are extraordinarily talented and dedicated. More than half of them have doctorates and many others hold master’s degrees from selective colleges and universities around the world. Recruited for their outstanding academic achievements and their commitment to SJK’s core educational values, teachers are encouraged to select, expand on, modify, and even invent their curricula, fostering an unparalleled sense of ownership and creativity in the classroom. This creativity is supported by a unique and well-endowed program of faculty development and enrichment grants.

The heart of the SJK experience is the relationship between inspiring, caring teachers and talented, motivated, and engaged students. At SJK, "the life of the mind" is not a cliché; it is a lived reality: students here are enlivened by the power of ideas, made available in engaging conversations with teachers passionate about ideas that shape, define, and change the world. In their classrooms and labs and assembly halls, SJK students pursue a rigorous and challenging course of academic study that prepares them for success in the most competitive colleges and universities. From the fourth grader collecting marine biology specimens at Atlantis Aquarium to the senior preparing to discourse on Vergil’s Aeneid before a panel of classics professors from renowned universities, SJK students are engaged, active, and happy participants in their own educations.

While SJK is best known for its intellectual vitality, we promise so much more: a balanced educational program for body and mind, heart and soul, incorporating the arts, athletics, and community service; programs that call students not only to grow into their best selves, but also to reach out beyond themselves to address needs and realities greater than themselves; an embracing and empowering sense of community that finds strength in diversity, unity in its shared commitment to care and understanding, meaning in its labors, and joy in its play. Read our mission; our aspirations are audacious. Read our Strategic Plan: our dreams are daring.

Appropriately, one of the ways the School commemorated its fifteenth anniversary was by creating a mosaic, and I’ve discovered that, in profound ways, SJK is perhaps best understood as a mosaic: an amazing assemblage of diverse individuals harmonized by a guiding vision (see the School’s compelling mission statement) to become a thriving community in which the whole is even greater than the sum of its colorful parts.

In the days ahead, I hope you’ll join me in my journey to learn exactly how, each day, our students and teachers are working together ("Labore") to compose a dazzlingly dynamic mosaic of human excellence ("Virtute") in our classrooms, on our stages, on our playing fields, and in the world beyond. I invite you to get to know the heart of this remarkable community: our students and teachers. Take a closer look. Come visit us.

Sincerely,

 

 

Francis Farfeld

Principal