ADMISSIONS / The JK-12 Journey
A Grace education is designed as a single, coherent journey—one guided by the belief that intellectual excellence and habits of ethical virtue depend upon each other to find their fullest expressions in good lives, well lived.
Through a pedagogy of joy, each stage of a student’s development builds deliberately on the last: the wonder nurtured in junior kindergarten becomes the curiosity that drives a fifth grader’s research, the confidence that shapes an eleventh grader’s elective choices, and the sense of purpose that a Grace graduate carries into the world. Families who choose Grace are choosing a school that knows their child well enough to ask the most of them and support them through their educational and personal growth.
In Early Childhood, students encounter school as a place of curiosity, care, and genuine discovery. Through a joyful and academically ambitious program grounded in the science of reading and evidence-based learning practices, children build the foundational skills and habits of mind that will carry them through Grace and beyond. Play, ethics, and academics are not separate, but are woven together from the start.
Lower School deepens and expands what Early Childhood began. Students move further afield in their studies—across New York City, across continents, across the natural world—while developing increasing independence as readers, writers, mathematicians, and scientists. Our talented faculty cultivate warm, joyful classrooms as the work grows more demanding and the thinking more rigorous.
In the Middle School, students learn to see themselves as serious scholars. They read challenging texts, conduct original research, argue historical cases, and design their own scientific investigations. The curriculum asks more of them each year, preparing them to arrive at the High School with intellectual confidence and a clear vision of who they are—and want to be—as learners and as people.
The High School builds on that foundation with a program of extraordinary depth and breadth. Ninth and tenth grade establish rigorous grounding across every major discipline; eleventh and twelfth grade invite students to go deeper into the areas that matter most to them, choosing from a rich range of electives and, for those ready, pursuing independent research at a collegiate level. Grace graduates leave not just prepared for college, but prepared for the intellectual and ethical demands of a purposeful life well lived.
“We have been consistently impressed by the combination of academic rigor, ethical grounding and an undeniable sense of community. We have spoken to and spent a ton of time with various Grace families over the past few months and just feel such a warmth and fit with our family and values.”
GRACE PARENT
“The curriculum asks more of students each year, training them in a different kind of attention with each grade—sustained, complex, allowing them to sit with a hard question rather than rushing past it. By the time they arrive at the High School, this habit of attention has become intellectual confidence: a clear sense of who they are, and who they want to be, as learners and as people.”
Simon Thomas Train, Director of Admissions, 5–8
