Leading Edge Program 2003 Honorees
The NAIS Leading Edge recognition program will honor NAIS member schools and school subscribers (new independent school and international school subscribers only) at varying enrollment levels for their outstanding programs. Here is a list and profile of each program honored by the Leading Edge program in 2003.
Community Relations
Curriculum Innovation
Equity and Justice
Technology
COMMUNITY RELATIONS
Norman Howard School is a coeducational day school, grades 5 - 12, in Rochester, NY, with an enrollment of 180 students. The head of school is Marcie Roberts. Robert Kane submitted the school's application.
Program links learning disabled students to their communities and comforts hospice patients at the ends of their lives.
The Hospice Program at Norman Howard School is the first of its kind in Upstate New York (perhaps nationally) to train high school juniors and seniors to provide bedside, end-of-life care to the dying. In addition to cross-curriculum study, the experiential learning part of this program allows students to interact with their community by actually providing bedside nursing assistant care. Through guided journal assignments during their visits, students reflect on the human process of dying.
Students' classroom study includes anatomy/physiology, global literature, psychology, sociology, comparative religion, and multicultural studies. Students are then trained by local hospice providers in Rochester, New York. Finally, they go on visits twice a week for a total of 5 hours a week. Students are evaluated on their reflective journals, their onsite performance (including feedback from nursing staff), and their final project, in which they create their own Ethical Wills.
Robert Kane, the English teacher who leads this program, explains that working with the dying "triggers three essential life questions for the students: Who are we? Where are we going? Why are we here? The answers lie in the reflective processing of personal values drawn from the students' care and interaction with the dying."
In one journal entry, student Andy Leighton, writes, "I played the guitar for George and fed him food. I also listened to his stories about his wife of 50 years. When I was in the room, I felt happy and sad at the same time. These people. . .made me realize that life shouldn't be taken for granted, that you should live your life and experience as many things as you can."
This program supports Norman Howard School's mission to meaningfully link learning disabled students to their community.
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The Louise S. McGehee School is a girls day school, grades Preschool - 12, in New Orleans, LA, with a student enrollment of 456. The head of school is Eileen Powers. Lori Kennedy-Roark and Carla Robertson submitted the school's application.
Middle school curriculum enhanced by service learning and partnerships formed within the community.
Louise S. McGehee School's nationally recognized service-learning program is an integral part of McGehee's middle school life. Long-term community partnerships are fully connected with the curriculum in several content areas, and every student participates in service-learning throughout all four years of middle school. The partnership activities occur as part of the regular curriculum, increasing cross-curricular ties within each grade level, infusing meaning into the everyday activities of students, and meeting real needs in the community.
The school's mission statement emphasizes active student participation in the learning process and a commitment to lifelong learning. Through the service-learning program, the school seeks to make classroom learning relevant by providing students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real life. It helps extend learning beyond the classroom walls, and encourages students' critical thinking, risk taking, and problem solving.
In 1999, three teachers met to develop a plan for transforming the community-service program, to study the logistics of incorporating the program into the middle school, and to connect service activities to the curriculum. Several long-term partnerships with community organizations were organized. The middle school modified its schedule to accommodate cross-curricular planning and year-long service-learning projects. Service learning is now infused into math, English, music, science, art, and history curricula.
The school takes great pride in the fact that the service-learning program was both teacher- and student-created and continues to be run by teachers and students collaborating with community partners. Fifth grade students helped develop the CYCLES Program, Creative Youth Conservationists Learning Through Education and Service, with the Louisiana Children's Museum. Sixth graders planned Celebration Literacy, a reading mentorship program with Bauduit Public Elementary School. Seventh graders created BRIDGES, Because Reuniting Intensely Different Generations Enlivens Spirits, with St. Anna's Nursing Home. Eighth graders created Science Connections, in which they teach environmental science to third graders, establish a community garden, and monitor local water quality. Teachers at each grade level act as mentors and tailor each partnership directly to their curriculum.
McGehee was one of only 16 schools nationwide recognized by the Corporation for National and Community Service as a National Service-Learning Leader School for 2002-2003. The McGehee program is creating positive and tangible change for the school and community, and the school wishes to share its successful model with other schools. It plans to continue outreach to other local schools with training and leadership programs and will host a city-wide Service Fair. Students and faculty plan to develop and maintain a website dedicated to service learning, providing useful information to schools and service organizations all over the country.
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Mounds Park Academy (MN) is a coeducational day school, grades K - 12, in St. Paul, MN, with an enrollment of 695 students. The head of school is Michael Downs. Mounds Park Academy Middle School Teacher Beth Slocum is the program liaison and submitted the application. Cleveland Quality School Middle School Teacher Randee Edmundson is Site Coordinator for the project.
Public-private partnership works to learn about and improve the health of neighborhoods.
For six years, Mounds Park Academy and St. Paul Public Schools' Cleveland Quality Middle School students have collaborated in a unique teacher-inspired, public-private, multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural community action program: the Ames Lake Watershed Project. In disciplinary teams led by teachers, students join with community activists, neighborhood organizations, and city and state agencies, to help produce a positive and healthy environment that enhances neighborhood resources to best support the people who live there.
Students from each school are paired in six disciplinary teams to study the history of the Ames Lake watershed; to conduct tests that monitor wetland environmental health; to reflect the community connection to the environment through the arts; and to develop a long-range plan through communication via school and neighborhood news articles, museum-quality exhibits, and web design. Student teams come together five times each year to define, address, and solve problems. Students learn the history of the area and share their own history and heritage through drama and creative arts to build common ground and a productive working relationship.
The program mirrors MPA's goals for: "best practices" in teaching, innovative curriculum design, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, and community service. By pooling the thinking and resources of adults and students in the community, the two schools intend to change the relationships among students and teachers in public and private schools; and between students, the natural environment, and the people who live in the Ames Lake neighborhood.
In addition to the participation of the school administrators and more than 30 teachers from both schools, MPA parents have been active supporters of the program, providing resources in plant ecology, computer technology, environmental restoration as well as logistical support for transporting, feeding, and chaperoning the program's 120 students.
This real-world, hands-on project incorporates classroom, building, and community resources. Teacher leaders from both schools are supported with technology and funds to create and implement the project, which also involves city, county, and state agencies (city planning, parks and recreation, regional district watershed, neighborhood development) that work directly with students. Last year through St. Paul Public Schools, this project was awarded a $535,000 three-year federal magnet grant for equipment, training, technology and curriculum support, and logistical resources for the project. The schools hope to expand the model into different grade levels, disciplines, themes, and partnerships; and to share the model nationally.
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CURRICULUM INNOVATION
The Caedmon School is a coeducational day school, Preschool - grade 5, in New York, NY, with an enrollment of 200 students. The Head of School is Carol Gose DeVine. Gregory Minahan submitted the school's application.
Mission-driven curriculum: learning about and celebrating the holidays of many cultures.
For the past decade, the Caedmon School has been bringing in the holidays with original, all-school, musical productions that celebrate multiple holiday traditions, side-by-side, within a single story. The shows use a light-hearted narrative to bring together many of the world's religious and cultural traditions under a common theme and celebrate them as a community. Though combined into one script, each holiday tradition is celebrated sincerely and in all its uniqueness. Greg Minahan, originator of the program, writes, "The narrative context seems to relax cultural and political sensitivities. For our audience, the experience of many faiths occupying the same storyline seems to act as a metaphor -- removed from political reality -- for many cultures occupying the same city, nation, and world. Caedmon's seasonal tradition has been effective in creating a school-wide atmosphere of curiosity, tolerance, and sincere multiculturalism."
Located in Manhattan, Caedmon is surrounded by many cultures and is blessed with an extraordinary level of diversity in its student body. Twenty five percent of our children are not Americans and typically come from as many as twenty-five different countries. Fully one-third of our students are children of color. The school strives to reflect this diversity within its curriculum, and so at a time when many schools are abandoning holiday assemblies altogether for fear of offending, Caedmon has ventured in the opposite direction. The holiday shows provide children, teachers, and parents with an opportunity not only to learn about each other's traditions, but also to experience them. The children spend weeks exploring, creating, and rehearsing the show material, and then actually participate in the cultural rituals within the dramatic context of the production. Their enthusiasm naturally communicates to their parents at home. When the tradition began a decade ago, the directors anticipated that at least some parents might react negatively to seeing their own children participating publicly in traditions other than their own, but, gratifyingly, the negative reactions never came. Since then, momentum has grown and the Caedmon holiday show has become a cherished and highly anticipated event for the entire school community.
The productions are mounted on a shoestring budget and thrive on the creative use of resources. As little as $300-$400 are spent for costumes and sets, many of which are reused annually. The art teacher donates her time as costume designer and teachers dedicate a substantial amount of class time to rehearsals. The school's instrumental music staff helps with musical arrangements and show accompaniment. With a growing repertoire of ten successful scripts, the team has begun to revive old favorites, updating and improving them by adding additional music, holidays, cultural detail, and theatrical sophistication. It is hoped that many of them can be adapted for use in other schools.
The program is an example of successfully tying curriculum and school activity into school mission. Caedmon's mission says in part: "As our world becomes evermore interdependent and our society more culturally diverse, we are determined that The Caedmon School community should reflect that connectedness and diversity. We honor and actively explore the varied backgrounds and traditions that are represented among us. We cultivate an environment in which emotional bonds are forged across potential barriers of language and culture, physical and intellectual difference, or social and economic disparity."
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The Madeira School is a girls boarding and day school, Grades 9-12, in McLean, VA, with an enrollment of 308 students. The head of school is Elisabeth Griffith. Christine Langford submitted the school's application.
Experiential learning program, an integral part of school's curriculum, empowers young women to become confident and responsible.
The Madeira School's Co-Curriculum Program is a unique and comprehensive experiential learning program. Every Wednesday of the school year, students take part in structured, innovative, age-appropriate volunteer and intern opportunities throughout the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
Ninth graders learn about ethics, leadership, community roles and academic skill-building through a variety of seminars that combine activities with personal exploration. Sophomores expand on their freshman experience and explore social responsibility by serving as volunteers in local community organizations. Juniors intern in the offices of U.S. Representatives or Senators and attend seminars led by lobbyists, journalists, and legislators. Seniors pursue career and personal interests and work in placements as varied as museums, brokerage and law firms, adolescent crisis centers, research laboratories, and theaters.
The commitment to this program is school-wide. More than 35 years ago, the faculty resolved to teach academic classes four days a week, allowing Wednesday to be used for the Co-Curriculum Program. This means students and teachers have to compress the time they spend in the classroom and use it more efficiently in order to complete required course material. The school commits a significant portion of its operating budget to the program for transportation and for coordinators.
This program was designed to maximize the nation's capital as a classroom without walls. Sophomores are exposed to the needs of the community. Juniors observe the U.S. Government in action and learn how to communicate with supervisors in a professional manner. Seniors learn valuable lessons by working in fields, which interest them personally. As the diversity and number of placements increase, wider opportunities enhance the learning experience.
The Co-Curriculum program results in Madeira students developing confidence, communication skills, responsibility, and maturity. Alumnae report that their experience helps them with college admissions and, later, their transitions to the work world. The Co-Curriculum program embodies the school's mission: to develop self-confident, compassionate, and responsible members of a global society.
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Dwight-Englewood School is a coeducational day school, Preschool - grade 12 in Englewood, NJ, with an enrollment of 995 students. The head of school is Ralph E. Sloan. Roberta Schwartz submitted the school's application.
Individually-designed, inter-disciplinary projects form the capstone of the high school experience.
Dwight-Englewood School's Senior Focus Program provides students with a meaningful culminating high school project through which they experience the excitement of a personal discovery in a field that particularly interests them; gain practice in defining a research question, narrowing it, and answering it independently; work collaboratively; learn how to make contacts beyond the school; and demonstrate their competency in a variety of ways.
The Senior Focus Program is an elective which allows students to work with an advisor and a group of peers to select their own topics, do intensive research, edit each others'work, and write a research paper. In the second semester, seniors take their research beyond the limits of the campus by fashioning field work related to their topic. They secure specialized mentors and organize a customized weekly schedule. The capstone is a portfolio documenting their fieldwork and a presentation before a panel of outside experts, faculty, and peers.
Developed by a division head, department chair, and teacher, the program draws on talents and resources available within the entire school community. Advisors, who come from nearly every discipline, meet weekly to coordinate the various activities in the program and to share their expertise in order to meet the wide range of students' interests. Librarians are well versed in the program and are given time to assist students with their projects. Parents and community members volunteer as mentors and panelists.
The program is routinely evaluated to ensure its continuing effectiveness. Each year, students, faculty members, mentors, and panelists are asked to reflect on the program and fill out a detailed survey about its failures and successes. Alumni who have participated in the program are asked about how the "Focus" program helped them to become independent thinkers, to succeed in college, and to choose a major and/or their life's work.
The non-traditional form of student evaluation is well suited for a broad range of student abilities. The students often produce a paper and/or a presentation that far surpasses any of their previous work. All students gain a greater sense of their own ability to work independently, to be analytical, and to be responsible for their own learning.
The Senior Focus program embodies Dwight-Englewood's institutional aims of exposing developing minds to analytical thinking and an open exchange of ideas. Students develop self-awareness and a sense of their place in the larger world.
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EQUITY AND JUSTICE INITIATIVES
The Chestnut Hill School is a coed day school, grades preschool - 6, in Chestnut Hill, MA, with an enrollment of 186 students. The head of school is Greg Blackburn, who also submitted the school's application.
Faculty/staff task force broadens school's definition of diversity and creates a more welcoming community for gay and lesbian families and faculty.
Part of the mission of The Chestnut Hill School is to recognize diversity and multicultural education as a key component in the education of children. The school also strives to provide a safe environment for all faculty/staff, children, and families. An inspired faculty/staff task force at the school worked to educate its board and community and change policy on the inclusion and support of gay/lesbian families and faculty in the school community.
The objectives of the task force were: to make the school safe for gay/lesbian faculty members; to broaden the school's definition of diversity; to attract gay/lesbian families to the school; and to incorporate the use of appropriate language through the school's Open Circle curriculum to support children and families.
The task force met to gather research (including visits to other schools) and literature in order to begin the education piece for the faculty. A faculty meeting was set aside each month with presentations on issues ranging from curriculum to parent involvement. Throughout the year, the task force and outside speakers made presentations to the Board. The task force communicated to parent groups through newsletters and meetings. The school supported this community-wide effort by providing time, space, and resources.
After meetings and educational sessions, the work of the task force was accepted and voted unanimously by the board of trustees. A safer, more comfortable overall environment has resulted, and the community is more accepting, and more open to the reevaluation of curriculum and policy language.
The initial energy of this task force has carried over into everyday school life. Faculty continue to dedicate one meeting a month to diversity issues. Multicultural forums have added these issues to their monthly meetings. School curriculum and school-wide language use is being reevaluated. The school has recently welcomed three lesbian families into its community and continues to develop the admissions process to make it more open and welcoming.
This program is an excellent example of taking a mission seriously, examining and expanding the mission, and truly living by it. In the head of school's letter on Chestnut Hill's home page, Greg Blackburn writes: We do not change for change's sake; valuing our mission in light of our changing society is the direction that we prefer to explore."
The faculty/staff task force and the whole Chestnut Hill School community took that mission to heart in expanding the meaning of diversity at their school, and in implementing it in policy as well as in curriculum and language use.
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San Francisco University High School is a coeducational day school, grades 9-12, in San Francisco, CA, with an enrollment of 415 students. The head of school is Michael Diamante. Anisha Desai, Director of the Community Service Learning, submitted the school's application.
San Francisco school's program integrates community service and social responsibility across its curriculum.
San Francisco University High School's Community Service Learning (CSL) program reflects the belief that education must be linked to social responsibility and action. The program is a four-year developmental curriculum designed to combine personal and intellectual growth in students with strong social purpose.
By providing 9th grade students with a broad exposure to service arenas followed by opportunities for greater choice and depth in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, the program mirrors the developmental logic of the school's academic curriculum. Freshmen participate in service-learning projects. Sophomores choose a social issues class. Juniors and Seniors submit action plans and learning contracts and written reflections on the experience. Throughout the four years, the students' experience is guided by three essential strategies: providing service in the community; reflecting on the personal significance of that service; and understanding the political and public policy issues related to that service.
The program engages 100 percent of the student body in service learning. Students work with over 50 different non-profit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and play instrumental roles in a number of large scale community initiatives for social change.
SFUHS is concerned with students' ethical growth, which is in part fostered by its mission to engage students in an education that fosters responsibility and challenges each individual to live a life of integrity, inquiry, and purpose larger than the self. The Community Service Learning Program provides opportunities for all students to be engaged in meaningful service in the community, and helps inspire in them a life-long commitment to service.
This program is an example of a long-standing, fully integrated service program. The school dedicates an office and faculty to the CSL program. The office works with students, soliciting feedback and conducting continual site checks so as to ensure the program's continuing quality. It also works to develop relationships with organizations and take on new projects. For example, working in conjunction with Global Exchange (a local non-profit activism group), the history department, and various student clubs, the CSL office is helping to organize an anti-sweatshop movement in the school and amongst other local independent schools, encouraging athletic departments to purchase socially responsible gear. The CSL office also plans with the faculty the social issues class to ensure meaningful integration into curriculum.
In the future, the CSL program coordinators will look to offer students even more opportunities, expand the use of technology in the CSL experience, and increase the external visibility of the program. They will also work to more fully integrate service learning and human rights education across the curriculum, and to develop a parents' council.
Anisha Desai, Director of Community Service Learning, writes, "We are a school in the city and of the city, [We are] dedicated to creating responsible educators who will engage actively with the community around them. Our relationships with organizations and their clients is a mutually beneficial one -- they benefit from the humanpower and other resources that our students and faculty bring and we benefit immensely from their stories and experiences. This is truly community service learning."
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Germantown Friends School is a coeducational day school, grades K-12, in Philadelphia, PA, with an enrollment of 896 students. The head of school is Richard Wade. Rita Goldman submitted the school's application.
Racially-motivated bombing in 1963 was the impetus for a scholarship program that connects one school to its community and increases diversity.
In 1964, Germantown Friends School initiated the Community Scholarships Program (CSP) as a local response to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, which killed four African-American girls. The program would provide full scholarships covering 7th through 12th grade to any boy or girl, regardless of his or her race or religion, who lived in the school's Philadelphia neighborhood and showed academic promise.
The main objective of the Community Scholarships Program was for "GFS to relate itself more closely to its immediate community, populated mostly by black families who would not normally think of sending their children to an independent school." Through this, the school hoped to increase the proportion of minority children, offer able boys and girls with leadership potential a challenging education, and aid in the renewal of Germantown by helping develop community resources.
The process was collaborative, both inside and outside the school walls. The School Committee of the Quaker Meeting, which oversees GFS, initiated the CSP concept. A fund-raising effort was led by a GFS alumnus, parent, and administrator. The faculty agreed to expand class size to accept two additional students in each grade. Local public school principals and leaders were enthusiastically supportive.
Germantown Friends' Community Scholars Program is an example of a school-wide policy initiative that connects the school to the community and increases the diversity of the school's student body in a meaningful, lasting way. Students of color now represent 26% of the student body; of those, 11% are Community Scholars (at least four are admitted every year). Nearly all Community Scholars have graduated from GFS and gone to college. The school's status as an anchor in our community has been strengthened. Its presence continues to attract and retain scores of families of strength, influence, means, energy, and community concern who might otherwise move to suburbs.
GFS students learn from one another and from a diverse faculty that other people's cultural perceptions and practices must be understood for one to be truly educated.
The Community Scholarship Program fulfills key elements of the school's mission -- to seek truth; challenge the intellect; honor differences; embrace the city; and nurture each student's mind, body, and spirit. In addition, the program also supports one of the school's curricular goals: that academic excellence and diversity are complementary.
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TECHNOLOGY
Cold Spring School is a coeducational day school, grades K - 6, in New Haven, CT, with an enrollment of 97 students. The head of school is Jeff Jonathan. Karen Zwick submitted the school's application.
Environmental monitoring introduces students to handheld technology and increases community collaboration.
Cold Spring teacher Karen Zwick's fourth and fifth grade students used handheld computers as data collectors and information organizers in a water research project on the nearby Mill River. They collected water quality indicators (including pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and alkalinity) and documented population samples at various sites along the river, developing a database of plants and insects. Students then created a Virtual Field Guide to the Mill River on the school's website, www.coldspringschool.org.
Cold Spring's project exemplifies the use of technology to enhance learning experiences. Using handhelds -- provided along with teacher training by Palm, Inc., as part of a Palm Education Pioneer Grant -- students took an active role in exploring science. They organized information, asked questions, solved problems, and thought creatively. The project also inspired an increased sense of responsibility; students were entrusted with expensive equipment and took that responsibility seriously. The handheld technology helped students maintain their general schedules and inspired collaboration, organization, and true engagement in an academic exploration. Beyond the project, students continue to find new ways to use the handhelds to facilitate learning -- to create music, publish their own stories, and read ebooks. Students will continue to monitor the Mill River and will broaden their research to another nearby tidal river, the Quinnipiac.
This project is also a model for how technology can be used to increase community collaboration. Local park rangers and the River Keeper shared information and time with the students. The work introduced the students themselves to important local environmental issues, but it also helped them communicate those issues to others in the community. Cold Spring students shared their project with local K-8 New Haven schools. The Virtual Guide has been used as a resource by the whole Connecticut community; at the end of the 2001 school year, the students celebrated the site's 1000th hit. Students also took great pride in an invitation to display their site to the Vision for the Waterfront Committee and to Connecticut legislators at the Legislative Technology Conference.
Cold Spring is a private school with a public purpose, supporting educational innovation by encouraging school/community collaborations and developing resources that advance progressive education. Zwick comments further on how the Mill River project ties in with the school's mission: "preparing children not only for the rest of their school careers, but for life."
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St. Matthew's Parish School is a coeducational day school, preschool - grade 8, in Pacific Palisades, CA, with an enrollment of 325 students. The head of school is Mr. Les Frost. Christine Lorenz submitted the application.
Teaching across the curriculum: Using SCUBA diving to teach math, science, and web design.
Through St. Matthew's Parish School's Diving Educational Enrichment Program (D.E.E.P.), students go well beyond hands-on exploration of science. Eighth graders research the science of SCUBA diving, learn to SCUBA dive, design individual science or math experiments, and publish their findings on a sophisticated website of their own creation. (www.stmatthewsschool.com/deep/deep.html) Experiments often involve taking data while on scuba in the pool or ocean. D.E.E.P. was developed in 1994 by mathematics teacher Roberta McCuskey and science teacher Bruce Harlan, with Technology Director Christine Lorenz joining the team in 1996. D.E.E.P. was featured in the August 2001 Dive Training magazine and given the National Association of Middle Schools' 1997 Team Teaching Award.
The program thrives on cross-curriculum collaboration and teacher teamwork. Science classes cover such topics as experiment design, buoyancy, the gas laws, and the circulatory and respiratory systems. Students have a special opportunity to experience applied mathematics in real-world problem solving. Gas law formulas are practiced in mathematical equations and students are introduced to geometric concepts of navigation to determine position and direction. As students analyze the results of their exper-iments, they learn to choose appropriate data measures, select meaningful graphic displays, and analyze error.
This program provides an example of how technology can enrich mathematic and scientific learning. Students use technological tools to study, research, and then to design and execute experiments. All students are required to create a website that must include background on their topic, lab report, display of results, analysis, and references. As students progress in their experiment research, they select the appropriate technology and other resources necessary for the success of their project. For example, a student studying one of the gas laws may find that using a pressure sensor connected to a computer would enhance the ability to collect accurate and meaningful data. Resources made available to the students and commonly used are: computer based sensors, computers with internet access and webpage design software, video cameras, digital cameras, scanners, and graphing and spreadsheet software. Students also have full access to the equipment in the science lab and materials from Scuba Haus, the community dive shop that has been a partner in DEEP from the beginning.
Lorenz writes that DEEP "can inspire educators to teach bravely and creatively, exhausting every available resource and idea to offer students the best learning experiences possible." Students have embraced these opportunities ambitiously, creating and analyzing experiments that demand higher-level thinking skills and demonstrating intellectual growth of high caliber.
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Northfield Mount Hermon is a coeducational day and boarding school, grade 9 - postgraduate, in Northfield, MA, with an enrollment of 1,131 students. The head of school is Richard Mueller. Jon Shannon submitted the application.
School's future-forward educational technology plan makes computing more accessible, reliable, and portable.
Northfield Mount Hermon's Next Generation Technology Plan (NextGen) creates an innovative, school-wide educational technology environment that preserves the strengths of portable computing without requiring students to carry computers to class. Students can use personalized, Windows-based virtual desktops that are supplied by the school to access school software and their coursework from nearly any Internet-connected computer in the world. Classroom technology is closely tailored to each curricular division's goals. Virtual desktops, assigned to each student and teacher, behave the same regardless of the computer platform they are accessed from, so teachers using them in class can count on a consistent interface that is ready and working for technology-assisted activities. Teachers report that they are seeing far fewer technology-related problems with completing classroom activities and homework.
NextGen was a collaborative effort of academic departments and the information technology departments, and involved a well-designed and implemented plan that looked to the future. Feedback was solicited from teachers, students, and parents. Department chairs voted unanimously to adopt the plan. Innovative use of resources was key to the plan's success: NextGen reallocated capital reserved for renewing 1,200 notebook computers to the installation of virtual desktop servers and wireless networks classroom buildings and libraries.
The goal of this plan was to increase the effectiveness of classroom technology by making it more accessible, reliable, and portable. Microsoft Office, databases, and course content can be projected into day students' homes, international terms abroad sites, and public schools participating in NMH's Upward Bound program.
As an independent school committed to an internationally focused education for students from a wide spectrum of cultural and economic means, NextGen's virtual desktop allows for educational engagement and communication far beyond the Northfield Mount Hermon's campuses.
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