Each year, the LREI Admissions Office guides a high volume of prospective families through the admissions process. Our charge is to share information about our programs and to encourage families’ interest, as well as to be discerning about which students we believe will be the best match for our School. In each conversation, we hold the hope that families will gain a true sense of what LREI has to offer and will want to be a part of our community.

LREI relies on community-wide involvement to assist in attracting prospective families and enrolling new students. Through all this work, we are fortunate to have many partners in admissions —current faculty, students and parents. The Admissions Office calls on faculty and staff to assist with tours and open houses, sit on decision committees and speak with prospective students and parents. We ask for parental involvement in many ways including welcoming visitors at open houses, meeting with parents during Lower School playgroup visits, providing office support for mailings, talking to prospective parents at preschools, and volunteering to be buddy families to those new to LREI. Of course, our students are our best respresentatives when they greet tours, speak about our curriculum at open houses, and participate in athletic competitions or in service learning activities throughout the city.

As we meet each prospective student and parent, we remain mindful of our goal to welcome a diverse group of families who are committed to their childrens’ success, understanding of progressive education and supportive of our School. We are proud to do the work of building upon our already strong community.

by Samantha Caruth
Director of Admissions, High School Admissions

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At LREI, our librarians work closely with teachers to help students understand the importance of and the demand for rigor that is a necessary component of the research process. While faculty continue to stress the importance of using reputable print resources as part of this process, research in the digital age requires that students master a new set of skills in order to find and assess the quality and reliability of on-line resources. Over the past few years, faculty have observed that when it comes to searching the Internet, our students employ a range of strategies that are not always the most useful or successful for finding
high-quality resources.

In response to this observation, the librarians from all three divisions were awarded a summer grant to address the issue of successful online searching. The project’s goal was the creation of an interdivisional library website for LREI, which would be an effective and informative homework and research tool for students, and eventually, for faculty and parents. Arranged by Dewey decimal number and subject categories, the website allows students to search for links according to curriculum subject areas, such as the American Civil War (973) or Farm Animals (636.3). This arrangement reinforces students’ understanding of the Dewey decimal system and of principles of information organization. It also supports the idea that books and the Internet are connected sources of information.

Over the course of three days this past summer, the librarians evaluated, organized, and annotated various educational websites they had collected throughout the pervious year from LREI faculty, other professional colleagues, and from the professional literature. Dubbed “Homework 311,” these links were evaluated by administration, and then added to the School’s webpage by the Publications team. While the librarians tried to insure that there was at least one representative link for each major curriculum area, they wanted to make clear in their grant proposal that this initial project would serve as a framework for an ever-evolving list of resources that would continue to grow and change in response to changes to the curriculum. The librarians will continue to take suggestions from faculty and the LREI community while also adding resources they themselves find useful in teaching students about the research process. In the future, the librarians also hope to add a section of links that would be of interest to parents, and a professional development section for LREI faculty and staff. As students become familiar with this new research tool, the librarians hope that the page will become the primary jumping off point for LREI students as they use the Internet to search for information.

To visit Homework 311 go to: http://www.lrei.org/libres/hw311.html. Please send any feedback to Middle School/Coordinating Librarian Jennifer Hubert Swan, jhubert@lrei.org.

by Jennifer Hubert Swan
Middle School and Coordinating Librarian

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After an intense summer for the English Department, the High School opened this year with a completely new English curriculum. In the past, all students in each grade studied a single curriculum. Now, the fully elective program for the Eleventh and Twelfth Grades offers a curriculum driven by student choices (with an emphasis on writing and analysis of literature). The Ninth and Tenth Grade curricula have also been reinvented in order to ensure a solid grounding for our students prior to the elective program.

Requirements for graduating seniors now include at least one course in each of the three major elective categories: American Literature, World Literature, and Writing Intensive. The course offerings reflect the varied interests of both students and faculty; this trimester’s electives are: Writing Memoir, Discovering Voice; Latino/a Literature; Gender and Madness in Dramatic Texts; Dangerous Language (a study of censorship and censored texts); and Global Literature. With the English and History Departments both offering trimester-long electives, and student-selected year-long courses offered for language, math, and science, it is now possible that no two graduating students will have identical transcripts, confirming LREI’s dedication to fostering independent and self-motivated learners.

The English Department’s summer grant work included several days with Professor Nicole Wallack, Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia and an experienced curriculum developer. The process was reflective and collaborative, as the department worked together establishing goals that would redefine the scope and sequence of the courses offered and fully support the School’s philosophical mission. One major goal was to find links across the curriculum, which helped in the process of creating the new Ninth and Tenth Grade curricula. The Ninth and Tenth Grade coursework now establishes the crucial base of knowledge necessary for the elective program, both in scope (the Ninth Grade course focuses on world literature; the Tenth on American literature) and in skills. These skills include reading —multiple ways of reading and analyzing the texts —and writing, primarily essays incorporating close reading and analysis of the texts. As per LREI’s philosophy, these skills are taught in a variety of creative ways, from dramatic presentations to artistic interpretations to traditional essay writing. The Ninth and Tenth Grade core courses are designed as building blocks, laying a foundation that will serve our students throughout high school and college. These courses look at literature through frameworks that allow for developmentally appropriate analysis: in the Ninth Grade world literature course, that frame is perspective and storytelling; in Tenth Grade, students focus on permutations of the American dream.

The mixed-grade electives for the Eleventh and Twelfth Grades move forward from the skills and ideas articulated in the Ninth and Tenth Grade core. The Latino/a Literature course focuses on Latino/a writers in the US and will look at questions of cultural identity and political consciousness, which grows from the earlier look at the American Dream and expands that study to include larger questions of society. In the Gender and Madness course, students explore the relationships between love, sex, gender, and society, a specific lens that comes from questions of perspective. In all electives and in the Ninth and Tenth Grade courses, texts range from the canon of traditional classics to modern works from diverse authors, allowing the students a wide base of genre and perspective.

The new departmental vision is immensely exciting; students are engaged and encouraged to pursue their interests, while faculty are able to delve deeper into issues and engage their students in new ways. The introduction of the writing-intensive courses, which started with Writing Memoir, Discovering Voice this trimester, allows for greater creative expression and encourages personal growth as well as critical skills; the writing workshop format provides a safe space in which to hone these skills. Looking forward, planned courses range from Creative Writing to Shakespeare to African-American Literature, but nothing is set in stone; as students articulate their interests and the faculty continue their own reading, the possibilities grow, and the dynamic new curriculum will continue to evolve with the school.

by Karen Silverman
High School Librarian

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Dear Fellow Parents and Friends:

The first month of school has been busier than ever as parents and students have enthusiastically thrown themselves back into life at LREI. The PA was happy with the high attendance at the Welcome Fair and the number of new volunteers who signed up to help with committees and events. The Literary Committee hosted the Get to Know Your Library breakfast and Thirty Books In Thirty Minutes, an evening of book-talks with our wonderful librarians. As always, last weekend’s Halloween Fair was a screaming success. These next six weeks are full– please refer to the calendar of events below to make sure you don’t miss anything. If you have any questions or suggestions for the PA please contact either one of us. Thanks for all you do to make our events so successful.

Best wishes,

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