Shady Hill School is an independent,
co-educational
Mixed-sex education, also known as mixed-gender education, co-education, or coeducation (abbreviated to co-ed or coed), is a system of education where males and females are educated together. Whereas single-sex education was more common up to t ...
day
school
A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes compuls ...
in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
. Founded in 1915, Shady Hill serves students in pre-kindergarten (called 'Beginners' by the school) through 8th grade. The school has an enrollment of approximately 500 students.
Mark Stanek became the school's sixth director in 2010; he was a math teacher and a former Head of School at
Ethical Culture Fieldston School
Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECFS), also referred to as Fieldston, is a private independent school in New York City. The school is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. The school serves approximately 1,700 students with 480 facult ...
in New York. Former director Bruce Shaw stepped down in June 2010.
History
Shady Hill was founded in 1915 by a group of Cambridge families, including John Hubbard Sturgis Jr.,
Agnes Boyle O'Reilly, and her husband
William Ernest Hocking
William Ernest Hocking (August 10, 1873 – June 12, 1966) was an American idealist philosopher at Harvard University. He continued the work of his philosophical teacher Josiah Royce (the founder of American idealism) in revising idealism to integ ...
. The school was first held on the "back porch" of the Hockings' house on Quincy Street in Cambridge. The school enrollment quickly outgrew the Hocking home, and the Cooperative Open Air School (as it was originally known) moved to the Charles Eliot Norton estate at the corner of Scott and Holden Streets in Cambridge. The school took its current name from this location, Shady Hill Square, before moving to the school's current location on Coolidge Hill, also in Cambridge.
Campus
The Shady Hill School campus features eleven acres of tree-lined paths, wetlands, and ample grassy areas for play and team sports. The campus includes nineteen buildings: an art, woodshop, and music center; library; gymnasium; science laboratories; a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) building known as the "Hub" which includes a makerspace; an assembly hall; and a number of child-scaled classroom buildings. The Hub is connected to the gym.
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Athletics
Shady Hill's athletic program includes "movement education" for Beginners through second grade and physical education for third grade through fifth, as well as a broad variety of intramural and interscholastic team sports for students in grades 6-8. A gymnasium that housed three full-sized basketball courts opened in February 2009; in 2016 Shady Hill took out one of the basketball courts and replaced it with the Hub.
Teacher Training Center (TTC)
Shady Hill offers a one-year teacher preparation and graduation program in which 16 to 18 apprentice teachers are mentored by certified master teachers in classrooms at the school. Apprentices have the opportunity through the Teacher Training Center (TTC) to spend the spring semester in local public schools. Many apprentices also participate in a master's program at either Lesley University or Tufts University.
Notable alumni
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Jonathan Aldrich
Jonathan Aldrich (January 22, 1936 – January 6, 2021) was an American poet and educator. He was the author of eight collections of poetry and several chapbooks. His collected poems, ''The Old World in His Arms'', was published in 2021 by Wolfson ...
Poet.
*
Kitty Brazelton
Kitty Brazelton (born 1951 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is a New York-based American composer, bandleader, improviser, singer/songwriter, and instrumentalist. She has released albums and fronted bands across varied genres, including contemporary ...
Vocalist, composer, flutist, lead singer and bandleader.
*
Jonatha Brooke
Jonatha Brooke (born January 23, 1964) is an American folk rock singer-songwriter and guitarist from Massachusetts, United States. Her music merges elements of folk, rock and pop, often with poignant lyrics and complex harmonies. She has been a ...
Folk rock
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singer-songwriter and guitarist
*
Loren Bouchard
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Creator of television show
Bob's Burgers
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.
*
Ed Droste
Edward Droste (born October 22, 1978) is an American singer-songwriter and musician, formerly of the rock band Grizzly Bear. The group began as the solo effort of Droste with the release of 2004's '' Horn of Plenty'', originally released on Kanin ...
Frontman of
rock
Rock most often refers to:
* Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids
* Rock music, a genre of popular music
Rock or Rocks may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...
band
Grizzly Bear
The grizzly bear (''Ursus arctos horribilis''), also known as the North American brown bear or simply grizzly, is a population or subspecies of the brown bear inhabiting North America.
In addition to the mainland grizzly (''Ursus arctos horri ...
.
*
Squirrel Flower
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Early life
Williams grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts. When Williams was a child, she gave herself the nickname Squirrel Flower. In 2014, she moved to Iowa to attend Grinne ...
Indie folk
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The genre has its ...
musician.
*
China Forbes
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Life and career
The daughter of Peggy (née Woodford) and Donald Cameron Forbes, China Forbes was born and ...
Lead singer of the band
Pink Martini
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.
*
Maya Forbes
Maya Forbes (born July 23, 1968) is an American screenwriter and television producer. She made her debut as a film director with '' Infinitely Polar Bear'' (2014). Her other writing credits include the screenplay of '' The Rocker'' (2008) and many ...
Screenwriter and television producer.
*
Motoko Fujishiro Huthwaite Teacher, awarded the
Congressional Gold Medal
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.
*
Sebastian Junger
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Journalist, author and filmmaker
*
Hester Kaplan
Hester Margaret Kaplan is an American short story writer, and novelist.
Life
Kaplan was born to a Jewish family, the daughter of novelist Anne (née Bernays) and author Justin Kaplan. Her maternal grandparents were Doris Fleischman and Edward ...
Short story
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writer and
novelist
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.
*
Richard Read
Richard Read (born 1957) is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for ...
Two-time
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
winner
*
David J. Smith Teacher, children's writer and educational consultant.
*
Elijah Wald
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Life
Wald was born in 1959 ...
Folk blues
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guitarist and
music historian
Music history, sometimes called historical musicology, is a highly diverse subfield of the broader discipline of musicology that studies music from a historical point of view.
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.
*
Marina von Neumann Whitman
Marina von Neumann Whitman (born March 6, 1935) is an American economist, writer and former automobile executive. She is a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business as well as ...
Economist, writer and former automobile executive.
References
{{Authority control
Private elementary schools in Massachusetts
Independent School League
Private middle schools in Massachusetts
Buildings and structures in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Schools in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts
1915 establishments in Massachusetts