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Outstanding Private Elementary School

Raising 21st Century Men
At St. David's School, a dual focus on education and character

When a visitor entered a math class at St. David’s School, one of the students, dressed neatly in khaki pants, a blue blazer and button-down shirt and tie, quietly left his seat and introduced himself. The student looked the newcomer directly in the eye while they shook hands and asked politely, “Would you like me to explain what we’re studying today?” At St. David’s School, tradition and manners still count.

Founded in 1951 by nine Catholic families who wanted to give their sons an independent but not parochial education, today St. David’s has close to 400 nursery school through 8th grade boys from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds. The school’s fundamental mission is to graduate “good men” who can achieve balance in scholarship, athletics, aesthetics and spirituality.

“We provide a special and unique education,” said Dr. David O’Halloran, headmaster. “Not in a stuffy or repressive way, but in an exciting, interesting, boy-centered way.”

The goal of St. David's to educate boys with a balance in scholarship, athletics, aesthetics and spirituality. Photo by Susan M. Sipprelle

A knighting ceremony heralds graduation from 3rd to 4th grade at St. David’s. In preparation, each boy makes a shield that represents his character and qualities. Later, the shields are displayed on the walls of the cafeteria. During the ceremony itself, held in the school’s chapel, the headmaster grandly dubs each student a “Knight of St. David.”

Afterward, students celebrate the occasion with a feast, which they are allowed to eat with their hands. The school’s older students juggle, jest and sing for the younger students’ entertainment and merriment.

“It’s rigorous academically,” said Laurie Lepeyre, a parent, “but it’s not an unhealthy, stressful environment.

Her son Pierre, 15, attended St. David’s for 10 years and graduated in the spring of 2007. Last year, she accompanied the 8th-graders and their teachers on the school’s annual 10-day art history trip to Italy, which she described as wonderful—but grueling.

The trip culminates the work the boys do at St. David’s and illustrates the focus the school places on the concept of balance, according to Lepeyre. The tour of Florence, Assisi and Rome explored art, religion and history, but did not neglect math or sports. The boys’ math teacher asked them to use geometry to calculate the length of the shadows cast by Italian towers, and the school reserves athletic fields in advance so that the boys can play soccer as they travel.

Lepeyre believes that the school’s emphasis on spirituality helps remind the boys what is important in life. Pierre wrote in an e-mail that his years at St. David’s had been wonderful and included a quote from Plutarch to partly summarize his experience there: “The whole of life is but a moment in time. It is our duty, therefore, to use it, not to misuse it.”

In 1st and 2nd grades, St. David’s students attend a weekly chapel service focused on Bible stories. From 3rd grade up, boys attend chapel daily. They listen to their teachers talk about a wide-ranging variety of subjects: One morning last spring, O’Halloran recalled, a female teacher vividly described her first adrenalin-surging skydiving leap out of an airplane.

Community service is also an integral part of the school’s curriculum, not just ?an after-school requirement that students must fulfill. Last year’s 4th-graders raised money for service dogs and visited Seeing Eye, Inc., in Morristown, N.J. Seventh-graders assume the responsibility of visiting local nursing homes every year during school hours.

Dr. David O'Halloran, headmaster.

Despite the importance the school places on spirituality, “We don’t think of ourselves as a religious school,” O’Halloran said. Students do not have to be Catholic to apply or attend, and the school has always had a lay faculty.

The school does not follow any single educational method but capitalizes on best teaching practices, according to O’Halloran. Composition and public speaking are stressed throughout the curriculum.

Class sizes at St. David’s range from 13 to 16 boys. The school recently added a music suite that includes space for practice, lessons and small performances. Boys’ artwork adorns the school’s red and cream walls on every floor of the building.

After graduation, about 60 percent of the school’s students attend independent high schools in the New York metropolitan area; the remainder go on to boarding schools, primarily in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

O’Halloran, who has been the school’s headmaster for the past three years, said that the greatest challenge that St. David’s faces is defining what it means to be both highly educated and a good man in the 21st century. The school must continually consider how to prepare its students for a rapidly changing world and teach them to search large quantities of information and synthesize it rapidly.

— Susan M. Sipprelle