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2009: Outstanding Private Elementary School

Steeped in Tradition
But integrating fresh lessons for Trinity’s young learners

The oldest continuously operating educational institution in New York City, Trinity School seeks to honor its churchy past in the secular present. The school has achieved a rich stew that mixes modern methods with Church of England customs; Festivals of Light with a dollop of Sufi poets. This is the result of Trinity’s “tremendous effort to become more diverse,” according to lower school head Rosemary Milliman. “Thirty to 40 percent of our kids are from different ethnic backgrounds,” she added. Friday chapel, a long-standing tradition that once took an exclusively Episcopalian form, has become a “launching pad for the expression of that diversity.”

One recent Friday morning, parents in Banana Republic neutrals and K-4 children in khaki, blue and white uniforms slid into smooth, blond wood pews in the school’s spacious auditorium. Chaplain Timothy Morehouse, a tall, thin, Harvard educated man in ankle-length black Cassock, presided. Not one cell phone or Blackberry disturbed the cushiony silence as a 4th grade child recited the day’s reading with excellent diction and perfect pronunciation of the word “Ecclesiasticus.” Morehouse, assisted by his chaplain-in-training, performed a skit that pulled themes from the readings about a “know-it-all.”

“Your mind is like this cup,” Morehouse said, holding his sloshing teacup. “If you think you know everything, there is no room for more. Be a try-to-know-it-all, not a know-it-all.”

After the new head of school, John Allman, delivered a cheery talk on “Making a Fresh Start,” and a 4th grader read “Good News,” a roundup of kind acts—“Mrs. Philpotts would like to thank Gabrielle for reminding her she left her laptop in the classroom”—chapel closed with the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible benediction. “May the Lord bless us and keep us,” Morehouse said. “May the Lord make his face to shine upon us. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon us and give us peace.”

It is easy to feel that “the Lord” shines upon you in Trinity’s generous yet cozy indoor and outdoor space. Three connected buildings make up the entire K-12 school complex and lower, middle and upper school students make great use of “the turf,” an enormous field. There are two other outdoor play areas and an indoor pool. The lower school, consisting of about 300 children, is in the oldest of the three buildings and features a “Great Hall” with elegantly worn tile floors, casual seating areas and a red-carpeted double staircase on one end.

The library, formerly the chapel, is off the Great Hall and librarian Sue Hipkens encourages parents to browse at any time. A ribbon of blue, watery fabric snakes around the library walls in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s explorations. Lower school kids follow the long windowed hallway—“The Long Hall”—to get to chapel and swimming. It also gives them a peek at upper school life.

A garden and terrace with wood tables and chairs outside is another feature that makes Trinity particularly homey, as well as a contemporary chapel off the hallway, which is open to all for reflection and prayer, and is used by high schoolers for yoga class during the day. Students eat family style with their teachers in a stylish cafeteria with red, gray and black chairs until they are old enough to make their own healthy choices in the cafeteria line.

While lower school students sit in old-fashioned school desks, much of the work on display is the kind generated in cutting-edge think tanks like the Reading and Writing Project at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and at Bank Street and Hunter College graduate programs. There are the strategies “Good Readers Use,” written on chart paper, the “math manipulatives” (a variety of colorful objects used for counting) in bins and the blocks in a shared hallway nook.

“We are a school where not everybody has to do the same process,” said curriculum coordinator Carole Ries. “But the content goals are the same. Children are really taken where they’re at.”

Teachers have developed Trinity’s rich curriculum elements over the years. For example, science teacher Howard Warren takes kids to Jamaica Bay where they don hip waders and collect specimens with a 30-foot seine. The sampling of sea life is brought back to the science lab’s saltwater aquarium for study, after which it is released back into the bay.

Kids get lots of individual and small group instruction. In 1st and 2nd grade, there are four classes of 15 students. The ratio is even better during critical subjects like reading—when 60 kids are divided among nine adults, three are reading specialists—and math, when the classrooms are split in half. Each year, teachers focus on two areas of the curriculum under Ries’ leadership. This year, they will delve more deeply into “Writing” and “Math Problem Solving.” To this end, all classrooms have posted bar graphs to chart the lengths of the days.

“Even the teachers are surprised by how quickly the days get shorter,” Ries said.

Cultural themes give the year cohesion: 2nd graders study Native Americans, 3rd graders study immigration and 4th graders venture outside the country through their study of Japanese and Egyptian cultures. Robert Keith, the computer teacher, helps 3rd graders make “classic state posters, like we used to do as kids,” but in tech-savvy presentations that include animation, video and drawing.

A child who remains at Trinity her entire school career is called a “survivor.” But in this gracious, historical campus, with its stimulating and innovative faculty, there is clearly plenty to appeal to a child at every stage of development.

“It’s almost scary” to imagine changing the rituals and traditions that have become part of the fabric of Trinity over the course of many years, Ries said, “because [our kids] wait for them.”

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Trinity School
139 W. 91st St.
New York, N.Y. 10024
212-873-1650
John Allman, Head of School
Rosemary Milliman, Lower School Principal
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— Lydie Raschka

ABOVE: Top-A cursive lesson. Middle-Students become tech-savvy at a young age. Bottom-Rosemary Milliman, lower school principal. Classroom photos by Andrew Schwartz