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Lawrenceville School

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The Lawrenceville School
Lawrenceville_Seal.jpg
Virtue is always green
Established 1810
School type Private, Boarding
Religious affiliation none
Headmaster Elizabeth A. Duffy
Location Lawrenceville, NJ, USA
Campus 700 acres
Enrollment 807 total
541 boarding
266 day
Faculty 142
Average class size 12
Student:Teacher
ratio 		6:1
Average SAT
scores (2005-06) 		670 verbal
680 math
Athletics 21 Interscholastic Sports
Color(s) Red/Black
Mascot Big Red
Homepage [www.lawrenceville.org]
The Lawrenceville School is a coeducational, independent boarding school for grades 9-12 located on 700 acres in the historic village of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, five miles southwest of Princeton. Today, the School enrolls 800 boarding and day students, who come from 34 states and 29 countries. Its endowment stands at $225 million (as of 2005), or nearly $300,000 per student.

Contents

History

One of the oldest prep schools in the U.S., Lawrenceville was founded in 1810 as the Maidenhead Academy. As early as 1828, the school attracted students from Cuba and England, as well as from the Choctaw Nations. It went by several subsequent names, including the Lawrenceville Classical and Commercial High School, the Lawrenceville Academy, and the Lawrenceville Classical Academy, before the school's current name, "The Lawrenceville School," was set during its refounding in 1883.

Among Lawrenceville's most distinctive features is its House system common to British boarding schools. Students reside in three distinct Houses (or dorms), where they live with faculty members in a family-like setting: the Lower School, the Circle and Crescent Houses, and the Upper School. Freshmen, or IInd formers (the School stopped accepting Ist formers in 1997), stay in two dorms, one for boys and one for girls. For their sophomore year, students are placed either into the Circle (for boys) or the Crescent (for girls) Houses. The "Circle Houses" are named for their location on a landscaped circle designed by the 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who is most famous for designing New York City's Central Park. The Circle is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The "Crescent Houses" are similarly named after the layout of the buildings. Circle/Crescent houses, which field intramural sports teams, have their own traditions, and participate in friendly, though intense, competition. Circle houses are Kennedy, Hamill, Dickinson, Woodhull, Griswold and Cleve. Crescent houses are McClellan, Stanley, Stephens, and Kirby. Plans to build a new Crescent house, to be called Carter, are underway. Seniors (the Vth Form) live in separate dormitories off the Circle and Crescent, or with underclassmen as prefects.

Like the House system, the Harkness table is a hallmark of the School. In the Harkness method, teachers and students engage in Socratic, give-and-take discussions around large, wooden oval tables, which take the place of individual desks.

In 1951, a group of educators from Phillips Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lawrenceville, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University convened to examine the best use of the final two years of high school and the first two years of college. This committee published a final report, General Education in School and College, through Harvard University Press in 1952, which subsequently led to the establishment of the Advanced Placement Program (the AP Exams).

Lawrenceville is part of an organization known as The Ten Schools Admissions Organization. This organization was founded more than forty years ago on the basis of a number of common goals and traditions. Member schools include Lawrenceville, Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield Academy, The Hill School, The Taft School, The Hotchkiss School, St. Paul's School, Loomis Chaffee, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover.

Lawrenceville was featured in a number of novels by Owen Johnson, class of 1895, notably The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, and The Varmint (1910). The Varmint, which recounts the school years of the fictional character Dink Stover, was made into the 1950 motion picture The Happy Years which starred Leo G. Carroll and Dean Stockwell and was filmed on the Lawrenceville campus. A 1992 PBS miniseries was based on his Lawrenceville tales.

In 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at the School in the Edith Memorial Chapel. Recent speakers have included boxer Muhammad Ali, legal scholar Derrick Bell, poet Billy Collins, playwright Christopher Durang, historians Niall Ferguson and David Hackett Fischer, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, poet Seamus Heaney, political analyst Ariana Huffington, novelist Chang-rae Lee, photographer Andres Serrano, poet Mark Strand, writer Andrew Sullivan, politician Lowell Weicker, and philosopher Cornel West.

Among Lawrenceville's prominent teachers over the years have been Thornton Wilder, who taught French at the School in the 1920s; R. Inslee Clark, Jr., who revolutionized Ivy League admissions at Yale in the 1960s; and Thomas H. Johnson, a widely-published authority on Emily Dickinson. Faculty members have gone on to head institutions such as the Horace Mann School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Groton School, Milton Academy, and Governor Dummer Academy.

While Lawrenceville was all-male for much of its nearly 200-year history, then-Head Master Josiah Bunting III and the board of trustees coeducated the School in 1987. In 1999, the student body elected a female president, Alexandra Petrone; in 2003, Elizabeth Duffy was appointed the School's first female head master; and in 2005, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, class of 2002, became Lawrenceville's first alumna to win a Rhodes Scholarship.

The School's weekly newspaper, The Lawrence, has been in publication for 126 years. It has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence.

Lawrenceville will celebrate its bicentennial in 2010.

Athletics

Lawrenceville's arch-rival in the Mid-Atlantic Prep League is The Hill School of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. On the first or second weekend of November during "Hill Weekend," the two schools celebrate the third oldest high school rivalry and fifth oldest school rivalry in the nation.

Lawrenceville competes with other schools in baseball, basketball, crew, cross-country, diving, fencing, field hockey, football, golf, hockey, indoor and outdoor track, lacrosse, soccer, softball, squash, swimming, tennis, volleyball, water polo, and wrestling. In addition, the School offers a variety of intramural sports, including 8-man tackle football for boys' Circle Houses.

Lawrenceville's House Football League is the oldest active football league in America. Teams compete against each other to battle for the pride of their house. Traditions abound, including the yearly rivalry game between the Hamill and Kennedy houses referred to as "The Crutch Game," first played in 1947. The game is fought for the possession of a historical crutch made of wood.

A bit of Lawrenceville football lore is recounted in the book Football Days, Memories of the Game and of the Men Behind the Ball by William H. Edwards, a graduate of Lawrenceville. The book describes the author's time as a member of the Lawrenceville football team, and paints a vivid picture of "the vital power of the [collegial] spirit."

On November 6, 2005, the Lawrenceville Girls Varsity Field Hockey team defeated The Stuart School 2-1 to capture their third straight Prep A State Championship.

On February 12, 2006, the Lawrenceville Varsity Boys Squash team won Nationals for the third year in a row.

On Thursday, May 18, 2006 the Lawrenceville Varsity Baseball Team won the New Jersey State Prep A Championship over Peddie in a double header (14-0 and 6-1).

Facilities

Memorial Hall, a classroom building on the campus of The Lawrenceville School
Memorial Hall, a classroom building on the campus of The Lawrenceville School

On Lawrenceville's 700-acre campus are thirty-four major buildings, including the Bunn Library (with space for 100,000 volumes). Opened in 1996, the Bunn Library offers computer research facilities, an electronic classroom, and study areas. Other campus highlights include a 56,000-square-foot science building (opened in spring 1998), a visual arts center (opened in fall 1998), a history center (reopened in fall 1999), and a music center (opened in fall 2000).

In the main arena of the Edward J. Lavino Field House are a permanent banked 200-meter track and three tennis/basketball/volleyball courts. Two additional hardwood basketball courts, a six-lane swimming pool, a wrestling room, two fitness centers with a full-time strength and conditioning coach, and a training-wellness facility are housed in the wings of the building. A new squash court facility, hosting ten new internationally zoned courts, opened in 2003.

Lawrenceville has eighteen athletics fields, a golf course, twelve outdoor tennis courts, a ΒΌ-mile all-weather track, an indoor ice-hockey rink, a boathouse, and a ropes and mountaineering course.

Notable Lawrentians

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External links


Private High Schools and Prep Schools in New Jersey
Blair Academy | Delbarton School | Dwight-Englewood School | Gill St. Bernard's School | Hun School of Princeton | Lawrenceville School | Morristown-Beard School | Newark Academy | Peddie School | The Pennington School | The Pingry School | Princeton Day School | Ranney School | Rutgers Preparatory School | Seton Hall Preparatory School | Saint Benedict's Preparatory School | St. Peter's Preparatory High School

Elderidge Nichols (Pancake Lover and holder of the world's longest gopher)

 

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