Mission & Vision

The Mission of the Sage School

We honor adolescence as a critical developmental window for learning essential academic, cognitive, social, and emotional skills.

The Sage School creates a thriving environment for students through a challenging, authentic curriculum, centered on human ecology and engaging experiences designed specifically to promote self-awareness, community responsibility, and a sense of place.

Our Vision

To help create sustainable and thriving human and ecological communities.

The Components That Bring Our Mission & Vision to Life

Adolescence: A critical time of transition between childhood and adulthood.

The Sage School acknowledges this period of growth as the foundation for crucial development and learning.

Academic Skills: The skills most often associated with schooling.

The Sage School helps our students develop essential skills, including math, writing, Spanish, and more, so they are prepared for collegiate success and the world beyond.

Cognitive Skills: The skills that allow an individual to learn.

The Sage School inspires students with curiosity and wonder, sparking their desire to learn and creating a trimester-long format that allows them the freedom and time to understand a topic within the encompassing lens of human ecology.

Social and Emotional Skills: The skills necessary to manage interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal emotions.

Students build the social and emotional skills to manage their own personal journeys through wellness, community meetings, mindfulness and self-assessment.

Authentic Curriculum: A course of study that connects a student’s inner world with the larger community.

The Sage School immerses students in content, experiences, and assessments that yield relevant and meaningful application, empowering them to understand why what they are learning matters.

Human Ecology: The study of relationships between humans and their environments.

Our curriculum examines big topics as relationships, rather than as individual subjects, to help our students see the world as a web of complex relationships, rather than as discrete, unconnected disciplines.

Self-awareness: A genuine understanding of one’s self and one’s actions.

Students develop an awareness of self through authentic curriculum field studies, wellness, and even clean up time.

Community Responsibility: The commitment to be a constructive part of the social and ecological groups that surround us.

Students develop and practice community responsibility through weekly Community Action, daily work within the school, Field Studies, and through the authentic curriculum.

Sense of place: A rich understanding of the area that surrounds us.

Students spend five weeks per year developing their sense of space in our Field Studies program, while the other 30 weeks spent in the classroom help clarify and explore.