Information Session: General Session

Hi everybody, hopefully you guys are in the right place. This is a Lawrenceville webinar for some general information about our school.

Hopefully we got a couple more people joining us. Not sure if anyone minds putting in the chat that you can hear me and see me or see our slides. That would be great. I just want to make sure that everyone is connected and that I'm not just talking to an open void, which would be pretty tricky.

So I'm not sure if anyone if you can put in the chat that would be awesome. If you see me, please do type something even hello.

Oops.

Just want to make sure.

I'm going to say, can you see and hear me that in the chat?

To make sure people are.

Able to see and hear me.

Not entirely sure.

I want to be sure.

OK, perfect sorry, it just took a second all right great. Well thank you so much. It looks like we've just got about everybody here. We just over 20 family sign up. So thank you so much for joining us this morning asking the Lawrenceville School. My name is Elisa, even China and I am a senior associate Dean of admission here on campus. Love what I do. Love talking to family so I'm excited to share a little bit more about our school with you. What I'd like to tell you is.

If you want to put into either the chat or questions, I think it's easier if you just kind of type things as we go along. I'll try and answer what I can at the end of our time together, and I also know that some of you submitted questions ahead of time, so I've got those over here on my desk, in my office and I will do my best to address everything that I can, both with what you you add now and what what you guys have already submitted. So just very quick.

Kind of overview and we'll go over some slides. This presentation has been updated, so there might be a surprise or two for me as we go along, but hopefully it'll give you a general sense of who we are as a school and lead you into kind of the next steps of applying for admission to Lawrenceville.

OK, so UM little little housekeeping items. We are recording these and we will make everything available. So when you look at our our kind of website you will be able to see where some of our representatives will be throughout the year to do more information sessions like this maybe at school fairs and when you're kind of checking out that that spot on our website, you'll be able to find out a little bit more kind of reference. Some of these other videos we are going to be doing these webinars.

It's about weekly over the summer and some have different angles to them, so keep checking that out. So if you want to pop back on and learn a little bit more about a different area of Lawrenceville, that will also be an option. There is closed captioning so as you can see, there's some directions there about. Click the CC button on the top right of the corner and your share window, and then you know you can full screen view. So I'm actually seeing you guys all big right now or excuse me, I should say I'm seeing the slides big right now. That's that kind of funky little expansion.

Button in the corner and then just refresh your share window in case there's any issues with the audio. But it seems like everyone's pretty OK, and the last thing is obviously the question. So to do, post this in the chat so we can address them later. So a little bit about Lawrenceville. This is actually last year's student council at their graduation, so that just happened a few weeks ago. Was very exciting. We have a mission statement which is through House and Harkness. Lawrenceville challenges a diverse community of promising young people to lead lives of learning integrity and high purpose. Our mission.

Is to inspire the best in each to seek the best for all, which I really like that.

Some people had some questions actually, even in chat, like really where are you? I think what is great about Lawrenceville is that we are in the middle of somewhere, not in the middle of nowhere. We are about 5 minutes from Princeton. Some of you might know Princeton University. We're right down the road, so we actually have access to kind of a town just to the north of us. And while we have the village of Lawrenceville, which has a lot of great amenities and we'll see some of those as we go through the slides. But we're about an hour to almost equidistant from New York and from Philadelphia, so.

Great if you are a traveling to school and really easy to get trains, planes and automobiles to get to Lawrenceville. There's a train station about 12 minutes from US, and each of those airports is about an hour and then obviously a little bit further are sort of the the major New York City airports.

As I mentioned, the village of Lawrenceville. So while we have kind of our village, as I mentioned, Princeton is just in the north of us that is sort of the town that's closest to us, but the village of Lawrenceville has sort of a very sweet Main Street that our students are able to frequent. So while we don't have exactly a closed campus, we do consider across the street to be on campus. So we've got a Starbucks. There's the purple cow ice cream. We've got TJ's pizza and a lot of other restaurants. There's even.

Run a Barber shop or two. We've got a great place called the Ginger. Peach was a bakery, so access to a lot of different things so you don't have to go. You know, off campus technically to sort of, you know, get that moment away and then sort of like hang out with your friends.

A little bit about who we are. So really, you know these numbers have just been updated. Our community is about 2/3 buildings. About 70% of our students are borders. About 30% are day students. 800 plus kids as their total enrollment. What I think is important to know about those numbers is that while we do have a fairly large you know proportion of of day students, our day kids are here all the time, so it's not a campus that clears out. It is not a place where.

You know kids are like OK all my friends left everyone's very active here. In fact, last year just graduated. Our school president happened to be a day student. Annie Katz, and so she was here all the time and I think that speaks to how engaged all of our students are here on campus.

Where are we from? So this year, it's really kind of fun when you see that we actually represent 40 countries and 37 States and the about 18% of our students are international students. So you know, looking at those numbers, it's a pretty diverse population in terms of geographic diversity and what's neat is when you sit around that harvest table. You have a lot of different perspectives that are enhancing your own learning. Every class is roughly 12 students and we might Max out on a few lab periods where you might have.

Seen in a class, but the student or excuse me teacher to student ratio is about 1 to 12.

In the classroom. Overall campus. It's about 8:00 to 1:00, so we are really lucky that we have small kind of intimate classes where you really get to not only know your teacher, but that they know you and that they understand who you are as a learner and and can help you grow. That way. Every teacher. Probably every term works with about 4041 students, so that's across approximately 3 to 4 sections that they might be teaching. If they're teaching up. But again, your teachers really get to know you, and we write a lot of comprehensive interim reports.

And term end reports are a lot of narratives where you know teachers really know your student. They really know who you are. You know, giving you some feedback, giving you things to work on, moving forward, and because they know you. It's not just sort of a numerical sort of sketch in there. It's really, hey, this is who? So and so is. This is what I'm seeing day-to-day. This is how I can help them. You know, this is how they are doing. We are a slightly. We're almost equal, but we're just slightly more males and females.

We do have nearly, you know, a 5050 split, but again, it sort of adds to the fact that we have grown in our female population. We built another dormitory about 10 years ago, which brought that number closer to 5050 and we are represented by 55% of our students who self identify as students of color. Meaning 45% of our students identify as white.

So there are a lot of different things about Lawrence. What we say, what sets us apart, and there are many great schools out there, but they're definitely things that are very specific to Lawrenceville that I think are perhaps unique.

We write about the House system a lot, so there is no place like house that house there. Actually, I was the head of house in that house for nine years. That's a Stevens house in the Crescent, so I lived with approximately 50 girls and that's borders and day students all of our day students are incorporated into the houses, so it's not like all the borders have a house and that the day students don't. Everybody spends time in their house. The house is a little like I would say, Harry Potter. That's a lot of people say you're the Harry Potter.

But as you can see by sort of what we've written here, it is a unique health system. We're modeled after an English boarding school where this smaller house kind of structure makes it feel like it's a. It's a smaller part of the school that you belong to, so you're not kind of overwhelmed by. Hey there a bunch of freshmen through seniors. You know, in the same vertical housing or dormitory you are with your peer group, we sort of meet you adolescent Lily, or where you are adolescent Lily and you're with your peer group, the House house that most of the.

Students affiliate themselves with, and when you talk to alums they say what year were you and what house were you in. They really are talking about.

The house that you lived in during your sophomore and junior years so you can see some pictures here. This is House Olympics which is a big thing that our office used to put on. Everyone gets kind of I don't know looking at this boy in the whole house with sort of I think it's caution tape on his on his face. You know everyone kind of gets dressed up and they play sort of.

Silly intramural games against each other, all for this fun sort of House Olympics Cup. So that's a really exciting time for them to to kind of get together and bond before classes even start. Some more pictures of some of these folks that are, you know, at a more formal event, houses tend to sit together, there's events and sort of cheer each other on as they win different prizes and awards. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging. So I'm going to read the slide to you. So in the classroom and our cocurricular activities and through our residential life.

Program students are provided the opportunity to explore and appreciate the perspectives and identities of others as well as their own. I think that that first part is is super huge. As I mentioned, we are diverse in so many different ways here on Lawrenceville. Whether and if you're in the house or you're in a classroom, all of that is all of that sort of leads to your learning, right? You're going to live with people that may not be just like you have different interests or from different places. Identify differently, you're going to also live. Excuse me, learn alongside of them.

And what's amazing is that that's a microcosm of the real world, right? It's not sort of just the bubble of where where you're from, so we bring all of these different students together. And what really helps is that as they sit there and they bond in different ways, they're learning from each other. And that's the end goal.

And part of that kind of I just I kept going to the learning part of it is the Harkness method. So for us, Harkness is sort of our main teaching methodology. The idea is that we are going to give you lifelong skills because you have to sit there and you sort of know more than 12 students and a teacher sitting around an Oval shaped table where you were actively engaged in your learning. You are listening, you are. You know, developing your voice. I think that even probably says it on the slide.

But the big thing is that you're building upon everyone else's thoughts and opinions in their voice, so you're not going to sit there and have a, you know, sort of a debate over something you're going to listen to people, and you're going to say, oh, I hadn't thought of that. And in that perspective, and so you're learning from other people's experiences and perspectives.

So you can see there's a little. There's a little part right here. This is sort of what the hardness.

Excuse me what the Harkness table looks like.

And so we sort of see the teacher up the end. She's kind of pointing, and this happens to be kind of a language class. She teaches language, but you can see all of the kids are kind of the same level and engaged in what they are learning. So academic offerings we have over 200 courses here at Lawrenceville. While we do have a lot of sort of core courses we do have, you know graduation requirements and you can see a lot of our different disciplines here. We have some some courses that you may not be able to take in in your local.

Or or kind of regular high school. So we do have like a religion philosophy department. We do have, you know, performing arts and interdisciplinary studies that are part of our curriculum. And so I think it gives our kids an opportunity to kind of go outside of just the normal core courses. Your first two years here. You're a little bit set and your courses. You can kind of take placement tests for math and for language. And so there you are leveled appropriately and you're kind of learning how to use Harkness in our humanities.

Program you're understanding how to do labs in our science program, but you're kind of doing that together. And then as you get to junior and senior year, you sort of diverge a little bit, and that's when you're taking more of these elective classes. That kind of fall under that 200 course range. So if you find that you are particularly interested in the sciences, you're going to be able to see.

Whole Swatch of classes that are going to be in those those high level elective classes that you might want to take before you go on to college and kind of figure out what you really want to do. I'm going to send you a few campus snapshots here on your screen. We say where we do what we do so you know our campus is quite beautiful actually. Just driving in this morning from my house and the sun was shining and I was looking and I thought Oh my gosh, this place looks like a postcard and it really does. But these are all great usable spaces that the kids.

Really, you know you know, gravitate towards so. Kirby Art Center and we use this for a lot of different things. Obviously with the arts, it's a place where our musicians perform. It is a place where our thespians are on stage, but it's also the place where we gather once a week school meeting there are acting studios, dance studios.

It's pretty fabulous. The Bun Library, which is sort of central to a lot of campus. This is an amazing space, I think when I interview students, a lot of them go. Oh my gosh, that library is unbelievable. As you can see the the visits per year thing is like 30,000 plus people. Or at least people come and go. We actually swipe our students in, you know, to make sure we know where they are in the evenings. If they come to the library. But there's great study spaces. The building or excuse me, the room that you sort of see over to the left. That kind of has that.

So I don't know what you call like, not pyramid, but pointed roof. That's a great space that we use for a lot of different meanings. It's really open. It's got a lot of carols in it, so kids are able to go and study in the library as well. Our libraries are also awesome. They can help you with research projects and how to use the library properly so we are fully staffed there as well with the Kirby math and Science Center. So this building is now a few years old like finally up and running.

We tacked on the new math part to the science part. It's 26 classrooms. We've got, labs. We've got combined classrooms and labs where you might have a classroom and your laboratory for, say, chem class right behind it. Prep rooms. There's also actually a lot of different things, like there's a lecture hall in this building. There's a greenhouse in this building and everyone actually loves this building. There are a lot of animals, so when you walk around there's like frogs and fish and turtles and birds. Feathers building which we affectionately call.

Top hall so we have Memorial Hall which is like MEM and this is pop. They kind of are back to back. This is actually the building that when I drove up to campus today I was like wow this is beautiful right in front of it is the bowl which is kind of in the middle of the boys and girls lower school dorms. This is a beautiful building. Was actually just recently renovated and we even have down in the basement a green screen facility. Your computer labs are there so if you're doing language work and again this is just kind of one of our many classroom buildings.

Group Center for Art and Design so GG CAD is what we call this and this is kind of a nice shot of sort of the general scope of it. This is a I would like to call it like a big maker space. We've got 3D printers. There's a wood shop. There's a room upstairs and I don't know if they call it here. They call it the flexible project room for ideation. This is a building that right before COVID opened. And now we're finally actually able to use it. We have dedicated space.

Here for club meetings, the robotics lab is in here, so if you are a person who likes to tinker, who likes to, you know, fabricate things who just wants to get into that. Do robotics you know, learn something new? Gcad is kind of where it's at, and this is open and accessible to you, and you can't see. But the gentleman who runs it, Rex Brody. He is there all the time. He will show you how to, you know, use the 3D printer. You have an idea he's going to show you how to use. You know your idea and create something out of it. So that's a pretty beautiful space.

New for us actually. Last year we started the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice, which is probably, I think, the first of its kind in any secondary schools. So this is a kind of we even have a summer program where we are trying to deepen our thinking about social justice. We want to listen and learn from each other and engage in community centered and impact focused action. So we have a lot of great speakers that come in. We have a lot of presentations and and artwork.

Even that has been displayed there throughout the year.

Pardon me Co curriculars so beyond the classroom, so we've kind of talked about a lot of buildings on campus spaces, just different things you can do, sort of in your academic day and a little bit beyond now. These are the things that you kind of do for sure after school is out for the day. Big red athletics. So we have now. I believe that's 38 interscholastic teams of different sorts. We also have intramural teams which we call House the majority of our faculty are coaching.

I actually coached the varsity field hockey and the varsity lacrosse teams and it's a great way also to know your your faculty and for faculty know students in a different capacity.

Our facilities, so we are actually in. You'll see, in another slide we are actually renovating some of this, but this was our current track. The largest indoor track basically in the area. We host track meets with thousands of people, but we have 10 international squash courts. We have 12 tennis courts outside and that indoor space can actually be modified for three indoor tennis courts. 2 field turf surfaces. So we actually have a turf stadium with two side by side turf fields. We've got 2 main basketball courts.

We have two softball and two baseball diamonds. We have an ice hockey rink, so if you're a hockey player, that's pretty cool. We have 14 other natural grass athletic fields all over campus, so we will use those as well and then obviously our normal quarter round outdoor track. And this is the 200 meter indoor track and we just actually completed or are on the way of completing an entire outdoor track stadium. Just because track and field is such a large program for us and it's it's kind of nice to give them their own space.

This is just some quick snapshots of some gals and guys doing their thing with big red athletics and the exciting news I was mentioning is at the side field house so we are in the process of kind of renovating our current field house, but also building essentially a new field house right next to it. So the anticipated first kind of phase is going to open this fall so they I've actually been able to see the pool and the rink and even the dining facilities this fall.

We're pretty much not quite nearing completion, but they were well on their way and then the final phase should be open.

The fall of 2023, so that's exciting for everyone that's looking to come in 2023. Performing arts. Also, as I mentioned, for example, Kirby Art Center and we also have the Clark Music Building, so you if you're not playing interscholastic sport or House sport, dance and arts will fulfill your athletic requirement, certain ones. So here we have an image of some of the girls are actually dancing in the Clark music building right here. We have different levels of say dance performance groups we've got.

Dramatic theater a lot of different opportunities? Excuse me there.

And here actually see I'm didn't want to skip music, but with performing arts and we do have, you know, orchestra, jazz band. You can take private lessons as well if you're into into music instrument specific.

Clubs so we have over 180 clubs here. This happens to be a shot of kids that do SNL Ville, which is sort of our party on Saturday Night Live and it's really fun. That kind of comes out with someone on Saturday and everyone kind of gets together and watches it. Super fun, but with 180 clubs there are a lot of different clubs of varied interest, so it may be that you have.

An interest of sports and interest in business where there's a sports business club, there could be something you know along the lines of robotics that that is a cocurricular that excuse me that is an extracurricular that is a club. The way the clubs kind of work. They typically are usually go to class and you have sort of athletics of different levels, and then you go and you kind of participate in the club. Or maybe it's a music lesson and that day is going to look different every day, right? So some days you might have nothing. Some days you might have SNL, though other days you might have.

Now I've got my piano lesson and you can carve that out. We work sort of. The student leadership works with all of the kids within those clubs to make sure that they have access to the clubs that they're part of. And if you can't go to one you know meeting, maybe you go to the next week's meeting. Or maybe you go to the next meeting in in two weeks beyond that, so there's definitely a lot of opportunity to get involved, and I'd say that probably the majority of our students are involved in at least one club, if not several. I actually didn't advise you one time, tell me she signed up for 12 clubs and I told her we probably have to pare that down a little bit.

Because I'm not sure how you're gonna have time.

Beyond the gates of Lawrenceville, I think that's really important. Lawrenceville is not just a bubble, that's a wonderful place, but there's so much else out there for you to take part of community service.

Community service is huge for Lawrenceville. We actually worked with a lot of local community groups. For example, we do we work with schools. We work with community groups like home, front and we also do a lot of Harkness travel. We'll talk about that in one second, but Harkness travel or trips that we take, you know, sometimes internationally, and they could have a community service angle to them. We really believe in, you know, Lawrenceville is not just sort of confined within our gates. We want to go out and we want to teach.

Our our community, our students that you know, there's community beyond sort of your little bubble, so we do have a graduation requirements that you have to fulfill. It's not an hourly component with something called El Cap, which is a weekly service project. And then these one time events you have to do and the majority of our kids when they do an A particular community service you know event they often do more because they find that it's really meaningful. They find that they can have an impact.

And they enjoy working with you, know the students or the group that they work with, which I think is wonderful.

Sustainability is also another piece here at Lawrence. We do have the Big Red farm. We actually have some kids at work on the farm as sort of farm hands as a replacement for their their athletic requirement, and so you see some of the kids here. I'm not sure exactly what they're picking there, but you can see we've got you know, baby pigs, and we'll have a sheep in the in the spring and on top of that we also have that solar field that you see up there that provides something like 90% of the energy to our campus, which is is pretty awesome. And the gentleman in the red shirt.

This is Steven Laubach, who is our director of sustainability, so I think every week we got something about how we need to be recycling or really cool things happening out on the farm and so that the campus is really active in trying to become as green a campus as possible.

This slide it's the Harkness travel program, so as I mentioned earlier, a little bit with community service I'm Harkness. Travel is a way for students to kind of have some experiential learning. You know, we do offer spring break and summer trips, and we want all of our students to go on at least one during their time here. Some of that can be a cultural exchange, some can be actually doing research, some are, you know, along the lines of a specific course or coursework and others are really just interest.

Just you know, if you can hop on a trip and there is space available and you've never been to Italy and you want to go explore that, certainly an opportunity. But we believe again, that sort of life outside of the gates is really important to to become aware of. And as I also said earlier, we do have some that have a community service angle, so you know, for example, we haven't gone a couple years, but we used to go to Tanzania and work with local schools and help them bring supplies, build, teach.

Whatever we could do, this looks like it's a. It's a trip to Jordan, which is pretty cool and I know some kids just came back. I just talked to one of our tour guides downstairs who just came back from Austria, so that was an amazing trip doing hiking. They were in the Alps so some pretty amazing outside of the box travel.

So life after Lawrenceville. So you come to Lawrenceville, you've got all of these amazing opportunities. You take advantage of, you know, all of these things in front of you. Some of your Harkness travel, you know, working on the farm, you're doing different things. Well, what happens afterwards? So college counseling that's a big question that comes up a lot. So I'm going to read you this. It says the goal of the College Counseling Office is to support, inform, and encourage students and their families as they navigate the exciting, complex and ever changing process of college admissions. So here you see some pictures of some kids who are.

Who had gone off to to play sports in college? Who would do it? Definitely have a number of athletes who go off to college and some kids have different interests. You know they play sports here or they have one interest that was peaked and they want to go off to college to pursue that college counseling for our students really begins in sort of their junior year, so we want you to do Lawrenceville well.

And then we assign you a college counselor about January of your junior year. At that point, it's up to our students to start having those conversations with their college counselor about, you know what their aspirations are. You know what they're most interested in. You know, cultivate a list of schools that they think you know would be good fits for them, and they kind of walk them through the process. And then our students and our families work with our college counselors all the way through. When students are, you know, admitted to the school of their choice or the schools that they get into.

And start to make decisions you know based on on those things.

So starting your big red journey, I know I've given you a quick little snapshot in our in our kind of half hour here to to go over what we have here. How do how do you get here? So how to start the application process so I'm sure that many of you who are here have already done this because that's how you signed up for this. But if you go to the inquiry form, so that's at lawrenceville.org and we have an admissions tab, you fill out all the information under there. It's a demographic information so that we can start sending you information as well. So if you want to attend.

Different webinars if you've got, you know if we have different events in your area. That is the best way to stay informed. I suggest setting up your campus visit with a tour and an interview. OK, it's great to have one of our students take you around. Usually our tours are, you know, one to two families on the tour, so you actually really get to connect with your tour guide. Ask them specific questions that might be of interest to you. See our facilities and then you come back and you have an interview in our admission office with someone like me where we sit.

And we chat with you. And then we have a separate time where we will chat and answer questions for parents. I'm a mom so I know that my kids don't always like to ask questions in front of me, so we we sort of do that so the whole process here on campus is probably about 2 hours. You know, good hour, long tour and then hour kind of speaking with an admission counselor. If you can't make it to campus then I would suggest doing an online interview. We do have a lot of content on the web so you can see a lot of you know what we have on campus. Maybe get a little bit of like a virtual tour going.

But you can set up an online interview app. I know that travel and stuff has been really tricky in the days of COVID, so that is definitely an option. But you can set that up as well and you can set up your interview yourself through your your portal.

So here the required items. OK, you have to do an interview, right? That's one of the things we do require. Fill out the application.

Fill out in that application your student statement, your parent statement, so each get an opportunity to sort of tell us about you, your transcripts, so the last three years of grades that comes from your school. If you've changed schools.

You still need those last three years, so even if you've been at your middle school for two years, you would need that that previous school to to excuse me to send your transcript. And it's all laid out kind of on the Gateway app. Great appropriate testing, so we do still require testing on standardized testing based on your current school year on the SAT is the most common. We also accept the IE. The SAT is given once a month and if you go to sat.org that will kind of tell you exactly how to go about signing up for that.

And then recommendations. That is part of the application process, so we require three, so it's a guidance counselor, an advisor head of your middle school, someone in the STEM, or math and Science department, and someone in the humanities.

So important dates for this though. November 4th. We're encouraging all of our day students to come in and interview by November 4th, January 15th. It will be the application for excuse me. The application deadline and also the application for scholarship aid and that is due. Then again, more information on our website under admissions on that February 1st is really the testing deadline. So if the SAT is being given February 20th, we cannot guarantee that we can read your scores.

By the time your application comes due, so my recommendation is always trying to do the PSAT, maybe in November, December. That gives you a little buffer in case you need to take it. In January. People get sick, things happen, gives you a little bit more wiggle room, so our admission decision date is March 10th. A couple days about actually about a week before you should get information about how to log into your portal. And then on March 10th you can log in and see your admission decision and then we require an enrollment response from you. You know, by April 10th. So if you're looking at several schools

to figure out, hey, where am I going to go? April 10th. This one. We request that you let us know if you're coming to Lawrence, which we hope you are.

So affordability part of the application process is, you know, a scholarship aide. We have about 32% of our students are on scholarship aid. This past year we gave out over $15 million in scholarship aid to our to our student body.

The average age package for a boarding student is over $60,000 and the average aid package for day students is over $40,000.

So here's a little kind of cute collage.

And I guess it's sort of telling us that we are wrapping up kind of the slideshow part of this, and I'm going to address some of these questions, but I do encourage you put your questions into the chat and I will try to get to all that I can in our next little bit of time together. But I'm going to put up here just like the last little slide. A lot of the information that you might require, you have additional questions this. This is great contact information, so admission at lawrenceville.org that is our big sort of admission mailbox. That's that's kind of manned by several people in our office.

General information questions can go to them and they can.

Help facilitate getting that out to one of the counselors. The counselor on duty like me this week who can answer your questions. Our main phone number is there 6098952030 but we also have a toll free number. For those of you that are calling. I'm internationally a lot of our information is on lawrenceville.org and I think another great way in these days is a little more modern than I'm used to. But Instagram and Twitter. We are really active on our Instagram especially and on Twitter we post a lot.

So if you have particular things that you are interested in, you know, or you want to know about a few things, you can certainly go ahead and follow those on on your own account and learn about. You know where we might be traveling, or things that we've been doing. Also great snapshots of things happening on school. I know that actually they just posted a girl who's traveling with her family, so it was cool to see one of our tour guides and her Kirby shirt. You know, touring in the whole night, so that was pretty neat.

So please put some questions in the chat, but I'm going to address a couple of the ones that came in and just kind of let you know the answers to those. So there's question about school safety policies, so school safety policies. So there are a lot of different things we have in place. We actually have an entire public safety group of officers and they are always kind of patrolling our campus, going through buildings, making sure at the end of the day that buildings are locked and things are secure. It's one of the first numbers.

Give to our students to say, hey, you know if you need something you call public safety. If you are injured they can drive you to class so we do make sure that everyone has a fob like a key fob that only lets them into the buildings that they're supposed to be in their dorm or during the school day into their into their classroom buildings. Other people cannot access that, so we are. We are conscious of that. What grades can attend the day school? I'm not totally sure. I mean, we are a 9th.

10th, 11th, 12th and postgraduate. So basically high school.

But hopefully that answers that question.

I'm looking at this. Will there be a representative from the Athletics department? I think that means during your visit, so if you do have a specific sport that you were interested in when you come for your tour and and your interview, and unless you specifically reach out to a coach, you know I might get an excuse me, an e-mail from a girl saying, hey, I'm really interested in field hockey. Could you come and meet me? I'm lucky I'm in the admission office so I can always pop down and say hello, but we don't have someone specific from the athletic department in our office.

But most of us are coaching so we can share a lot about the athletic program. The athletic department, if you have specific questions for a coach or would like to meet with them, I would say you should really go ahead and e-mail them ahead of time and say, hey, this is what I'm coming. I'd love to to meet with you. Are you available? A lot of our coaches are teaching, so sometimes that can be a little bit tricky, but if it's not the head coach then they can often send, you know, an assistant coach to meet with you. Next question was will there be a.

Representative from your financial aid department to discuss the scholarship process during the interview. So actually our director of financial aid or excuse me. Scholarship aid is actually in a part of our department. You can certainly ask questions, especially if she's the one interviewing you. But really, the way that scholarship aid works in Lawrenceville, it's a little. We use a program called S and you can find most of this information online. You do submit your tax forms from sort of the previous year.

And kind of it produces sort of I want to say like an algorithm, but it will produce sort of a number based on a lot of the information that you put in there. What your family's contribution could be, it's always fine to to reach out to a director of financial aid or scholarship aid to learn more about that, but it's a pretty straightforward process. You just do have to.

Fill all of that out. We are in a need based scholarship aid. We are not a merit based aid provider of any kind, so it was all need based financial aid and it is all grants.

Is this a five day boarding school? No, actually we are. We're basically we're an all in boarding school. We do have classes six days a week, so we have half days on Wednesdays and half days on Saturdays and most of our kids are playing sports and doing other activities on Saturdays. So our day students are here as well, but it is not a five day boarding school.

Do you provide day transport to your school? If students reside an hour away to the north of your school, we don't provide any transportation transportation for gay students is up to the family. We recommend that if you are within about 30 minutes, that makes sense to be a day student and and that's what we sort of we require. I guess if you're within 30 minutes you you need to be a day student as opposed to border. But if you're further than that, it makes it pretty challenging just because.

Of all the things that students would be involved in.

Let me see this. We talked a little bit about Harkness. Want to make sure I'm covering a lot of what a student be at a disadvantage if they joined the student body in the 10th grade or above? No, not at all actually. You know, I would say that, excuse me.

I would say that you know a number of our students come in. It's probably our second largest entry point is the 10th grade. Also the 11th grade? I mean, some kids come in. It's just a a later change or a decision for them to apply to school. There is not a disadvantage. You've already been in high school. I think it's actually more exciting in some ways, right? Because you come right into the house system and all the stuff that a lot of our younger students have been looking forward to. So I think that that's great. We do look at students and to see what their their academic program was like at their their previous school.

To make sure that there isn't a place where they would be taking, say, the same class and we want to make sure you know if they've already taken U.S. history, that they don't necessarily have to take that again. So that might be a little different than our normal academic progression, but we work with our students on that.

Are there opportunities to try new sports or do you have to be accomplished in a sport already to play? There are different levels of sports, so while we have 38 interscholastic teams, that doesn't mean they're all varsity teams. You know, for example in field hockey and lacrosse that I coach, there's a varsity in the JV. Some of our JV kids are really gifted. Athletes have played a lot of club but we also got a couple kids to come out and say you know I'm an athlete and or maybe I'm not and I want to try this so we find a way to encourage all of our students to be a part of something.

We even have some freshman teams, and so there's a really good opportunity to sort of start, start kind of with your peer group, something new as well. We also have house sports so House sports is an option as you get to 10th and 11th grade you don't want to do an interscholastic sport. You can actually play like an intermural program against other houses, and I think that that's really fun because you know our students. I think really enjoy kind of the. I would say the sort of the the House competitiveness, House spirit and house.

Pride that comes along with that.

How many hours of homework are kids doing per day? So that's sort of depends a bit on what their courses are. We do regulate the amount of homework, so based on your class level you can only have X amount of homework per evening and I don't want to speak out of turn, but I believe it's something like 30 to 35 minutes for sort of, you know, an intro or like a freshman level class, maybe 40 minutes for a 400 level class, and then our honors classes, which are considered college level classes could be upwards of like.

60 minutes now that's not every single night that could be prior to the next time the class is meeting, so that could be broken up over time. Our kids are not overloaded with work, but there is a study hall that's carved out every night where there's class the next day, so you check into your house by about 8:00 o'clock and then you have study hall, so quiet time between about 8:00 and 10:00 and then roughly 10:50 is sort of quiet time where you're not kind of, you know you can go to someone else's room, kind of hang out, but you're not kind of having a big party upstairs because other people are still studying.

So that's about a three hour window right there, but you can check in as of 7:00 o'clock. So technically, if you really wanted to kind of grind through the night, you could be working from 7 to 11, but that's not usual. When I'm on duty in the dorm, usually girls are coming in around eight. They kind of hang out. I often bring brownies or something, and then, you know, they kind of get get their stuff together and start studying a little a few minutes after eight, you know, but I think here our kids are really busy. They really care about what they want, so they're good at planning ahead. You know they'll use? Oh, I've got some extra.

I'm here, I'm going to just kind of get once one subject of homework done, you know where I want to get ahead and I hear that a lot like I wanted to get ahead because I got a big game or big performance this week. So kids also plan that way so that they carve out time for the other things that they want to do.

Umm?

I'm looking at this. There's a question about fencing. OK, so there's a question about. Basically this was specific to fencing, but it's how. How does fencing and academic classes? How does that kind of work like how do we carve out that time? So if you looked at your day like a timeline roughly from about 8:30 to 3:00 every day, our class is depending on you know what classes you're taking and when they start, and then about 3:30 to 5:30 every day. Our athletics. You might have a little extra time if you're traveling for a meat or a game.

And typically most of our trips are not too far away. It's in time to get back for dinner.

But if not, you get real money because right up to TJ's and get a slice of pizza or something. But that time is carved out so there's no conflict between sort of your academic day and your athletic practices that times already carved out. And if kids have a lift or an on field agility session, something like that. The the strength and conditioning team is working with you. You might have a slight extension so I might have practice from 3:30 to 5:30 and then we might have a lift from 5:30 to 6:00, but everything's wrapped up in time for kids then to go to dinner. You know, shower, do what they want to do and then.

Get back to their dorms in time for their houses in time for study, help.

We talked about when the SSAT should be taken. As I mentioned probably November, December is probably the most common that gives you a little buffer so that if you you know were ill or something happened, they cancelled the test. You'd have an additional month of January to to take that test. So to make sure what's campus like on the weekends. So actually we don't clear out on the weekends. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of our day students come back so they are really busy. They're here, they're participating in whatever activities happening Saturday night it could be.

That we have kind of what we call like a drive-in movie where we put up a big screen and we project a movie and kids come and we sell popcorn and do stuff like that. There could be a dance there could be game night in your house, it could be a big barbecue. We've had Spike Ball tournaments so there's always a lot happening on Saturday nights. And that's really the kids big social night because we do have study Hall on Sunday nights because we have classes on Monday. So I think kids really like to take that time to socialize and to be out and about. So things really do not clear out Sunday would be the day where I think kids like to sleep in a little bit.

Maybe we have a really great brunch here on campus. If it's a beautiful day, they might be sitting outside and kind of doing work with their friends, taking a little bit easy before they use it to the evening tonight.

I'm I'm looking just to make sure. I think I've got most of these questions. Please do put anything in the chat. I don't see anything in there right now.

I'm just looking to make sure I've. I've think I've answered all the questions that are here, but I'm looking in the chat. I just don't see any additional ones. I'm not sure if anyone has anything, but please I do welcome you to put something into that chat and I can answer specific questions for you, so I'll just give it a second.

See if anyone's putting anything in there.

Maybe maybe.

Looks quiet in the chat.

Well, what I'll what I'm going to say is, I'm pleased if you, you know, do have additional questions. This is a lot of information to take in at once. We have a counselor on duty throughout the summer, so please, you know, reach out to the office at any of the contact information that's right here on the screen. Admission at lawrenceville.org is a great e-mail to use. You can call us and you can be connected to the counselor on duty. If you're specific questions you know I'm in the office this week actually, or I think we're off on Friday.

But if I if I'm not in an interview, I'm always happy to take a call to answer what I can for you. If you have something specific and you didn't want to put it in the chat, we just want to let you know a little bit more about us, and I think making school decisions are big decisions. So we want you to have as much information and knowledge as possible to make the right decision for you. There's a lot that goes into this process, but we want to make it as easy as possible for you. We want you to feel good about what you are doing about how you are. You know, going through this process, it should not feel overwhelming.

It should feel like, hey, this is the right fit. So we definitely want that for you as you as you decide to apply to Lawrenceville. But I guess if I'm not seeing any questions pop in right now and I'm just looking around both in the questions, the chat I'm going to sign off. But please do take a screenshot or something of the contact information here in front. And definitely you know OOP, and you know, let us let us know how we can be helpful as you sort of navigate.

You know your application process. We are always happy to help, so I hope everyone enjoys your day. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to me. I'll go through these slides and tell you a little bit more about who we are as a school and I look forward to seeing so many of you on campus. All right. So take care everyone. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time. Bye bye.