Program areas at The Sage School
Education: our goal is to create an intensive, experiential learning environment for adolescents that is committed to educational excellence and The development of self-awarness through community action, and humanitarian and ecological responsibility. The Sage School is a progressive School, dedicated to a transdisciplinary, project based, authentic, and playfully rigorous curriculum. This curriculum is delivered by teams of faculty working closely together in small groups. These groups are nimble, adaptive, and responsive. The commitment to this team structure, which provides everything from The rapid prototyping of ideas to a critical collegial perspective, is essential to The delivery of our program, to keeping a low student to teacher ratio, and to delivering The most dynamic educational experiences we can.
Field studies - all education is experiential. The critical question is "what is The quality and nature of those experiences?" We believe our students should be immersed in and interact with The world around them- in their immediate communities, in The regions surrounding The School, and in environments from rural to urban to international.our field studies program takes our students into The field 20-25 days a year- over 140 days in 7 years; The equivalent of an additional year of School. Field studies are designed for students to directly experience The world around them. They include everything from simple field trips to local art museums, to a 15 day international trip to ecuador for all of our seniors. The best field studies intentionally blend The critical areas of adolescent development- they are academic, they are cognitive, they are social, and they are emotional. Through these experiences, our students come to know The critical elements of how humans interact with their social, built, and natural environments; students develop genuine community understanding and responsibility; students learn deeply a sense of their place; and, ultimately, students develop a strong sense of who they are.
Financial assistance: our mission is to provide a School for adolescents. While our tuition is all-inclusive--we do not charge families additional fees for materials, for field study trips, or for other programming--we also appreciate that there are many families who cannot afford our School and so have instituted a flexible tuition model. Families can apply to pay an amount less than full tuition, based on their financial circumstances. In fiscal year 2022-23, 34% of our families paid flexible tuition, ranging from 19% to 81% of our full tuition amount. We believe this supports our educational values, our desire to make our School as broadly available to members of our community as possible, and our hope for a diverse student body.