Why Nursery to eighth grade

By not having a high school, Gordon keeps the focus exclusively on younger students. Educational research and Gordon’s one hundred years of experience with this model have reinforced that it best serves the educational, social and emotional needs of children. 

At Gordon, children can remain children, in the best possible sense, until they graduate from eighth grade. During these critical eleven years, Gordon students take more risks, try more activities, and grow into confident, empathic and engaged leaders. 

The nursery to eighth grade structure allows Gordon to connect children across age levels, promoting a schoolwide sense of community and making key social skills, like empathy and kindness, part of the day-to-day experience. Through informal connections as well as structured cross-grade affinity groups, after school programs and classroom activities, younger students learn directly from older peers, and the older students learn to be leaders and models.

Friends ask me, 'But where will they go for high school?!' My response is that it doesn’t matter; I’m so confident that by the time my children graduate from Gordon, they’ll have gained all of the skills they need to be successful anywhere, regardless of which specific high school they attend.

Parent of two Gordon students