Why St. Peter’s School
St. Peter’s School is small. With twelve people in my graduating class, size is often the first thing that I mention when I describe the school to others, largely for the response that the account tends to draw:
“But didn’t you all ever fight?”
“Did everyone make friends in such a small group?”
“Couldn’t the teachers - find you?”
The answers, of course, are yes, yes and yes. Anyone familiar with St. Peter’s knows that two of its defining qualities are its size and scope as a preschool through eighth grade institution. These attributes are touted as valuable for academic development, and certainly St. Peter’s students benefit from close relationships with their teachers. Yet ten years after graduation, what I appreciate most about St. Peter’s is not only the teachers themselves (and there were several who were educators for the ages), but the way in which the environment of the school itself shaped us all. The qualities of size and scope that I once appreciated only vaguely as a feeling of comfort when I walked through the front door I now understand were impacting me and my classmates by creating something special and increasingly rare - a place to be known, a place to know others and a place to experience the process of maturing as a series of rewards and responsibilities rather than hurdles.
What does it mean to be known or to truly know others? I found that the experience at St. Peter’s was manifold. In such a small environment, my classmates and I learned the best, and sometimes the far less than best, qualities of one another. We learned to appreciate that friendships could not, and should not, be abandoned, and that our actions had consequences not only for ourselves, but for others. We learned about teachers often long before we ascended to their grade or classroom, and found that once there they knew a good deal about us. Yet rather than feel that we became branded, fully formed individuals before we had the chance to make our own first impression, my classmates and I also learned that being known meant that our capacity for growth was never underestimated. In the small environment of St. Peter’s, relationships were lived everyday, with each moment an opportunity to gain further understanding of a friend, a teacher, a subject and all that lay in between.
However, the experience of knowing and of being known did not occur within individual relationships alone. A key component of life at St. Peter’s was an understanding of how our development through the years would give us new rights and responsibilities acknowledged by the school community. I remember so clearly how I looked forward to particular steps - the new dances to learn for May Day, the beginning of hand bells, the plays or special assemblies that accompanied each grade - as important turning points not only for the skills gained but for what they signaled about our growing maturity. We were getting older, and in the close-knit environment of St. Peter’s that growth was recognized. Though I hesitate to make too anthropological a point of it, it feels important now that the process of maturing was marked by literal rights of passage. While friends at other schools often seemed mystified by what was expected of them from peers or teachers, we knew, in some small way, how to grow up. We knew what responsibilities, academic topics, performances and sports teams attended each grade; we knew what roles we would play in traditions that we had participated in for years. That knowledge and that participation meant that assuming those roles became an important marker of growing up. Whether or not we understood it at the time, I believe that we felt responsible both to one another and to ourselves precisely because we were part of a larger community that explicitly understood our journey. We were known, and so we mattered.
By the time graduation came, everyone in my class was ready for the next step. I’ve heard countless St. Peter’s students describe their classmates as siblings, and like siblings there comes a time when a broader social landscape is exciting. Nonetheless, I remember being struck when I arrived in high school at the extent to which the very presence of grades nine through twelve in a kindergarten through twelfth grade school had influenced the experience of my peers in their middle school years. By looking to twelfth rather than eighth graders as the epitome of maturity, students in fourth, fifth and sixth grades got a very different message of what it meant to be a teenager. This is not to say that St. Peter’s students were unaware of anyone over the age of fourteen, but I believe that there was a real benefit to an environment where eighth graders had the opportunity to be leaders in their own right. I was surprised to learn that the feeling of leadership, confidence and ownership that came with being an eighth grader at St. Peter’s was no where to be found amongst my high school peers. Eighth grade was a pit stop on the way to high school rather than a culmination of perhaps the most important developmental period of one’s life. Feeling confident, assuming responsibility, and being a leader were perhaps the most lasting experiences that I or any of my classmates gained at St. Peter’s, and I think that it’s no accident that those experiences occurred in a K-8 environment.
Of course, I appreciated little of this while I was a student at St. Peter’s. I was more concerned with friends or the folios, with basketball or with pre-algebra. I now see those very concerns as the freedom that St. Peter’s provided. I wasn’t worried about pressure from peers to do things I didn’t want to do; I wasn’t anxious about which class track I might get placed in or how to handle cliques. Though early adolescence is always difficult, I understand now that being known at St. Peter’s was the foundation my classmates and I needed to have the confidence to grow up with integrity, and with the knowledge that maturing was both a right and responsibility. It is an experience that I now appreciate as rare, as precious, and as one for which I am grateful.
