Horace Mann School

The Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City founded in 1887. Horace Mann offers courses from nursery school to the twelfth grade and is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. The Upper, Middle, and Lower Divisions are located in Riverdale, a neighborhood of the Bronx, while the Nursery School is located in Manhattan and the John Dorr Nature Laboratory, a 275|acre (1.11288 km2)campus in Washington Depot, Connecticut, is the school's outdoor and community education center.

History
The school was founded in 1887 by Nicholas Murray Butler as a co-educational experimental and developmental unit of Teachers College at Columbia University. Its first location was a building at 9 University Place in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The school moved in 1901 to 120th Street in Morningside Heights. Columbia University followed suit soon afterwards, moving northwards to its present campus. The name of the school can still be seen on the northern-most building at the Columbia campus, named Horace Mann Hall, after education reformer Horace Mann. However, Horace Mann was becoming a school in its own right instead of a teaching laboratory, and it became more independent of the Columbia University and Teachers College. The Teachers College therefore created the Lincoln School, located on 110th Street, across the street from Central Park, to continue its experiments in teaching.

Shedding its co-educational roots, the school split into separate all-male and all-female schools. In 1914, the Boys' School moved to 246th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and during the 1940s it severed formal ties with Columbia University and became Horace Mann School. The Horace Mann School for Girls remained at Teachers College, and then merged with the Lincoln School in 1940, and finally closed in 1946.

The New York School for Nursery Years (founded in 1954 on 90th Street in Manhattan) became the Horace Mann School for Nursery Years in 1968, and was co-ed. In 1972, Horace Mann merged with the Barnard School, next door in Riverdale, to form the Horace Mann-Barnard Lower School for kindergarten through grade six, located on the former Barnard School campus. At that point, only the lower school was co-ed. That changed in 1975, when HM returned to its roots as a co-educational learning environment and began admitting females to the Upper School. The Class of 1976 is Horace Mann School's last all-male class. In 1999, the sixth grade moved from the Horace Mann-Barnard campus to the main 246th Street campus and formed a distinct Middle Division along with the seventh and eighth grades.

Divisions
Horace Mann just won their first MD football game in 3 years. There are four divisions of the school, all co-educational: a Nursery Division (three year olds through kindergarten) located on 90th Street in Manhattan, a Lower Division (kindergarten through fifth grades) on the Horace Mann campus on Tibbett Avenue in Riverdale, a Middle Division (sixth through eighth grades) on the 246th Street campus in Riverdale, and an Upper Division (ninth through twelfth grades) also on the 246th Street campus. There is also the John Dorr Nature Laboratory, located on 275 acres (1.11288 km2} of land in Washington Depot, Connecticut, used for extended field trips for classes of students starting in second grade and an orientation program for new students entering the Middle or Upper Divisions. The Dorr facility was recently renovated and is currently LEED-certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Current tuition for students in the Lower Division through the Upper Division is approximately $40,000 a year. Financial aid at the school is based on need; no merit scholarships are awarded. For the 2010-2011 academic year, 17% of the students received more than $7,400,000 in aid.

Each division of the school has its own Division Head. The Middle and Upper Divisions have separate student government bodies. The entire school is overseen by a Head of School. The ninth and current Head is Dr. Thomas M. Kelly, who previously served as Superintendent of Schools in Valhalla, New York. Kelly succeeded Dr. Eileen Mullady (who is currently the head of the Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, CA), on July 1, 2005. Formerly of Princeton University and the Lawrenceville School, Dr. Mullady was the namesake of one of the new buildings erected under her term. Prior to Dr. Mullady, the long-standing Head was the late R. Inslee Clark, Jr., previously Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale University.

The current Horace Mann Nursery Division Head is Marcia Levy, who replaced Patricia Zuroski when she was appointed to the position of Director of Diversity Initiatives. The current Lower Division Head is Wendy Steinthal, replacing Dr. Steven B. Tobolsky, who departed in June 2007 to run the Chestnut Hill School, an elite N-6 prep school outside Boston. The current Middle Division Head is Robin Ann Ingram, and the current Upper Division head is Dr. David Schiller. Glenn Sherratt is the current Director of the John Dorr Nature Laboratory.

Academics
Horace Mann is known for its large number of college level courses. The school offers 20 Advanced Placement courses and 10 foreign languages. Its 220 faculty members hold 210 master's degrees and 34 doctoral degrees.

Students in the Upper Division are required to study English, World History, United States History, Biology, Chemistry and/or Physics, Geometry, Algebra II and Trigonometry, and also meet various requirements in the Arts, Computer Science, Health & Counseling, and Physical Education. Students must go beyond these basic requirements in at least some, if not all, subjects. They are also required to take at least three years of either French, German, Japanese, Latin, or Spanish. Additional classes in Greek, Italian, Mandarin, and Russian are offered.

Starting in eleventh grade, students have more flexibility with their requirements and can choose from courses in Economics, Psychology, Classical History, Government, Religion, Political Philosophy, United States Legal History, Calculus, Statistics, Science and Public Policy, among other elective classes.

Independent Study and Senior Projects, where students create their own coursework and present their findings in weekly meetings, are also common. Additionally, many students develop original research projects with faculty at Columbia University, Cornell University Medical Center, NYU, and Rockefeller University.

Arts
Horace Mann has an extensive arts program. The offerings include courses in the performing and visual arts. At least 1.5 arts credits are required for graduation, with at least one half-credit course in performance/studio arts and one half-credit course in art history/appreciation.

Horace Mann has two major instrumental ensembles: The Horace Mann Orchestra and the Horace Mann Jazz Band. The Jazz Band program is also split into two ensembles: the Contemporary Directions Ensemble and the Creative Arts Philharmonic. Each ensemble performs at least three to four concerts per year, culminating in a trip abroad. Recent trips have taken the Glee Club and Orchestra to Prague, Germany, France and Spain. Horace Mann also has an established Glee Club, which performs several concerts each year, including past performances at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, and Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center. In 2006, the Jazz Bands performed at the world-famous BB King's jazz club. On February 25, 2007, the Horace Mann Jazz Band and Concert Band performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the world-famous Allen Room. The next month the Middle Division concert band and chamber orchestra went to compete in a Heritage Festival and each won gold medals with scores above 95. Additionally, the Jazz Band has most recently performed at a couple of the world's most famous jazz clubs, Birdland and, again, B.B. King's.

Admission
Admission to Horace Mann is highly selective. Decisions are based on an applicant's recent grades, an interview, and the candidate's score on either the ISEE or SSAT test.

Sixth grade is Horace Mann's largest entry point, with between 50 and 55 places available each year. In the ninth grade, Horace Mann traditionally enrolls between 40 and 45 new students. A smaller number of students are accepted in other grades, although there are no admissions to the twelfth grade.

Rankings
Forbes Magazine ranks Horace Mann as the second best preparatory school in the country. The Wall Street Journal ranks Horace Mann as the fourth best high school in the United States, as measured by student admission rates to exclusive colleges. Each year almost all Horace Mann graduates attend highly selective universities. Worth magazine ranked Horace Mann seventh out of all the nation's high schools based on the proportion of graduates attending Harvard, Yale and Princeton Universities.

Student life
Co-curricular activities are an integral part of Horace Mann. Clubs give students the opportunity to produce publications, hone their debating skills, participate in activism and much more.

Clubs and organizations
The school has a considerable number of clubs, especially in the Upper Division. Prominent clubs include:

Student Politics
Student Government is made up of many different councils and positions. The main branch of the Student Government is the school's "Governing Council", previously known as the Community Council, or GC. The GC has five full time elected members and two alternates representing each grade (9th, 10th, 11th...), except for the 12th Grade, which has five full time representatives and one alternate. Due to the significantly less faculty members on the council, each voting faculty representatives has two votes. Only full time representatives can vote. Each year a Chair is elected to oversee the meetings, which are typically once a week, on Tuesdays. The Chair of the GC is elected by the representatives (though the Chair is typically a Senior), everyone on the council gets a vote, including alternate representatives. Over the years the GC has removed the once-strict dress code (this was accomplished in 1969, when the structure was known as the Community Council), instituted an honor code, begun a debit card system to pay for items at the cafeteria and bookstore, and revised the school's constitution. The school also has a Student Body President and a Student Body Vice-President (SBP and SBVP), which are elected by the entire Upper Division and the eighth grade.

Student publications
Horace Mann also has a significant number of student publications. Many of them have won national awards. Prominent publications include:

The Record, established in 1903, is the weekly, student-run newspaper. Throughout its history, The Record has won national journalism awards and has been staffed by students who went on to become distinguished journalists and authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Lewis (class of 1944), Richard Kluger (class of 1952) and Robert Caro (class of 1953). In 1954, Horace Mann made national headlines for translating a copy of The Record into Russian and distributing it in the USSR. The purpose of the exercise was to show Russian schoolchildren what life in America was like. The staff purposely kept in an article about the Horace Mann soccer team's losing one of its games to demonstrate the operation of an independent free press. The American Scholastic Press Association twice honored The Record as the "Best High School Weekly Newspaper" for 2001-2002 (Volume 99) and 2003-2004 (Volume 101). It was also named a National Pacemaker in 2004 (Volume 101) and in 2006 was a Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Medalist (Volume 103). The Record is published every Friday during the academic year and can be found online here.

The Horace Mann Review, now in its twentieth volume, is a journal of opinion on current events, politics, public policy, and culture. The Review covers issues from unique and otherwise unexamined perspectives. The publication has paying subscribers throughout the nation and abroad and has been the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in journalism. In April 2001, the American Scholastic Press Association (ASPA) honored the Review with its award for Best Magazine. The Review's 2005-2006 volume was honored with a first place finish in the American Scholastic Press Awards critique. The Review is a finalist for the National Scholastic Press Association's Magazine Pacemaker of the Year award for 2007, the highest honor in high school journalism. The Review was again awarded the ASPA's Best Magazine Award in 2009 for its eighteenth volume. The Review can be found online here.

The Mannikin is the yearbook of the Horace Mann School. Traditional sections include Student Life, Underclassmen, Seniors (each graduate receives a half-page to design as they wish), Athletics, Faculty, and Advertisements. At 560 pages, the Mannikin is one of the largest high school yearbooks in New York State. In addition, the Mannikin has won numerous awards from the American Scholastic Press Association.

HM Voyager is Horace Mann's first magazine dedicated to travel. In 2007, the American Scholastic Press Association honored the Voyager with its Best New Magazine award. In addition, the Voyager's 2006-2007 volume received First Place with Special Merit in the American Scholastic Press Awards critique.

Manuscript is Horace Mann's poetry publication. Poems are accompanied by beautiful artwork, which allows viewers to draw many interpretations and viewpoints from the poetry.

Insight is the photography publication of the Horace Mann School. Photographs are selected on the basis of composure, aesthetic quality, and professionalism in order to create a well-organized, pleasing publication.

Folio 51 is Horace Mann's magazine dedicated to women's issues. The publication has been honored by American Scholastic Press Association in the past few years, notably winning First Place in the magazine category and Best Outstanding Theme.

Double Play is Horace Mann's sports publication, featuring articles covering all sports, with season previews, recaps, and analysis.

Other school publications include: Prime, a math magazine, Overheard Voices, a playwriting publication,Word, the revival of longstanding prose publication Legal Fiction, The MannHattan Review [sic], the school's magazine on issues relating to New York City, Mental Boom, a creative writing magazine, The Score, a sports newspaper, Amplified, a music publication (website here), Images, an art magazine, the Thespian, a theatre publication, Cinemann, a magazine related to current movies Lola's Kitchen, a one-page periodical published by the Gay Straight Alliance,  La Plume, a language publication ,and InsideOut'', a health publication. In addition, a literary-arts magazine called Muse, featuring the work of Middle School students, is published each year.

Interscholastic leagues
Horace Mann School is a part of the Ivy Preparatory School League, a division of the greater New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS), which comprises all the private schools in the New York State. Fieldston, Riverdale, and Horace Mann together are known as the "Hilltop schools," as all three are located within two miles (3 km) of each other in the Riverdale-Fieldston section of the Bronx, on a hill, literally, above Van Cortlandt Park. The three also share a great interscholastic sports rivalry; Horace Mann's annual charity basketball game, the Buzzell Game, is almost always versus Riverdale, and sometimes Fieldston.

Sports teams
^- boys' volleyball takes place during the spring, while girls' takes place in the fall
 * V = Varsity, JV = Junior Varsity, MD = Middle Division

Athletic accomplishments
The Horace Mann MD football teem recently won their first 2 football games against Poly prep, and Dalton. It was their first win in 3 years. Horace Mann's Boys Varsity Tennis team has won the New York City Mayor's Cup Team Competition six times since 1994; its most recent victory was in 2010, where they defeated Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, 3-2. 2010 marked the fourth time the tennis team has won the competition in the last five years. In 2006, the Boys Varsity Tennis team placed 5th in the All-American Invitational Boys Team Tennis Tournament beating the defending champions Santa Barbara High School. In 2007, the Boys Varsity Tennis team placed 9th in the tournament, winning the consolation round. They also won the sportsmanship award. In 2008, the Boys Varsity Tennis team placed 6th in the tournament.

Pedro Alvarez (class of 2005) was drafted as the 2nd overall pick of the 2008 Major League Baseball draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates. He attended Vanderbilt University, where he was named a First Team All-American in 2007 and National Freshman of the Year in 2006.

Charles Altchek (class of 2003), of the Harvard Varsity Men's Soccer Team, was named Ivy League Player of the Year in 2005 and 2006.

The Girls' Varsity Gymnastics Team has won the AAIS Championships 7 times since its first win in 1999. In 2000, the team placed second by a margin on 0.025 points. The following year, the girls regained their title and have had 6 consecutive wins since then.

In 2005-2006, the Boys' Varsity Swimming Team completed their first undefeated season in the history of the Ivy League with a 6-0 league record (6-1 overall, including a loss to St Benedict's). The team has continued to have a stellar record, getting first place in the Ivy League championships in 7 out of the past 8 years.

The Horace Mann Wrestling team won the city-wide Mayor's Cup in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The team has also won the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Championships eight of the last nine years.

The Horace Mann Girls' Cross Country Team had an exceptional record under the appointment of Coach Kevin Nicholas. In their first year under his guidance, the girls were Ivy League champions and New York State Federation qualifiers. In 2003, they won the NYSAISAA Championships. In 2006, they took 2nd at the Ivy League Championships, 3rd at NYSAIS, and qualified for Federation yet again. In the 2007 season, the team took 3rd at the Ivy League Championships, and 6th at NYSAIS. Horace Mann Girls' Indoor Track won the Ivy League Championships for 2006. Horace Mann Girls' Outdoor Track and Field won Ivy Championships as well as NYSAIS Championships for 2006. They also placed 2nd at Croton Harmon relays. The Girls' Outdoor Track Team won the Ivy League Championship in 2007, dominating the league for the fourth straight year. They went on to win the 2007 NYSAIS Championship as well. The Boys' Outdoor Track & Field Team also had an exceptional season in 2007, placing second to nationally-ranked Collegiate in both the Ivy and NYSAIS Championships.

In 2007, the 4x200 meter relay team of Girls' Indoor Track dominated the Ivy League as well as the entire New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS). They advanced to the New York State Indoor Track & Field Championships, a remarkable feat for a private school, where they placed third overall in the state. The girls then qualified for the 2007 National Scholastic Indoor Championships, where they placed fifth. In June 2007, the 4x200 meter relay team once again proved they were a national-caliber team, placing ninth at Nike Outdoor Nationals. In addition, the girls earned fifteenth in the country in the 4x100 meter relay and twelfth in the Sprint Medley Relay.

In 2009, Horace Mann Volleyball placed second at the NYSAIS Championship.

Recently, Horace Mann's water polo team has emerged as a highly successful program, showing an 8-2 record in 2008. In response to its wildly successful 2008 season, which included defeats of highly ranked teams in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, the team has been invited to several high caliber tournaments for the 2009 season, including the Beast of the East tournament.

Notable alumni
Category:Horace Mann School alumni
 * Pedro Alvarez, class of 2005, professional baseball player
 * Erik Barnouw, writer, critic,documentary filmmaker, Columbia University professor
 * William Barr, former US Attorney General
 * Josh Bernstein, class of 1989 - host of The History Channel's Digging For the Truth
 * Amy S. Bruckman, class of 1983, Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and selected as one of Technology Review's 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
 * Robert Caro, class of 1953, author and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
 * Elliott Carter, composer and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
 * Peter Cincotti, class of 2001, jazz pianist
 * Roy Cohn, aide to Joe McCarthy, lawyer in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial
 * Peter Deutsch, former congressman
 * Martin Duberman, class of 1948, author and gay rights historian.
 * Seymour Durst, prominent real estate developer
 * Morris Leopold Ernst, lawyer and co-founder the American Civil Liberties Union
 * Alan Furst, novelist
 * Ivan Fisher, prominent white collar criminal defense attorney
 * Henry Geldzahler, class of 1953, art critic, curator, New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, (1977–1982)
 * Alison Gertz, early AIDS activist
 * Robert Heilbroner, economist, historian of economic thought, author
 * Anthony Hecht, poet
 * E.J. Kahn, class of 1933, pillar of The New Yorker, author and journalist
 * Richard Kluger, class of 1952, author and Pulitzer Prize winner
 * Sir Thomas Legg, senior British civil servant
 * Tom Lehrer, political satirist and math professor
 * Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives
 * Anthony Lewis, class of 1944, journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
 * Allard K. Lowenstein, civil rights leader and former congressman
 * Joshua Malina, actor and member of the cast of the television series The West Wing
 * Eric Mindich, head of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management
 * Martin Moynihan, class of 1946, ethologist and founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama
 * Kenneth Pollack, analyst and author on Middle East affairs
 * James Salter, class of 1942, writer
 * Barry Scheck, class of 1967, member of legal team that successfully defended O.J. Simpson; attorney and founder of the Innocence Project
 * William Carlos Williams, class of 1903, medical doctor and poet; Pulitzer Prize winner

Writer Jack Kerouac attended Horace Mann for one year of high school as part of the class of 1940 and played on the football team. Hollywood agent and Broadway producer Leland Hayward also attended.

Miscellaneous
The school's motto is "Magna est veritas et prævalet," meaning "Great is the truth, and it prevails." It comes from the King James version of the Old Testament, which is usually translated today as "Magna est veritas et prævalebit," or will prevail. The school mascot is a lion, possibly a holdover from the days when the school was associated with Columbia University, whose mascot is also a lion. The Swim and Water Polo Teams have adopted the Sea Lion as their unofficial mascots, as the Varsity Ski Team has the Mountain Lion.

All students are required to take American Red Cross CPR certification, as well as a swim test, in order to graduate. Horace Mann students are also required to complete at least 80 hours of community service, with at least 40 hours in ninth and tenth grades and 40 hours in eleventh and twelfth. In eighth grade, one out-of-school project or three in-school projects are necessary for graduation to the ninth grade; in sixth and seventh grades a homeroom project is done cooperatively. In the Lower and Nursery Divisions, there is no community service requirement, although there is an annual "Caring-in-Action" day dedicated to community service that students and their families can attend.

Several films have been shot on the Horace Mann campus over the years, including Splendor in the Grass and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.