Middle School · Grades 6 to 8 · ages 11 to 14
The awkward years, taken seriously
Middle school is where curiosity most often dies, unless a school is designed to protect it. Ours is: advisory groups of eight, teachers who chose this age on purpose, and real work with real stakes, from the fabrication lab to the Grade 8 Ridge Hike.
- Class size
- 17 students; advisory groups of 8
- Tuition 2026-27
- $29,800 / year*
- Grades
- Grades 6 to 8
*Illustrative. See tuition & indexed tuition. This is a sample site.
What Middle School is built on
Four commitments, kept daily
Advisory at the centre
Every student meets their advisor daily in a group of eight, and the advisor is the family's single point of contact. Nobody falls through cracks that small.
Hands on the work
The Design & Fabrication Lab opens to students in Grade 6 (laser cutter, sewing machines, soldering irons), with projects graded on iteration, not polish.
Languages get real
Spanish and German move from games to grammar to actual letters. Grade 8 students keep a term-long letter exchange with partner classrooms abroad.
Bodies and nerves
Daily PE or team practice, and an outdoor-education thread that peaks in the two-night Grade 8 Ridge Hike every child trains for all fall.
A day in the life
What a real day here actually looks like
Here is an honest Thursday in Grade 7, including the parts other schools leave off the brochure, like the scramble to find a lost gym shoe.
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8:20
Advisory
Eight students, one advisor, fifteen minutes. A check-in question, the day's logistics, and whoever needs a quiet word gets one.
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8:40
Humanities double
This term's question: who gets remembered, and who does the remembering? Primary sources on the table, laptops closed for the first half-hour.
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10:20
Break
The Grade 7 hallway at full volume. A teacher referees the four-square line dispute with visible amusement.
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10:40
Math
Two flexible sections, regrouped each unit so nobody is stuck on a track at twelve. Today: linear relationships, argued over hot-glue bridge data from the lab.
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11:40
German
Herr Herrera switches the room to German at the door. The letter exchange with the Bremen partner class gets its weekly writing block.
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12:30
Lunch and clubs
Hot lunch, then twenty minutes of chess club, eco council, or determined loitering. All three are developmentally appropriate.
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1:15
Science
The creek data the Lower School collects becomes Grade 7's dataset: water chemistry, error bars, and the discovery that measurement is hard.
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2:15
Design & Fabrication Lab
Iteration three of the wind-turbine blades. The rule of the room: document the failure before you fix it.
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3:15
Team practice or activity block
Soccer and cross-country in fall. Everyone plays: Marlowe fields no-cut teams through Grade 8.
The Middle School signature
The Ridge Hike
Every Grade 8 student trains all fall for a two-night hike along the Elmbridge ridge, planning food, carrying their own pack, and leading a segment of the route. It is the hinge of a Marlowe childhood: the year they stop being looked after and start looking after each other.
“Grade 7 is when my son's old school lost him. Marlowe got him back. Mostly, I think, because his advisor noticed things before we did.”
Considering Middle School?
An honest word about admissions
Middle School applicants spend a full visit day with their grade. We're watching how they treat the lost kid at lunch, not auditing their marks.