Throughout the 2021-22 school year, numerous distinguished guests visited Friends Select or spoke at school-sponsored events, either in person or virtually, to share their expertise and experiences with our community.
Select News
The ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new Parkway Building spaces kicked off our academic year with a great deal of excitement. It marked the culmination of the Advance Friends Select: Transformation Campaign, our strategic plan that continues to guide the decisions we are making to ensure dynamic and engaging teaching and learning are happening in our classrooms.
The momentum of the Advance Friends Select: Transformation Campaign continues with the expansion of Friends Select’s campus across 16th Street. Work is under way on the historic townhome at 1520 Race Street, which will officially become the upper school’s center for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM), with four floors and 15,000 square feet for classrooms, laboratories, and studios.
Designed by James Bradberry Architects, Friends Select’s newly transformed Parkway Building spaces are modern and inviting. However, the state-of-the-art design of the new lower school classrooms, art studio, and lobby is deeply rooted in Friends Select’s commitment to excellence in teaching and learning and best practices in education.
The past two years have called on us individually and as an institution to reexamine long-held assumptions, beliefs, norms, and ways of being. Throughout this issue of Select News, you will read about the ways that Friends Select is thinking and acting differently with increased clarity about our mission.
For the past three years at Friends Select School, Social Justice Week has become a fixture of the upper school’s educational program.
Alumni Stories
Two Friends Select alumni, Jack Gontowski and Phil Sieg, shared their on-the-job experiences in engineering-focused co-ops.
In a Virtual Speaker Series event last February, Andrea Kremer ’76 and Michael Harris ’88 spoke to Friends Select students, employees, and families about COVID-19’s impact on the world of professional sports.
“I can remember studying college material as early as junior year, so a lot of the advanced curriculum I experienced at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was familiar to me from high school,” said Imon Rahaman ’16, on how his Friends Select education prepared him for the intensity of MIT’s bioengineering program.
AuxeticBreath, by Hyejun Youn ’14, was exhibited this past February at the 15th annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI), a convention addressing issues of human-computer interaction, novel tools and technologies, interactive art, and user experience.
Maia Weintraub’s busy summer started with her graduation from Friends Select School. A lifer who attended Friends Select for 14 years, Maia began attending Princeton University this fall. But first she traveled to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, as a member of the U.S. delegation for fencing.