School portraits / School life · A kindergarten Mountain Day
On Mountain Day, Brearley's Kindergartners Climbed the School
Each fall the older girls go north to a state park. The Lower School gets its own excursions, and they shrink, one grade at a time.
Mountain Day at the Brearley School in Manhattan began in 1983, when the head of school modeled it on a Smith College tradition for the school's centennial. Every autumn, Middle and Upper School students and teachers go north for a day outdoors. In the year the school wrote up, it was Rockland Lake State Park: cloudless skies, kickball, volleyball, cornhole, singing along to Taylor Swift, and a three-mile hike around the lake led by the head of school.
The Lower School, the school explains, has recently started a Mountain Day of its own. Each grade gets its own excursion. Read in order, they make the best countdown I have seen in a school newsletter.
Class IV took a bus to a YMCA camp in New Jersey.
Class III went to the Bronx Zoo.
Class II went to Central Park.
Class I went to the Transit Museum.
"Finally, the Ks climbed Mount Brearley." Mount Brearley is the building. The kindergartners walked up all twelve flights, "14 if you count A and B decks below ground," and got to see the big kids' school up close for the first time. They explored the library, the gym and the art floor, and spent some time in the head of school's office.
I respect this enormously. Every expedition needs a summit, and every kindergartner needs to know that the summit of a school is the head's office, reached on foot, with permission. I have reached a head's office twice in my life, and both times I took the elevator and was not offered the sofa.
We tried it at home. The youngest and I climbed our house: basement, kitchen, landing, attic, counting the basement steps the way Brearley counts its decks. Fourteen flights, if you're generous, which she was. At the summit there was no head of school, only boxes of my old tax returns, and she asked if she could have a turn in my office now. I said that was the office.
Brearley likes a ritual with a handover. Each Middle and Upper School class has its own mascot, passed from the graduating seniors to Class IV every May at a Mascot Assembly that dates back to at least 1923, with both classes singing. The mascots include Theodore the Bear, Fridgie the Penguin, Socrates the Owl and Olaffub the Buffalo, which is buffalo backwards.
The kindergartners climbing Mount Brearley this year will, in time, be the seniors handing over a penguin. They will take the stairs every day by then and not call it a mountain. The youngest, meanwhile, has renamed our landing Base Camp and charges me a sticker to pass.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Mountain Day — The Brearley School brearley.org
- Brearley: History and class mascots brearley.org
- Brearley virtual tour: Common Room and Friday Flower brearley.org
- Brearley public parent and student reviews niche.com