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College Counseling

Harley’s Approach to College Counseling is highly individualized and student-centered. Students have direct access to college counselors throughout their Upper School experience, but really, each student is part of a team including faculty, administration, and staff. It’s our job to support each student and we want nothing more than to send students on to the next step of their journey at a right fit school for them. The student centered and driven process is wrapped in care, expertise, and professionalism.

We host college reps during times students are available (no need to miss a class) so they can make connections and learn more about potential schools. We also arrange campus visits for classes as field trips, host an alumni college day (where recent Upper School graduates return to share advice and answer questions), and help connect students with our international alumni network. In fact, representatives from schools all over the world actively seek opportunities to come to Harley and meet with our students!

Our college counselors are accredited and are part of national/global conversations on admission trends. They also attend and present at conferences across the country.

Beginning with our Grade 11 parent night, we offer informational sessions for parents, including one devoted just to financial aid. Our partnership with families is critical, as the college admissions world changes very quickly and having an expert to guide students and families through the process is essential.

View the downloadable College Counseling Guide

Clubs

“Club Rush” is an afternoon every fall in the Upper School when students have the chance to sign up for clubs for the year, and each year it is very different because new clubs are created based on student initiative and enthusiasm.

A few of this year’s choices: Sports Media, Social Action Club, Journalism Club, Feminism Club, Student of Color & Allies (SOCA), Gay-Straight Alliance, Tri M (music honor society), E-Sports Club, Euchre, Key Club (service), Animation Club, Dungeons & Dragons, Sustainability Club, Jewish Cultural Club, Astronomy Club, Biomimicry, and Beyond Soup (social justice/service).

Athletics

​Each and every year, students at The Harley School participate in HAC Athletics, and their success continues to be impressive, both as students and athletes. Our athletic program is an integral part of Harley, teaching student-athletes invaluable lessons about teamwork, time management, persistence, and competition.  Our program allows them to develop physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally as they represent their school on and off the field. They grow, mature, and work hard to be the best teammate they can, while creating lifelong memories with teammates who often remain friends for life. 

Helping our athletes to reach their potential are some of HAC’s best assets: our coaches. More often than not, they are drawn from the ranks of our faculty and  have a deep understanding of the personalities and abilities of the student-athletes on their teams.  

We strive to find the right balance of academics, exercise, and personal growth for everyone.  By offering a variety of sports at many different levels, all student-athletes find a sport they can be successful in. It is with great pride and pleasure that my team and I work to enrich the athletic lives of all our HAC student-athletes. Go Wolves! 

To learn more check out our athletics page.

Student Leadership

Our Upper School is filled with formal and informal opportunities for students to take on leadership roles. Whether following passions or learning new skills, student-driven opportunities take many shapes.

– Independent study: one trimester, full year, and multi-year projects have included automating our solar chimneys, coding handmade musical instruments, or developing a class on financial literacy for underserved high school students.

– Serving on student council

– STEM: Climate curriculum program, biomimicry program, NASA Hunch program

Clubs

“Club Rush” is an afternoon every fall in the Upper School when students have the chance to sign up for clubs for the year, and each year it is very different because new clubs are created based on student initiative and enthusiasm.

A few of this year’s choices: Sports Media, Social Action Club, Journalism Club, Feminism Club, Student of Color & Allies (SOCA), Gay-Straight Alliance, Tri M (music honor society), E-Sports Club, Euchre, Key Club (service), Animation Club, Dungeons & Dragons, Sustainability Club, Jewish Cultural Club, Astronomy Club, Biomimicry, and Beyond Soup (social justice/service).

Hospice

Unlike this class, death is not an elective. Although it is one of two universal human experiences, our culture often ignores, denies, or misconstrues the true nature of death and dying. What happens when we bear witness to this natural process in the cycle of life and develop our ability to be fully present with others when they need us more than ever? It has the potential to change us deeply and fundamentally while shining a brilliant light on the path of our own lives.

With the support of their classmates, teacher, and comfort care home communities, senior students are offered the chance to care for others who truly need their purposeful, non-judgmental attention. In the home-like setting of a comfort care home, opportunities for learning extend beyond a traditional classroom rubric and conventional methods of evaluation. In this course, students will certainly find tangible “learning outcomes” by studying the medical/physical processes associated with dying and the basic nursing assistant skills of comfort care. The ultimate goal, however, will always be rooted in true relationships and connection, which occurs only through empathy and compassion.

Learn more about the Hospice Program at Harley HERE.

Capstone/Independent Studies

This program utilizes environmentally-focused approaches to education and hands-on learning in order to foster the next generation of leaders through a lens of sustainability and problem-solving.

Food & Farm: These year-long and trimester-long classes are held outside as much as possible, allowing students to become leaders in our various growing spaces. They cover environmental justice issues as well as hands-on work such as planning and overseeing planting, harvesting, and preparation of the gardens.

Past year-long focus projects have included: Creating a native plant shade garden in the Wild Wood area, redesigning our hydroponic system, overhauling Harley’s high tunnel, and improving the irrigation system for the MicroFarm.

Culinary Arts: These classes have a two-fold purpose: to give students practical skills in cooking and the science behind different techniques in the kitchen, learning about food justice, food sourcing, labor topics, and sustainability.

Past topics have included: Examining a plant-based diet, looking at the carbon footprint of different meals and food preparation methods, proposing a low carbon footprint menu to the dining hall, links between food labeling and environmental issues of food production.

Beekeeping: This one trimester class provides hands-on training in beekeeping, how to be a beekeeper, and safety and other techniques for working with bees. Once trained students help with all aspects of Harley beekeeping such as hive inspections, honey collection and extraction, and teaching students in Lower School about our hives.

Students pick a research topic addressing honeybee health and the larger environmental picture.

Social Justice

At Harley, our students learn how to evaluate social systems in order to identify complex problems in society through a lens of social justice. They take a hands-on approach to working for a fair, equitable society by researching, exploring and evaluating different perspectives, and offering solutions—both theoretical and practical.

Our faculty integrate social justice into our broader curriculum to assist students in gaining a foundational knowledge about what makes a democracy function. By gaining skills in ideating supportive pathways they become more exposed and experienced to how communities can undergo healing and restorative actions.

 

Capstone/Independent Studies

Students may create independent studies with supervising teachers throughout their Upper School experience or, during Grade 12, they can design Capstone projects—intensive collaborations with Harley faculty and off-campus mentors—involving rigorous academic study and culminating in public presentations. They are empowered to create their own curriculum, set goals, and work on time management skills in order to accomplish their objectives.

Independent Studies run the gamut from The Psychology of Sports to Furniture Design to The Neuroimaging of Alzheimer’s Disease. Capstones, meanwhile, are as diverse as the students who pursue them: Fictional Rochester, Autobiographical Art, Biomimicry Education, Organic Fuel, and Rochester Refugees. 

Indicative of Upper School curiosity and creativity, pursuits such as these distinguish our graduates in college. Through deep dives of this sort, Harley students master more than speaking, writing, and computing: they learn to communicate, advocate, collaborate, organize, listen, and empathize. 

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Joy Moss: Storytelling Roots

In Every Issue

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By the Numbers

From the Archives

What’s (Who’s) New at Harley

Divisional Highlights

Alumni Profile: Vandebroek

Alumni Profiles: Keller

HAC Athletics

2021 Lives of Great Purpose Awards

1000 Words

Commencement 2022

Reunion 2022

In Memoriam

Retirements and Fond Farewells

Divisional Highlights

Lower School

Simple Machines, 

Complex Thinking

This unit harnesses the power of learning through play to help students understand complex physics topics while solving authentic problems

Students in Grade 4 created machines à la Rube Goldberg in Harley’s Makerspace as part of a project combining lessons about physics and simple machines using things like ramps, screws, and levers to solve a problem.
Goldberg was a popular comic book artist in the first half of the 1900s, known for depicting complicated gadgets. The cartoons presented incredibly complex machines doing ordinary, everyday tasks, like switch- ing off a light, turning a page, or swatting a fly.
For example, students designing a Rube Goldberg machine might build a system of pulleys and inclined planes to simply ring a bell or water a plant. They began learning about kinetic and potential energy while working in teams to create catapults.

Trial and error are a large component of this assignment, and students have fun seeing what works and what doesn’t turn out quite as planned.
“Students learn how actual drawings can be turned into their solutions—by exploring the question, How do I get something to perform a function for me? They discover ways to create something that’s in their minds, build it, and make sure their solution completes the assigned task,” said Harley’s Maker Educator, Kima Enerson. “We take time when we start the unit to walk around School and look at all the simple machines we interact with, but don’t often have the opportunity to manipulate. This becomes their chance to make something happen using simple machines in a context where they are choosing which to try and in what order.”

Divisional Highlights

Middle School

Bee Club Debuts

One Of the great things about being upstairs in our Middle School is that the Harley bee hives are right outside the hallway windows. It’s no coincidence students become curious about what they see happening; so this year they decided to form a club. A dozen students, along with faculty advisor Lisa Barker, harnessed their interests into a formal, ongoing way of connecting the Middle School with the bees.
Ja’lynn Patmon, Grade 6, was instrumental in helping the club form. Last spring she was able to see a swarm of our bees that moved into one of the trees near the front entrance before they were relocated. With help from the Upper School beekeeping class, she was able to see the bees up close and interact with them—you can easily hold a bee in your hand during swarming because they are particularly docile. Ja’lynn was the first student to specifically approach Ms. Barker about starting a club.
“Because the club is new, there is no shortage of possible projects,” shared Ms. Barker. “What was really cool was that for the first month of the bee club, it overlapped with my Upper School beekeeping course.

The Upper Schoolers developed Friday lessons to introduce the younger students to the bees as part of their class.”
They created a Kahoot (an online trivia game) to acquaint them with basic concepts and to conduct a demonstration of how hives work. They also demon- strated honey extraction and presented their final project presentations to the Middle School Bee club. In the Spring, the club sold honey produced at the Harley hives. They worked on packaging and marketing the product for their potential customers.
Another aspect of the club focuses on advocacy. Students started by learning about bees and becoming excited about them. The next step is to protect what they love through peer education. This club prepares them for Upper School when they have the opportunity to work hands-on with the bees as part of the Introduction to Beekeeping elective.
“It’s very easy to be afraid of bees, but the more students learn about them, the more they want to protect them,” says Ms. Barker. “I’m glad to help make this club available to the students so they can understand more about the bees and also share their passion and knowledge with others.”

Divisional Highlights

Upper School

Harley’s Newspaper, The Acorn, Marks the Latest Literary Publication

During the 2021-22 school year, Harley’s Upper School newspaper, The Acorn, was reimagined in a bi-monthly digital format. The effort was spearheaded by Grade 11 student Frances Dickinson and guided by faculty advisor, Erin Berg.
Previously, Upper School published a literary magazine, Calliope, that provided a showcase for student talent—and three years ago it was rebranded as Rosebud. However, during hybrid learning due to COVID, the efforts were put on hold; but now it is revitalized and being published again as The Acorn.
According to Frances, a school newspaper is important because, “it allows students to write as well as share opinions. At Harley there are really strong writers and stories, and The Acorn gives them a way to contribute outside of writing for classes.”
This year, there are nine Upper School students working on the publication, many of whom joined during club rush. The newspaper, in its current iteration, is guided less by a rigid editorial calendar and more by the concept of selecting stories the writers are passionate about, submitting the potential topics for vote by the newspaper staff, and then writing and publishing the articles. The group also brainstorms various article ideas and provides these to the writers for coverage, keeping in mind that the school serves students as young as nursery.
For the first group of articles, staffers were encouraged to collaborate to complete the work. For example, a pair of students wrote teacher interviews, and although they wrote them separately, they worked together to develop the questions and map out the process; plus, it’s easier to be accountable to someone else.

Going Digital

The choice to go digital this year was a group decision. They were able to use an existing website and take advantage of quicker publication without needing to format, print, or distribute a physical paper. As an added bonus, they could focus more on writing if they didn’t need to fundraise for a printed piece—and it’s more climate-friendly being online.
One of the group’s goals is to develop ways for people to be able to click on the newspaper link directly in order to create posters with QR codes to put up around school. Another is to look ahead to next year when the writers will be more seasoned and can develop a stronger voice overall, as well as themes for the issues. Additionally, they are developing a group of mentor texts to help guide and inspire story development.

You can enjoy The Acorn by clicking here.

Divisional Highlights

Lower School

Simple Machines, 

Complex Thinking

This unit harnesses the power of learning through play to help students understand complex physics topics while solving authentic problems

Students in Grade 4 created machines à la Rube Goldberg in Harley’s Makerspace as part of a project combining lessons about physics and simple machines using things like ramps, screws, and levers to solve a problem.
Goldberg was a popular comic book artist in the first half of the 1900s, known for depicting complicated gadgets. The cartoons presented incredibly complex machines doing ordinary, everyday tasks, like switch- ing off a light, turning a page, or swatting a fly.
For example, students designing a Rube Goldberg machine might build a system of pulleys and inclined planes to simply ring a bell or water a plant. They began learning about kinetic and potential energy while working in teams to create catapults.

Trial and error are a large component of this assignment, and students have fun seeing what works and what doesn’t turn out quite as planned.
“Students learn how actual drawings can be turned into their solutions—by exploring the question, How do I get something to perform a function for me? They discover ways to create something that’s in their minds, build it, and make sure their solution completes the assigned task,” said Harley’s Maker Educator, Kima Enerson. “We take time when we start the unit to walk around School and look at all the simple machines we interact with, but don’t often have the opportunity to manipulate. This becomes their chance to make something happen using simple machines in a context where they are choosing which to try and in what order.”

Divisional Highlights

Middle School

Bee Club Debuts

One Of the great things about being upstairs in our Middle School is that the Harley bee hives are right outside the hallway windows. It’s no coincidence students become curious about what they see happening; so this year they decided to form a club. A dozen students, along with faculty advisor Lisa Barker, harnessed their interests into a formal, ongoing way of connecting the Middle School with the bees.
Ja’lynn Patmon, Grade 6, was instrumental in helping the club form. Last spring she was able to see a swarm of our bees that moved into one of the trees near the front entrance before they were relocated. With help from the Upper School beekeeping class, she was able to see the bees up close and interact with them—you can easily hold a bee in your hand during swarming because they are particularly docile. Ja’lynn was the first student to specifically approach Ms. Barker about starting a club.
“Because the club is new, there is no shortage of possible projects,” shared Ms. Barker. “What was really cool was that for the first month of the bee club, it overlapped with my Upper School beekeeping course.

The Upper Schoolers developed Friday lessons to introduce the younger students to the bees as part of their class.”
They created a Kahoot (an online trivia game) to acquaint them with basic concepts and to conduct a demonstration of how hives work. They also demon- strated honey extraction and presented their final project presentations to the Middle School Bee club. In the Spring, the club sold honey produced at the Harley hives. They worked on packaging and marketing the product for their potential customers.
Another aspect of the club focuses on advocacy. Students started by learning about bees and becoming excited about them. The next step is to protect what they love through peer education. This club prepares them for Upper School when they have the opportunity to work hands-on with the bees as part of the Introduction to Beekeeping elective.
“It’s very easy to be afraid of bees, but the more students learn about them, the more they want to protect them,” says Ms. Barker. “I’m glad to help make this club available to the students so they can understand more about the bees and also share their passion and knowledge with others.”

Divisional Highlights

Upper School

Harley’s Newspaper, The Acorn, Marks the Latest Literary Publication

During the 2021-22 school year, Harley’s Upper School newspaper, The Acorn, was reimagined in a bi-monthly digital format. The effort was spearheaded by Grade 11 student Frances Dickinson and guided by faculty advisor, Erin Berg.
Previously, Upper School published a literary magazine, Calliope, that provided a showcase for student talent—and three years ago it was rebranded as Rosebud. However, during hybrid learning due to COVID, the efforts were put on hold; but now it is revitalized and being published again as The Acorn.
According to Frances, a school newspaper is important because, “it allows students to write as well as share opinions. At Harley there are really strong writers and stories, and The Acorn gives them a way to contribute outside of writing for classes.”
This year, there are nine Upper School students working on the publication, many of whom joined during club rush. The newspaper, in its current iteration, is guided less by a rigid editorial calendar and more by the concept of selecting stories the writers are passionate about, submitting the potential topics for vote by the newspaper staff, and then writing and publishing the articles. The group also brainstorms various article ideas and provides these to the writers for coverage, keeping in mind that the school serves students as young as nursery.
For the first group of articles, staffers were encouraged to collaborate to complete the work. For example, a pair of students wrote teacher interviews, and although they wrote them separately, they worked together to develop the questions and map out the process; plus, it’s easier to be accountable to someone else.

Going Digital

The choice to go digital this year was a group decision. They were able to use an existing website and take advantage of quicker publication without needing to format, print, or distribute a physical paper. As an added bonus, they could focus more on writing if they didn’t need to fundraise for a printed piece—and it’s more climate-friendly being online.
One of the group’s goals is to develop ways for people to be able to click on the newspaper link directly in order to create posters with QR codes to put up around school. Another is to look ahead to next year when the writers will be more seasoned and can develop a stronger voice overall, as well as themes for the issues. Additionally, they are developing a group of mentor texts to help guide and inspire story development.

You can enjoy The Acorn by clicking here.

Divisional Highlights

Lower School

Simple Machines, 

Complex Thinking

This unit harnesses the power of learning through play to help students understand complex physics topics while solving authentic problems

Students in Grade 4 created machines à la Rube Goldberg in Harley’s Makerspace as part of a project combining lessons about physics and simple machines using things like ramps, screws, and levers to solve a problem.
Goldberg was a popular comic book artist in the first half of the 1900s, known for depicting complicated gadgets. The cartoons presented incredibly complex machines doing ordinary, everyday tasks, like switch- ing off a light, turning a page, or swatting a fly.
For example, students designing a Rube Goldberg machine might build a system of pulleys and inclined planes to simply ring a bell or water a plant. They began learning about kinetic and potential energy while working in teams to create catapults.

Trial and error are a large component of this assignment, and students have fun seeing what works and what doesn’t turn out quite as planned.
“Students learn how actual drawings can be turned into their solutions—by exploring the question, How do I get something to perform a function for me? They discover ways to create something that’s in their minds, build it, and make sure their solution completes the assigned task,” said Harley’s Maker Educator, Kima Enerson. “We take time when we start the unit to walk around School and look at all the simple machines we interact with, but don’t often have the opportunity to manipulate. This becomes their chance to make something happen using simple machines in a context where they are choosing which to try and in what order.”

Divisional Highlights

Middle School

Bee Club Debuts

One Of the great things about being upstairs in our Middle School is that the Harley bee hives are right outside the hallway windows. It’s no coincidence students become curious about what they see happening; so this year they decided to form a club. A dozen students, along with faculty advisor Lisa Barker, harnessed their interests into a formal, ongoing way of connecting the Middle School with the bees.
Ja’lynn Patmon, Grade 6, was instrumental in helping the club form. Last spring she was able to see a swarm of our bees that moved into one of the trees near the front entrance before they were relocated. With help from the Upper School beekeeping class, she was able to see the bees up close and interact with them—you can easily hold a bee in your hand during swarming because they are particularly docile. Ja’lynn was the first student to specifically approach Ms. Barker about starting a club.
“Because the club is new, there is no shortage of possible projects,” shared Ms. Barker. “What was really cool was that for the first month of the bee club, it overlapped with my Upper School beekeeping course.

The Upper Schoolers developed Friday lessons to introduce the younger students to the bees as part of their class.”
They created a Kahoot (an online trivia game) to acquaint them with basic concepts and to conduct a demonstration of how hives work. They also demon- strated honey extraction and presented their final project presentations to the Middle School Bee club. In the Spring, the club sold honey produced at the Harley hives. They worked on packaging and marketing the product for their potential customers.
Another aspect of the club focuses on advocacy. Students started by learning about bees and becoming excited about them. The next step is to protect what they love through peer education. This club prepares them for Upper School when they have the opportunity to work hands-on with the bees as part of the Introduction to Beekeeping elective.
“It’s very easy to be afraid of bees, but the more students learn about them, the more they want to protect them,” says Ms. Barker. “I’m glad to help make this club available to the students so they can understand more about the bees and also share their passion and knowledge with others.”

Divisional Highlights

Upper School

Harley’s Newspaper, The Acorn, Marks the Latest Literary Publication

During the 2021-22 school year, Harley’s Upper School newspaper, The Acorn, was reimagined in a bi-monthly digital format. The effort was spearheaded by Grade 11 student Frances Dickinson and guided by faculty advisor, Erin Berg.
Previously, Upper School published a literary magazine, Calliope, that provided a showcase for student talent—and three years ago it was rebranded as Rosebud. However, during hybrid learning due to COVID, the efforts were put on hold; but now it is revitalized and being published again as The Acorn.
According to Frances, a school newspaper is important because, “it allows students to write as well as share opinions. At Harley there are really strong writers and stories, and The Acorn gives them a way to contribute outside of writing for classes.”
This year, there are nine Upper School students working on the publication, many of whom joined during club rush. The newspaper, in its current iteration, is guided less by a rigid editorial calendar and more by the concept of selecting stories the writers are passionate about, submitting the potential topics for vote by the newspaper staff, and then writing and publishing the articles. The group also brainstorms various article ideas and provides these to the writers for coverage, keeping in mind that the school serves students as young as nursery.
For the first group of articles, staffers were encouraged to collaborate to complete the work. For example, a pair of students wrote teacher interviews, and although they wrote them separately, they worked together to develop the questions and map out the process; plus, it’s easier to be accountable to someone else.

Going Digital

The choice to go digital this year was a group decision. They were able to use an existing website and take advantage of quicker publication without needing to format, print, or distribute a physical paper. As an added bonus, they could focus more on writing if they didn’t need to fundraise for a printed piece—and it’s more climate-friendly being online.
One of the group’s goals is to develop ways for people to be able to click on the newspaper link directly in order to create posters with QR codes to put up around school. Another is to look ahead to next year when the writers will be more seasoned and can develop a stronger voice overall, as well as themes for the issues. Additionally, they are developing a group of mentor texts to help guide and inspire story development.

You can enjoy The Acorn by clicking here.