David O'Halloran, Headmaster - Saint David's School, New York City

In February 2020, our Student Council President at the time, Finn Hayden '20, his father, Kevin, and I traveled to Tigray, Ethiopia, to officially open the second elementary school that the local community built through the support and fundraising of Saint David's boys in partnership with Save the Children. The elementary school is located in Ala'sa. While in Tigray, we also visited the Saint David's Kalina School, the first school we had opened in Tigray for a Muslim village community, in 2014.   Sadly, our trip occurred on the cusp of both the Covid-19 pandemic and the violent internal conflict that has embroiled Ethiopia. Upon a recent check-in, we have learned that both schools are currently closed to children. Ala'sa has been badly shelled during the conflict and Kalina is being used as a hospital and shelter for some of the villagers displaced by the fighting.   Yesterday, Aaron Fossi, our Save the Children liaison, addressed seventh and eighth graders during ...

This semester, one highly visible way that the scholarly and creative intersect at Saint David's is through our longstanding Lower School partnership with the New-York Historical Society. In Grades One, Two and Three, an art historian from N-YHS visits weekly with the boys for hands-on classes she co-teaches with Saint David's teachers. These sessions dig into historical facts and issues through creative art projects, often utilizing art mediums representative of the time period under study. First graders are learning about how their city has evolved in the thousands of years since the Lenni-Lenape Native Americans inhabited the land. Their understanding will be made visible in their creations of Manhattan maps that track this evolution, and ultimately will include an architectural 3D component to accommodate the addition of current-day skyscrapers. Second graders are exploring the development of New Amsterdam. In a recent class, they were charged with creating watercolor still...