Ethical leadership is not a trait you are born with. It is a practice, built through daily choices, meaningful relationships, and a school culture that consistently asks boys to consider not just what is best for themselves, but what is right for everyone around them.
Learning to Lead by Learning to Follow
One of our most distinctive features at Saint David’s is the way we structure relationships across age groups. Throughout our program, consecutive grades are paired together for lunch, Chapel, and athletics so that over time boys have the experience of being both the youngest and oldest in the pairing. Fourth graders, for example, are the youngest in the Upper School, yet they are the oldest in their pairing with third grade, providing these boys the chance to lead the opening blessing at lunch, assist with the Chapel doors, and demonstrate how to win with humility and lose with grace during intramural competitions. These aren’t just incidental arrangements. They are deliberate opportunities for boys at every stage of development to take turns leading and following and to understand that both roles demand character.
The second and seventh grade buddies program deepens this further. Boys take turns visiting each other’s classrooms for shared projects, and the two grades attend lunch and Mass together for special occasions. While a seventh grader works with a second grader, he practices patience, attentiveness, and care. The second grader who looks up to the older boy is learning what it looks like to one day show up for someone who is younger and less experienced. In both directions, character is being formed.
Learning to Listen and Respectfully Disagree
Ethical leaders are good listeners. They consider opposing viewpoints fairly and value others’ contributions equally, even when those perspectives challenge their own. We cultivate this skill early and deliberately.
In fourth and fifth grades, book talks invite boys to sit with ideas, defend positions thoughtfully, and hear one another out. In Upper School history classes, Socratic seminars push boys to engage with complexity and ambiguity rather than retreat into easy answers. Eighth-grade scientific debates require boys to marshal evidence, acknowledge counterarguments, and hold their reasoning accountable to scrutiny. Across all these experiences, boys are learning something that transcends any particular subject: that being heard requires learning to listen first, and that intellectual humility is not a weakness but a mark of genuine strength.
Serving Others
Abstract values only take root when they are practiced in concrete ways. Our service program ensures that boys at every level have meaningful opportunities to act on behalf of others.
Fourth graders participate in a read-a-thon to support The Seeing Eye through the Pennies for Puppies initiative. In conjunction with One Sandwich at a Time, fifth graders prepare sandwiches for people experiencing food insecurity in New York City. Sixth graders host an ice cream sale to benefit the Gbowee Peace Foundation’s backpack drive to support the education of high-achieving students in Liberia. The entire school participates in the Thanksgiving can and turkey drive led by eighth graders, supporting families in our local community. And eighth graders organize a walk-a-thon, basketball knockout tournament, and a t-shirt sale to fund the rebuilding of a school in Jamaica destroyed by Hurricane Melissa in 2025.
These are not small gestures. They are exercises in accountability and empathy, and in understanding that one’s actions have consequences far beyond oneself. These service initiatives teach boys that leadership means solving real problems for real people, and that service is not charity but solidarity.
Problem Solving in Performing Arts: Working Toward a Common Goal
Leadership demands the ability to navigate uncertainty, collaborate under pressure, and hold onto a vision that hasn’t yet come to life. Few experiences cultivate these capacities the way live performance does–there’s no pausing a play to fix a mistake the way you might pause a scrimmage or rework a problem set. The show goes on, bumps and all.
From pre-k mini-productions to third-grade Fractured Fairy Tales to the fifth-grade class play, boys learn to listen to one another, test ideas, fail, revise, and try again, all in service of a shared goal. The revision happens out loud. As the boys work through each scene, Ms. Myette, the director, asks “What went well? What didn’t go so well? How can we solve for that?” Through her guiding questions, she empowers the boys to work together to smooth out the rough patches instead of solving the problems for them. As a result, boys feel comfortable improvising on stage when everything doesn’t go precisely to plan, covering for a forgotten line or turning a missed cue into part of the scene. Long after the curtain falls, what stays with them is the habit of working toward a shared goal even when the outcome is uncertain.
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Synthesizing Learning for an Audience
As boys move through Upper School, they are given opportunities to lead where the stakes are genuine, and the audience extends beyond the classroom. As part of their Digital Universe Field Study (DUFS) experience, sixth graders work in collaborative teams and present original space shows in the Hayden Planetarium to their classmates, parents, and the extended Saint David’s community. In eighth grade, boys prepare and present an analysis of a work of art, and the finalists deliver their lecture to a panel of judges that includes trustees, heads of schools, alumni, and art and architecture professionals. In these moments, preparation, collaboration, intellectual rigor, and quiet confidence must all come together. Boys leave these experiences knowing they are capable of more than they thought.
Marking Milestones of Responsibility
At Saint David’s, leadership is not reserved for the oldest boys in the school; it is built into the structure of every grade, so that every boy, at every age, eventually finds himself the one others are watching. In the pre-primary years, the Omega boys are the leaders of the program; as the oldest boys on the first floor, they are expected to model and guide. Third graders carry the mantle of leadership within the Lower School. As fourth graders cross into Upper School, they immediately take on responsibility of a different kind, modeling how to quietly and calmly move through the hallways with increased independence and closely adhering to the dress code with their shirt tails tucked in, ties straight, and blazers buttoned. This care and attention to detail teaches the youngest boys, by example, what it looks like to be an Upper School student.
Starting in fourth grade, each homeroom elects a representative to serve on the Student Council. Eighth graders are Captains of Chamber Singers, guiding the ensemble toward performance readiness and as editors of the Canticle, shaping the school’s newspaper publication. What makes this progression remarkable is not any single role, but its constancy. At every grade, without exception, a boy is given something to be responsible for so that by the time he graduates, leadership feels less like an achievement than a habit he has practiced for years.
Cultivating Ethical Leaders
In his end-of-year remarks to the faculty, the Headmaster reminded us: “They [the boys] don’t arrive good men. We form them.” Ethical leadership is not delivered. It is cultivated through relationships, service, discourse, performance, and the steady accumulation of moments when a boy is asked to do the harder, better thing.
The goal is not perfection. It is a young man who lives by the Golden Rule, who loves learning and takes it seriously, who steps forward in the hardest moments, and who understands deeply that leadership is always about the people he is leading. That is what we are building at Saint David’s. One boy, one year, one choice at a time.