School Profile 2006-2007
by Stephen Keith Sagarin, Faculty Chair - 09 Dec 2006

School Profile: Great Barrington Waldorf High School
454 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230
phone (413) 528-8833
fax (413) 528-5132
email info@gbwaldorfhighschool.org
web www.gbwaldorfhighschool.org
web www.waldorfhigh.org
Stephen Keith Sagarin, PhD, Faculty Chair
Renni Greenberg Gallagher, Enrollment and College Guidance
CEEB code: 220901

School and Community Information: The Great Barrington Waldorf High School is a rigorous, college preparatory, independent, coeducational Waldorf day school. We enroll 15 students in grades 9-12 this year, our fifth year of existence, and celebrate our first graduating class of seven seniors last June.

As a Waldorf school, founded on the educational principles of Rudolf Steiner, we aim to balance rigorous academic work with required fine art, practical art, and performing art classes.

As a school on Main Street of a small town, we aim to integrate our school into our community, aiding community soup kitchens, a local environmentally-friendly river walk, and local community-supported organic farms, while using local resources—libraries, artists’ studios, museums and the great outdoors—to extend our small campus.

Great Barrington, a town of 9,000 year-rounders and 22,000 summer vacationers in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, straddles the Housatonic River, site of several paper mills. Approximately half our students come from southern Berkshire County; the rest come from northern Litchfield County in Connecticut and eastern Columbia County in New York.

Their parents are teachers, dairy farmers, doctors, publishers, building contractors, small business owners, and paper mill employees. Almost all are college graduates.

Our school is open to all, regardless of ability to pay. Our student body is white, but the economic range of our students is significant.

Unique Elements of Our Curriculum: Many academic courses—history, English, science, and some math—are taught in 3-4 week blocks as seminars that meet for 100 min. per day, five days per week. Other academic courses—foreign languages, mathematics, and some English—meet 3 to 4 days per week for 50 min. Arts and electives meet 50-100 minutes 1-2 times per week.

All academic courses are required for all four years of high school, and we offer only one “track,” which we consider the equivalent of an honors or advanced track at any other school.

English: English classes meet 3 times per week to focus on reading, writing, and interpretation. Additional English seminars cover American literature, the Odyssey, Tragedy & Comedy, Bible as Literature, Poetry, Parsifal, Shakespeare, the Transcendentalists, and Russian Literature.

Math: In addition to a standard course of study that progresses from Algebra I through Geometry & Trigonometry and Algebra II to Precalculus and Calculus, we require seminars in Statistics & Probability and Projective Geometry.

History: History seminars cover U.S. history and world history from the ancient world to the modern world. In addition, seminars in history through art, history through drama, history through music, and history through architecture present the evolution of human consciousness as evidenced by the cultural artifacts of the diverse civilizations that constitute world history.

Foreign Languages: German or Spanish with an emphasis on conversational facility and reading. Each class takes a 3 week visit to Lima and Cuzco, Peru, or to Munich, Germany in 9th or 10th grade; many, if not most, students then visiting with Waldorf schools in these cities in 11th grade. We host approximately 10 visitors from Germany and Peru for visits of 3 weeks and visitings of 6 to 12 weeks each year.

Science: In addition to sequential seminars each year of high school in biology, chemistry, and physics, we offer seminars in earth science, botany, geology, astronomy, and environmental science. Transcripts record which seminars have a laboratory component.

Arts: All students take required and elective courses in fine, practical, and performing arts each year.

Graduation Requirements: Except in extraordinary circumstances, all students take all courses at our high school. Transcripts may reflect credit earned while on foreign visiting.
Grading and Ranking Procedures: We grade from A+ (98 %) to F (60%). Seminar teachers may offer courses pass/fail as they see fit.

We do not weight our students’ grades; all academic courses are required. We do not rank our students.

Test Score Information: 100% of our seniors and juniors have taken the SAT I this year. Mean scores for the SAT I are:

verbal/critical reading 646
math 544
writing. 606

Please note that our school does not give nor prep for standardized tests, SAT or other. For most of our students, the PSAT is the first standardized test they encounter.


College Attendance: We anticipate that 100% of our graduates will attend 4 year colleges. Last year’s graduates were accepted at:

Bard College
Clark University
Ithaca College (2)
*Occidental College
Reed College
*Rochester Institute of Technology
*Skidmore College
SUNY Purchase (2)
UC Santa Barbara
UMass Amherst
*UMass Boston
Umass Framingham
*University of Washington


*Currently attending. One graduate is pursuing a modeling and acting career and one is traveling for the year.

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