Abstract
This interview is a discussion about the history of Laurel School with Hope Murphy. She gives a chronological overview of the school's history and talks about important changes. There is some discussion about the type of education received at Laurel School and the curriculum. There is also discussion about when the school moved to Shaker Heights and when it had a dormitory. Recent changes include the acquisition of additional land in Geagua County for educational endeavors and sports.
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Interviewee
Murphy, Hope (interviewee)
Interviewer
Raponi, Rich (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Heights Centennial
Date
7-20-2011
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
47 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Hope Murphy Interview, 20 July 2011" (2011). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 915035.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/494
Transcript
Rich Raponi [00:00:04] Testing, testing. My name is Richard Raponi. I’m conducting an interview for the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities to document the history of Laurel School. The interview is being held at Laurel School, located in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Could you please state your name?
Hope Murphy [00:00:41] Hope Murphy.
Rich Raponi [00:00:43] As a starting point, could you provide a little background on yourself and your association with the school?
Hope Murphy [00:00:48] Sure. I’m an alum, an alumni of the school. I attended Laurel from 1966 to 1973 when I graduated. I had previously attended school in the nursery school and then went to public school in between. My mother went to Laurel, my grandmother went to Laurel, my two daughters have attended Laurel and graduated. I also studied the history of the school to provide a printed history in preparation for our centennial celebration in 1996. So the book, Educating the Independent Mind, is the book that I wrote about the history of the school.
Rich Raponi [00:01:35] Could you tell me, could we start with maybe some early history of Laurel School?
Hope Murphy [00:01:40] Laurel was founded in 1896 by Jenny Prentiss. Jenny grew up in the neighborhood in which she established a school. And it was a really interesting time in Cleveland’s history because it was the time of the centennial of the city. There was lots of examination, there were women’s committees looking at the accomplishments of the city, celebrating the foundation of the city. At the same time, it was a time when there was tremendous influx of immigrants into the city because of the heavy industrialization of the area. And that meant that the school system, the public school system, was flooded with students. They were running classes of 48 to 1. And Jenny, who was a fairly sensitive individual, was really concerned about girls getting lost in the system. She had a fine education at Lake Erie College and wanted to be able to share her experience with girls in the area. Central High School, which was one of the finest public high schools in the city, had too many students. And so the school board decided to run double sessions. So kids went to school in the morning or the afternoon, but not both. And she felt it was important to educate a child over the course of the entire day. And she actually preferred to take boarding students. So she opened her school in 1896 with three girls. She had also been exposed to the ideals of John Dewey, a progressive educator, through her studies at Lake Erie College. She had a well-rounded liberal arts education. She studied science, languages, English, math. So it was a fairly remarkable education for girls at the time. And she was very excited about establishing that kind of a school here in Cleveland with the expressed desire to reduce stress on girls. She was quite concerned about social stress among the wealthier students who lived on Millionaires Row, because there was an intense social calendar for those girls, and she wanted her girls to be removed from that. Not to worry about social expectations, but to explore the life of the mind.
Rich Raponi [00:04:07] And who attended the school during the early years?
Hope Murphy [00:04:10] There were middle-class girls from the area. She ended up creating a boarding school. Very shortly the school became so popular that she had to move it out of her house. They moved to another location on Streeter Avenue, which was where she lived. They had to add a boarding department. There was a kindergarten that was folded into her school. And so they then looked for other locations. They eventually found a house on Euclid Avenue that they rented. And at that point the school grew to such a size that she needed to a board of trustees to oversee it to help her with finances. And then they moved, when they changed heads of school, Jenny left Laurel. She got married and moved out of town. And the head changed. And at that point it was a fairly well-established institution. Girls from the immediate neighborhood walked to the school. This was also the time that HB already existed, Hathaway Brown School. And at that point they were both drawing girls from the immediate neighborhood, as well as girls from out of town who then lived in the dorm, dormitory.
Rich Raponi [00:05:34] And could you maybe explain the role of a all-girls school in late 19th, early 20th century?
Hope Murphy [00:05:41] Yeah, it’s really interesting because public schools did not come to Cleveland immediately. There were ragged schools for kids who were too poor to pay for their education. This is very early on in Cleveland’s history. There were traveling teachers who would come and work here for a period of time. They roomed with the families who were sending their children to school. But girls were not typically educated. And when the public school system was established, and then when Andrew Freese became the superintendent of the schools, he opposed girls’ education. He did not think it was essential for girls to be educated through high school and felt that they really weren’t proper candidates for his public high school. So boys had easy access to education, girls did not. And as a result, a number of families looked to the Brooks Military Academy, which was a boys’ school, to see if they could get education after hours through their teachers. There were a couple of girls’ schools that were started. Ms. Mittleberger School was started. She was quite an institution. She was a good friend of John D. Rockefeller’s. He gave her the building that their school was in. It was a stone building that was on his property, which was in the way of his view of the house that he planned to establish. But the girls who went to Ms. Mittleberger’s tended to be the very well-to-do girls. So Jenny Prentiss was looking for a niche. Girls who were in the middle class, who wouldn’t have gone to Ms. Mittleberger School, who would not have gone to Hathaway Brown School, a school that was for them, but focused primarily on a really good liberal arts education without that pressure socially of the interactions that the girls at Ms. Mittleberger’s were experiencing.
Rich Raponi [00:07:52] As far as just public education, when did, was school mandatory during this time period or at what point?
Hope Murphy [00:08:03] It was in the mid 19th century that it became mandatory in Cleveland.
Rich Raponi [00:08:10] If we can move on to the original, or the site on Euclid for the actual Laurel School.
Hope Murphy [00:08:20] Yeah. So Jenny Prentiss found this house on Euclid. She called it the Yellow House. It was a frame building. She was able to use that space until, it was about 1902 that she left Laurel. Florence Waterman, who was a teacher, took over as the interim head of school. And then the board of trustees recruited Sarah Lyman. And Sarah had taught at Hathaway Brown. She was a math teacher. She went to Oberlin College. She didn’t finish there, but she had a strong background and, while she came in as an interim head, she recognized the need for the school to grow and to be in its own permanent establishment, in a place that was designed for classes. So she was the one who built the building on Euclid Avenue. It was 10001 Euclid Avenue. It was the lot right next to the lot that Hathaway Brown built their school on. So these two schools, which were rivals, shared the same block on Euclid Avenue. The girls developed rivalries between them in terms of their athletic teams. But this building that Sarah Lyman designed included things like a chemistry lab, a gymnasium. There was space for chapel, which they had regularly. They’d start their day in chapel. The building was brick. It was still standing, in the spring of 2011, it was demolished by the Cleveland Clinic because the Cleveland Clinic has taken over all of that land. She also built a freestanding kindergarten building, also out of brick. Kindergarten was a very important formative year for children entering Laurel. She wanted to establish the right way of teaching them. Sarah Lyman was a progressive educator. She was well aware of John Dewey’s philosophy of teaching hands on, experiential. Girls took field trips around the city. They went to the beach. They could see Lake Erie, witness what was going on in Lake Erie for themselves. She also had a really strong music program, so the music department was quite large. The house that they had been renting on Euclid, the frame house was used as the music department. Music department was so strong that at one point they had 100 students taking music lessons. She imported students from, I’m sorry, teachers from the east coast, teachers in elocution, in music, instruction in dance, to develop girls understandings of how to project their voice and how to develop a presence in public. And then meanwhile, she had teachers who were local, who taught all of the other academic subjects, including multiple modern languages, German up until World War I, French, Spanish was added later, Latin, Greek, those were both taught, and a full range of science and math classes, as well as visual arts, and English.
Rich Raponi [00:11:51] As far as, I guess, in like a national context, like the curriculum, was it for an all-girls school, was that regular or was that the-
Hope Murphy [00:12:02] It was a very rigorous curriculum. Sarah Lyman’s reputation and the Laurel program were so strong that many of the girls were able to apply to colleges, and using a Laurel certificate could be granted admission to places like Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Wells College, Western Reserve College, which had been established in University Circle. So the reputation was really strong. The program was remarkably strong, in part because Jenny Prentiss had a really strong foundation at Lake Erie College, which was based on the Mount Holyoke model, and then Oberlin. Sarah Lyman had her Oberlin background. So they had really powerful education that they were able then to use as a model for their formation of the Laurel curriculum.
Rich Raponi [00:13:07] Was this part of a national movement or was this unique to the development of all-girls schools with a strong curriculum?
Hope Murphy [00:13:17] This was part of what was going on on the East Coast. There were girls’ schools established on the East Coast and Laurel was following in a similar model.
Rich Raponi [00:13:30] I guess, following Euclid Avenue, could you go into the move from the original site to the present location?
Hope Murphy [00:13:38] Sure. By the 1920s, the Van Sweringen brothers were developing Shaker Heights. They had laid out a number of the streets. Sarah Lyman had also witnessed the fact that Hathaway Brown moved in the late 20s to a campus in Shaker Heights. University School also had moved from their Hough location to Shaker Heights, and she felt the encroachment of the city on her campus and talked about the loss of the birds on campus. The girls had an extensive lawn in front of their building where they were able to play jump rope, they had outdoor climbing equipment that they could use, a small kind of playground area. They played field sports outdoors. And she was well aware that the quality of the air was changing and that actually the wildlife around her was fleeing and talked about losing the last birds from their area and felt it was really important to move her girls. She had always been well aware of the challenges that girls faced walking on Euclid Avenue. In fact, she prohibited that they ever walk on Euclid Avenue. They were not allowed out without chaperones. At one point they had rented a streetcar to take girls to the school so that the girls would not have to be with the public when they were trying to get to school. She asked that any girls who were in the neighborhood walk using the side roads to get to school and not use Euclid Avenue. They were even prohibited going to ice cream parlors that were on Euclid Avenue. So, she was ready to move her girls out to absolute country. The piece of land that she bought was named Lyman Circle after the school bought, well, she bought the land. The board of trustees that had existed under Jenny Prentiss was dismissed under Sarah Lyman. She felt that she could run the school completely on her own. She was able to do that quite successfully until she bought the land out here, and it became a much more complex business proposition for her. So at that point she reconfigured a board and established the school at 1 Lyman Circle. The area around here was very rural. This had been a farm. The land was quite swampy. There were trees that the girls could climb. There were apple trees actually they could pick apples. There was lots of space for them to roam freely and to enjoy the outdoors. The initial pictures of the property as it was being developed. There were no houses on Lyman Circle. Currently, half the circle is ringed by private homes. And the school owns the front half of the circle and the central part of the space for athletic fields which is eleven acres.
Rich Raponi [00:16:53] At this point, was it primarily a dormitory school or was it also students coming in?
Hope Murphy [00:17:02] We had a lot of day students, but we also had dormitory. The building that we’re sitting- The portion of the building that we’re sitting in right now which is the middle school was the dormitory.
Rich Raponi [00:17:15] So did they act more, was it a neighborhood-ish school or was it-
Hope Murphy [00:17:20] Yes, girls came by car to school. Also the rapid transit was developed as far as Green Road and the Van Sweringen developed Shaker Heights from the western boundary towards the east, and Laurel is at the very eastern end of Shaker Heights. So as people moved into Shaker Heights during the twenties as they were able to get downtown for jobs, more girls were living in this immediate area and could attend school here. And this was a, at that point a nursery school. So age 3 or 4 all the way through grade 12.
Rich Raponi [00:18:08] I guess would be a good time to actually maybe do descriptions of the campus. And I guess if we were standing outside and looking toward the campus. If you could describe the buildings and the campus in general, the buildings that stand out to you.
Hope Murphy [00:18:30] When you’re standing on Laureldale, which is a boulevard, a double-lane boulevard. From the intersection of Shaker and Green, you can see the Laurel Tower, which is central to the campus. The building spreads to the north and to the south. It was all built, the central part of the campus was all built at the same time. Today it’s a fairly dark brick building, but it’s a beautiful campus. The tower is turreted, it’s numerous stories high. The central part of the building is three stories. In the beginning, we had primary to the south, middle on the main floor, and upper school on the second and third floor. There were gathering areas for various classes. The dormitory was in a wing of the building that was linked by a solarium. The primary also had a solarium linking it to the central part of the building. So these were beautiful spaces where there were many paned windows looking out to the outdoors, gardens beyond or playing fields beyond. Places that the girls could spend time running around, playing team sports, enjoying the outdoors. The dormitory was very comfortable. I actually lived in the dormitory briefly when I was in a play. And driving back and forth between Moreland Hills and Shaker Heights was a bit too much for my mom. So during tech week, I moved into a dormitory room. I had my own room. We ate dinner in the main part of the building. There was a living room on the first floor where girls could gather after classes. There was a fireplace. We could have hot cocoa and cinnamon toast and sit around and do our homework. There was quiet time run by Timber, who was the house mother. She had an apartment in the dormitory and she looked after all her girls. Ms. Woods was her real name. She was Scottish. She had two terriers who had a very strong presence in the dormitory and, we called her Timber because of her given name. But it was a wonderful place to be. And then in the morning we’d have breakfast and head off back to classes.
Rich Raponi [00:21:21] And earlier you brought up that there’s a family history with the school. Could you go a little into how, I guess, how they got to be here and just the role of the school in your family and how you ended up at Laurel?
Hope Murphy [00:21:38] My grandmother went to Laurel when it was downtown. Her sister actually attended Ms. Mittleberger’s school in its heyday. But she was eight years older than my grandmother, and by the time my grandmother was ready to attend school, Ms. Mittleberger was not particularly well and the enrollment was declining. So her parents enrolled her at Laurel in the very early days. So that would have been fairly daring and very gutsy on their part. My grandmother was very fond of her experience at Laurel. She was so excited when the grandchildren were born that she had girls. She had four boys, so they could not attend Laurel. My mother, and therefore on the other side of the family attended Laurel, because her family lived in Shaker Heights. She was able to bicycle to Laurel when it was moved to the Lyman campus. She lived on Landon Road and she came in fifth grade and made very, very dear friends here. And a group of her friends went off to Vassar College together. They were such close friends that they roomed together at Vassar for four years and remained very close friends after that. She also maintained very close friendships with girls who were in her class here but went to Wellesley. One of them went abroad and lived in England, moved there permanently. Another classmate moved to Rye, New York. They all maintained very close friendships well into their adulthood and compared notes as grandparents got together as grandparents. Laurel was the center of her life. As a result, both my sister and I attended Laurel. Nursery school was co ed so my brother was able to attend during nursery school. We came in middle school, and also had a remarkable experience. The world was open to us in our experience here both in classes and in reality. We had a sister from Norway through the AFS program. Laurel was very deeply involved in the American field service. We were able to invite Inger to our home. She attended Laurel for our senior year and we have maintained that friendship ever since. So we still are in touch. Inger still comes back to visit Laurel to see where she went to school for a year. And then because of our remarkable experience, both my girls attended preschool here and pre kindergarten. Abby attended kindergarten and then Abby was here when Laurel moved from having a half day kindergarten to a full-day kindergarten. And due to tuition we took them out very briefly but returned them during middle school when it was really important for them to have a single sex education. They’d been in a co ed school and both of them. Based on my understanding of Carol Gilligan’s research at Laurel, the Laurel Harvard study, in which she identified the middle school years as being very vulnerable for girls when they lose their voice. It was very apparent to me, seeing my girls at a co ed school that they needed to be in a single sex school in order to have their opportunity to develop their voice and to feel completely free to have a full education to develop their skills as emerging leaders. And so we brought them back in third and fifth grade and then they graduated from Laurel several years ago.
Rich Raponi [00:25:47] That actually leads into our next question. The advantages of single sex education.
Hope Murphy [00:25:54] It’s a remarkable experience for girls, in particular because when there are leadership opportunities, typically in a co-ed school, boys will rise to those leadership opportunities often more frequently than girls. There are also studies that indicate that women who have gone through single-sex, single-gender schools have more confidence in taking on leadership roles and have more confidence in going after roles in corporations, in politics. Typically, those women have some experience in an all-girls environment. So here we say girls are leaders, girls play sports, girls are the athletes on the field, girls are the leaders in the classroom. In science, in math, as well as in the humanities. We have an engineering program. Our girls have three or four courses that they can take in an engineering sequence. We have a really well-developed STEM program, which is science, technology, engineering and math. Our girls can go through not only a full calculus sequence, but they can take multivariable calculus and advanced three dimensional geometry, which are typically courses offered in sophomore level college. We also have a really well developed language program. We offer four different languages. Chinese, French, Spanish, Latin. Girls who complete the Latin sequence can take Greek. The opportunities here are remarkable. And student government is completely run by girls, of course. We also set up opportunities for our girls to do internships in the hospitals and at Case Western Reserve University, our girls are in labs with professors studying advanced chemistry and biology, which then gives them opportunities when they’re competing for places in college. And today the change is that there are more girls attending colleges than boys. And that makes it more competitive for our girls in trying to get places in those colleges. And they have a remarkably successful track record as a result of the kind of education that’s possible here at Laurel.
Rich Raponi [00:28:56] Was Laurel always a college- Was it always to prepare girls for college or-
Hope Murphy [00:29:04] It was. Early on, though, there was an assumption that there would be a number of the girls who would move more rapidly into getting married, raising a family. And so, even as early as the foundation years, Jenny Prentiss developed a program so that those girls understood how to care for infants, how to raise young children, how to educate them at home so that they were ready for school. So she took that role very seriously and developed a curriculum for them so that they had not only nursing, but early developmental understanding of how to teach their children. It was not until the 1960s that Laurel became, by the request of the board of trustees, 100% college preparatory. And that all girls would go to four-year colleges as opposed to junior colleges. Prior to that, 2/3 of the girls were heading off to four-year colleges.
Rich Raponi [00:30:14] And is that still true today? Is it-
Hope Murphy [00:30:19] It’s 100% college preparatory, yes. And that they’re going off to four-year colleges. They’re going off to the most selective colleges in the country. They also go abroad to school. We’ve had students go to Cambridge, Oxford, St. Andrews in Scotland. Very occasionally, a school in France. But primarily they’re looking at schools, small liberal arts schools, large universities, the most selective colleges and universities in the United States. West coast, east coast, Texas, the Midwest. Yeah.
Rich Raponi [00:31:03] Has Laurel always been a tuition-based school?
Hope Murphy [00:31:07] Yes. Yeah, it has. It’s always been a private school and the tuition started very low in the very early years. There was one point at which I remember it cost $60 per year to send your daughter to Laurel. Now it’s as competitive as all the other Cleveland Council of Independent Schools in terms of tuition. They very closely look at their tuitions.
Rich Raponi [00:31:37] And having both attended Laurel School and teaching here now, could you go into some of the differences you see, or if any?
Hope Murphy [00:31:48] Yeah, I would say that the science program was strong for its day. When I was here, the science labs had just been renovated in the 1960s. The first floor of the wing in which we are right now, which was the old dormitory, was turned into state of the art science labs in the mid-1960s. Nowadays our science labs have been updated. Of course, they were renovated in probably the late 90s. I’ve lost track of at this point. But there are now computers in those labs. The latest probes, in order to be able to evaluate lab experiments that are going on, are available in those labs. As a result of the focus on girls and STEM courses today we now do have calculus. I was able to take calculus, but there wasn’t the choice of AB or BC calculus. Today we have BC and multivariable calculus. We have more languages available today. In my day, there was a very serious thought about co education. It was crossing the country in the early 70s as a part of the sexual revolution, as a part of looking at how girls and how boys were educated. There was a widespread movement. It happened in boarding schools. It happened in the most competitive day schools on the east coast. It was definitely happening here in Cleveland. The board of trustees seriously examined the possibility of Laurel going co-ed. So I was attending school in the heat of that discussion. My father was on the board of trustees, my aunt was on the board of trustees. They were visiting schools outside of The Cleveland area considering co education. Shortly after that, Hawken went co-ed independently. University School built their upper school campus. They invited both Laurel and Hathaway Brown to join them in that venture. Both Laurel and Hathaway Brown voted not to do that. But as a result, there was a recommitment to single-gender education and Laurel has flourished as a result of that. We’ve participated in the Laurel Harvard study in which Carol Gilligan brought a team of psychologists here to study girls and their psychological development. This was a study that she was very excited about doing, having studied Emma Willard School, which is also a girls’ school that’s a boarding school in Troy, New York. She wanted to see how girls developed independently. The only psychological studies of development had been done on boys. And because of this recommitment to girls education, I think there’s a greater level of self-confidence that our girls are flourishing in this kind of environment and we’re able to study not only what is good for them, but how that helps them when they become a part of a co ed society. Under our current head of school, Ann Klotz, we’ve established the center for Research on Girls and that has brought a number of studies to our campus through the work of Lisa Damore and Larry Goodman. And we’re currently involved in a stress study. We’re looking at wellness in girls and it’s called the 21st Century Athena’s Study. And we have researchers from Boston University and Boston College who are doing research on how girls create a sense of wellness and how the school can establish a sense of wellness. We’re collaborating with Dana Hall School, which is a girls school in Massachusetts on this study. And there’s a tremendous excitement around what girl are able to achieve in their education in a single gender school.
Rich Raponi [00:36:25] As far as the student population, is it primarily from the Shaker area or is it-
Hope Murphy [00:36:33] We drove from a very broad range. We no longer have a dormitory. The dormitory closed in the 1970s. But we are able to draw girls from the west side, from the downtown Cleveland area. We have girls who come from Cleveland Public Schools. We also have girls who come from the far east side, from south of Cleveland as far as Macedonia. We have girls from Waite Hill. I would say our primary feeder schools are most likely Shaker and Cleveland Heights. But we also draw a significant number from Orange schools, from Chagrin Falls. We have girls coming from Parma. There are a broad number of public schools. We also draw girls from the Jewish day schools. They tend to go through their middle school and then come to Laurel for their high school rather than go on to another religious day school. We draw girls also from a number of parochial schools.
Rich Raponi [00:37:49] I was just reading the brochure as far as the Butler Center, the Butler campus. Could you describe the Butler campus?
Hope Murphy [00:37:57] Yeah. We were very lucky to be able to get a hold of 140 acres in Geauga County. This is a piece of land that is internal to a very large block. It’s on Fairmount Road, east of County Line Road. This land was not developed. We were also able to acquire a house that was on Fairmount. Next to that piece of property, there is a long driveway which we put in. This is a piece of property that has a climax forest. Beech trees, oak trees. It has a significant understory. There are trails that we’ve put in the woods. We also have deer, coyote occasionally, lots of squirrels, birds there. There are also areas where there were meadows. We’ve been able to develop those to use for state-of-the-art athletic fields. We have field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball fields. We also built our tennis courts out there. And in addition, we’ve got two lodges, the North Lodge and the South Lodge. The South Lodge has an extension, which is the Pavilion, the Conway Pavilion, which is a spectacular octagonal indoor outdoor space that’s open to the elements on the sides. But we can use it as a classroom space, as a meeting space. We have classes that go out there from pre primary all the way through grade 12. We can use our Project Adventure course for outdoor leadership training, for team building. We have a magic tree house that was built based on the inspiration of the books written by Mary Pope Osborne, or Mary Osborne Pope, one or the other. At any rate, this is a series of books in which children go into a treehouse that they have built and come out and have adventures traveling through time. They go to ancient Egypt, they go to the Middle Ages. They go into space. So our treehouse is built to foster imagination among our primary and middle school students. We also use the land as a wonderful place to share with the Warner Girls Leadership Academy, which is part of our Northstar program. And this is a place that we invite girls from the Warner School, which is Cleveland Public School designed only for girls under Eugene Sanders leadership. These girls have joined with us in a collaborative program with their teachers to encourage exploration in the outdoors as well as academic exploration. We adopted them when they were third graders. They were the oldest girls in their school and they are now middle schoolers. They do summer camp with us and with our counselors, our girls who are camp counselors, as well as our teachers. Holly Fiddler and Shannon Lux are our lead teachers who are helping design the program with them.
Rich Raponi [00:41:22] Is the Butler campus, is it accessible? Is it a short distance from here or-
Hope Murphy [00:41:30] It’s a short distance by bus. We bus our girls out there for sports events. Once a month, in primary, each primary class goes out for lab days. They spend the day out there exploring the outdoors, understanding the environment, using it as a lab space. Our upper school science classes are conducted out there. Environmental science, biology classes. Our girls athletic teams of course compete out there. The middle school uses it for hands on interactive experiences that are a week long or two weeks long. The seventh grade has a simulated dig of the Whittlesey people. This is based on a teacher experience on an archaeological dig of a Whittlesey site. She and her team of teachers bury artifacts in that site in the same manner as the site at which she dug. The girls then grid the site. They dig in square meter blocks. They graph all of their finds using applied math. They study social studies out there. They learn about the community that the Whittlesey people created. They read literature of a similar tribe. The book’s called Cricket Sings. The sixth grade has a tinkering week out there in which they explore, they use discovery methods to explore cooking using our kitchen. They tinker with language. They tinker with building things. They take apart appliances, they rebuild appliances. So it’s a wonderful place for discovery and just a short bus ride out there, we’re there. We’re there for the day and it’s a remarkable opportunity for our girls to learn in the outdoors.
Rich Raponi [00:43:28] And you brought up the Warren School? I’m sorry.
Hope Murphy [00:43:33] The Warner Girls’ Leadership Academy.
Rich Raponi [00:43:36] Are there other examples of Laurel School’s community involvement or-
Hope Murphy [00:43:41] Yes, community service is what we’ve called it in the past, that has gone back as far as Sarah Lyman’s days when she encouraged girls to have experiences in the community, both in tutoring and also in nursing. Kinds of experiences under the following head of school, Edna Lake. Laurel girls were out and particularly during World War II, they were out collecting scrap metal, they were raising funds to outfit an ambulance which was then sent off to the war effort. They also tutored in the City of Cleveland. They did nursing in volunteering capacities. Since then, Laurel has adopted a requirement for all upper school students to spend 50 hours out in the community doing something which both enriches their lives and helps others who could use some support in terms of tutoring, in terms of helping in institutions in which children are either unable to enjoy a fully complete life like our girls do. They work with other community services that help women, that help people who are impoverished. Whatever capacity they can find that they can contribute, they do that. In school, we also provide activities like supporting the Special Olympics. We can do that on campus. And we have our middle school students, because they can’t drive, do activities that we can bus our girls to. We volunteer at Cleveland Food Bank at Medwish in terms of packing supplies that are taken by Cleveland doctors abroad to help others. We run school trips. One to Honduras to help build community buildings. There’s one to Tanzania in which we have relationship with an orphanage, and our girls who are in our engineering program have designed chicken coops, which our girls who have gone on the trips then have built for the benefit of the orphans at this orphanage.
Rich Raponi [00:46:20] And I guess if there’s anything that I’ve missed that you’d like to discuss about Laurel School.
Hope Murphy [00:46:29] Well, our other affiliation, which is very exciting and new, is the Online School for Girls. Recognizing that girls lives are very complicated and families make commitments for their daughters in order to be able to take part in remarkable experiences, sometimes having the access to classes that are taught through digital means gives them the kind of flexibility that helps deepen their experiences and provide the flexibility that they need. So Laurel is a founding member of the Online School for Girls, and there are a number of girls schools throughout the country that are participating in this. We have several teachers who are teaching courses for the Online School for Girls. And that just gives us a greater opportunity to share the wonderful experience that are here.
Rich Raponi [00:47:30] Well, thank you very much.
Hope Murphy [00:47:37] Thank you.
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