For over 100 years, Roycemore continues to push education forward through unique partnerships with Northwestern University, Adobe Corporation and a world-class faculty while maintaining a familial environment fostering an incredible sense of community.
Our Upper School students can attend classes at Northwestern once they have exhausted our offerings in a certain subject. For example, if a student has taken AP Calculus at Roycemore their junior year, they may then attend the next level math course at NU their senior year.
January Short Term (JST), a Roycemore tradition since 1972, provides a wonderful opportunity for upper school students independent exploration. With guidance from staff and project directors, students spend 3 weeks in January exploring areas of personal interest beyond our curriculum.
The P3 program provides an opportunity for students to engage in projects designed by them! Twice a week students in the middle school have time in the schedule where they work with a teacher/ coach and an expert mentor on their project.
Each spring, the Lower School devotes a week to conduct an in-depth study on one topic through project based learning. The children are divided into multi-age groupings where they create, build and research one aspect of the topic. Previous Theme Week topics have included Architecture, The Earth Beneath Our Feet, Climate Change, and many others.
Thinking back on my time at Roycemore, I most value how my teachers were collaborators in my education. They didn’t tell me what to do or how to do it – they sought out my strengths and used them to help me excel. My experience in expecting and advocating for teamwork from those in leadership roles has served me far beyond my years at Roycemore and presented me with opportunities that my peers have missed out on – both academically and professionally. I think more impersonal school settings can sometimes discourage students from asking ‘why’ and digging deeper in ways that Roycemore definitely encouraged me to do.”
When I remember my years at Roycemore, it is clear to me that Roycemore’s culture of excellence and individuality has positively shaped my life since graduation. Roycemore emphasized learning through discovery, critical thinking, and challenging oneself; values that have remained with me to this day. Outside the classroom, the opportunities to build friendships through the extracurricular activities offered also shaped my character and proved to be invaluable, particularly through soccer, baseball (which I had never played before), and scholastic bowl. Through my January Short Term projects, I learned and was inspired by the logic behind how computers operate, and went on to study Computer Science in college. I still remember how I learned to critically analyze film on another JST project. Roycemore provided me with a truly unique experience.
Roycemore was much more for me than just a series of challenging courses, competitive teams, brilliant teachers, dedicated coaches, extravagant Palio performances, and clandestine trips to D&D Dogs between periods. Roycemore was, and continues to be, a vibrant, stimulating and diverse community with a wide range of subjects, activities and sports to explore. Not to mention, January Short Term, which I’d look forward to every year. Whether it was living with a French family in Paris, winter ecology and hiking with Mr. Spica in Wisconsin, recreating Normandy’s D-Day invasion, or learning how to run a snowboard shop as an independent study on entrepreneurship, I was able to pique interests, gain international exposure and build lifelong memories.