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Mission Statement
"The Mission of The Unquowa School is to develop, educate and prepare our family of children with an unafraid spirit to achieve their personal best in a changing world."
At Unquowa, we aim:
- to teach a skills based traditional academic curriculum with individual, personal attention and innovative methodology in a small classroom setting.
- to foster artistic creativity, creative problem solving, and leadership through participation in our fine and performing arts program, our computer program, and our physical education and team sports program.
- to engender positive ethical values in a school climate which promotes integrity, responsibility, civility, compassion, cooperation, support, and respect. Our teachers function as role models, and the peer student culture embodies these values.
History
The Unquowa School was incorporated under Connecticut law as a not-for-profit school in 1917. As an early (1927) school report put it:
"Unquowa School was founded by an association of parents for the purpose of providing a school in which their children could acquire at least the same valuable information and skill that they would get in ordinary schools, but under conditions such that their health would be better safe-guarded, their social spirit more highly developed and their growth in power more definitely provided for."
The mission statement of the school in 1917 accurately captured the inspiration and idealism of the school at that time. What is interesting is that the original mission statement was continually referred to throughout the next 80 years, in spite of dramatic changes in the country, educational philosophies, the surrounding school community and the public education system.
At the 75th reunion of the school a former headmaster captured the essence of the school when he stated that the school holds the child as the center of its purpose, and that every child at Unquowa receives the love, respect and security that they would expect to receive from a family. Educating the whole child is still at the school's core -- the classes are small, the teachers know the children, and every child is developed to his or her full potential. These elements have not changed since the school's founding, and they have been the primary draw of the school to families with elementary children, regardless of the time period.
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