Miss Porter's School

Miss Porter's School
Address
60 Main St Farmington , Connecticut 06032 United States
Coordinates	41°43′21″N 72°49′46″W
Information
Other name	MPS, Porter's, Farmington
Type	Independent, boarding
Motto	Puellae venerunt. Abíerunt mulieres. ("They came as girls. They left as women.")
Established	1843 (1843)
CEEB code	070210
Head teacher	Katherine G. Windsor
Faculty	52
Grades	9–12
Gender	Girls
Enrollment	325 total 212 boarding 113 day (2014)
Average class size	10
Student to teacher ratio	7:1
Campus size	55-acre (220,000 m2)
Campus type	Township
Color(s)	Green and white
Athletics	18 Interscholastic teams
Mascot	Daisy
Endowment	$142.3 million
Tuition	$66,825 boarding $53,475 day (for 2021–2022)
Website	www.porters.org

Miss Porter's School (MPS) is an elite American private college preparatory school for girls founded in 1843 in Farmington, Connecticut. The school draws students from 21 states, 31 countries (with dual-citizenship and/or residence), and 17 countries (citizenship alone) and international students comprised 14% as of the 2017–2018 year. The average class size was 10 students in 2017.

The community traditionally denotes those new to campus collectively as New Girls, those returning members as Old Girls, and alumnae/i as Ancients.

History

Early history and Sarah Porter

1888 cabinet card of Sarah Porter, the founder of Miss Porter's School.

Miss Porter's School was established in 1843 by education reformer Sarah Porter, who recognized the importance of women's education. She was insistent that the school's curriculum include chemistry, physiology, botany, geology, and astronomy in addition to the more traditional Latin, French, German, spelling, reading, arithmetic, trigonometry, history, and geography. Also encouraged were such athletic opportunities as tennis, horseback riding, and in 1867 the school formed its own baseball team, the Tunxises, the name of which itself harkens back to those members of the Saukiog tribe who originally settled the area on which the school is situated.

Mary Dunning Dow (1884–1903)

In 1884, Sarah Porter hired her former student, Mary Elizabeth Dunning Dow, with whom she began to share more of her duties as Head of School. From then until her death in 1900, Porter gradually relinquished her control of the school to Dow.

Sarah Porter's will named her nephew, Robert Porter Keep, as executor of her estate, of which the school was the most valuable asset. Dow's compensation for her position as sole Head of School was also specified in the will. As executor, Robert Keep began extensive repairs and renovations to the school. While Dow continued to receive a salary as per Porter's will, she became convinced that Keep, in diverting the school's income to pay for construction, was enriching his inheritance with funds that were rightfully hers. The conflict escalated and culminated in Dow's resignation in 1903. She moved to Briarcliff, New York, taking with her as many as 140 students and 16 faculty members, and began Mrs. Dow's School for Girls, which would come to be known as Briarcliff Junior College only to be absorbed by Pace University in 1977.

Elizabeth Hale Keep and Robert Keep (1903–1943)

Robert Keep announced in July 1903 that the school would reopen in October of that year with his wife, Elizabeth Vashti Hale Keep as Head of School, eleven teachers, and between five and sixteen students in attendance. After Keep succumbed to pneumonia and died on July 3, 1904, Elizabeth Keep continued his legacy of renovation and construction. One of her many legacies was the establishment of a kindergarten for children of her employees. The kindergarten, on Garden Street, became the Village Cooperative Nursery School, and is no longer connected with Miss Porter's School. When Mrs. Keep died of influenza on March 28, 1917, leadership of the school passed to her stepson, Robert Porter Keep, Jr., who moved to Farmington from Andover, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching German at Phillips Academy. From 1917 until the school's Centennial, in 1943, he and his wife, RoseAnne Day Keep, remained Heads of School at Miss Porter's.

Robert Keep appointed members to the first board of trustees in 1943, including:

• Wilmarth S. Lewis, Yale University's Horace Walpole scholar
• Annie Burr Auchincloss Lewis, Wilmarth Lewis's wife
• The Rev. Palfrey Perkins, a senior minister at King's Chapel
• Lewis Perry, headmaster of Phillips Exeter Academy
• George H. Richards, a lawyer and Mr. Keep's classmate at Yale University

Centennial (1943)

The school was incorporated as a non-profit institution during the school's Centennial in 1943, with the primary purpose as a college preparatory school rather than its previous reputation as a finishing school for the social elite. Also in 1943, the school ended the tradition of choosing a successive Head of School from the Porter family tree, selecting as its Heads, Ward L. Johnson and his wife Katharine Johnson.

Katherine Windsor (2009–present)

Since 2009, the Head of School is Katherine Windsor, who draws on her past experience running the Center for Talented Youth program at Johns Hopkins University and The Sage School in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Her tenure as Head of School has seen the school, among other things, instantiate its partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s Independent School Teaching Residency program. On March 31, 2021, Windsor announced via her Twitter account that she is currently serving as a faculty member at the UPenn Graduate School of Education.

As of 2022, the school's endowment was estimated at $142.3 million.

Campus

A banner hanging in a themed guest room in the Timothy Cowles House, at Miss Porter's School, gives insight into how Porter's girls lived during the mid 1900s

Former History Building at Miss Porter's School

The Kate Lewis Gym at Miss Porter's School

The 40-acre campus overlooks the Farmington River and includes a number of historically significant buildings which have collectively served the wider Farmington community in a range of functional capacities over their respective histories. Over the years, the school has transformed its campus assets to suit its needs.

The school currently maintains a total of nine student residence halls, two of which are strictly limited to the senior class: Brick, Colony, Humphrey, Keep, Lathrop, Macomber, Main, New Place, and Ward.

Academic facilities

• Main House, located at 60 Main Street and the front door of which is depicted on the school seal, was built in 1830 as the Union Hotel on Main Street, intended originally to serve patrons of the nearby Farmington Canal and later it was rented to Sarah Porter in 1848 until her eventual purchase on April 19, 1866. Retrofitted with a kitchen during a renovation c. 1870s, the building serves as the central-most hub of campus life. More recently, the dining hall was expanded to accommodate the school's burgeoning enrollment; a project which also saw the campus security office and adjacent student spaces reimagined with intentions to bring the whole facility around to bear a closer historic resemblance to the original hotel, and the school opting to have the structure outfitted with an elevator to facilitate access.
• Greene House, historically the Thomas Hart Grist Mill, serves to accommodate the school's admissions office. The Thomas Hart Grist Mill dates back to the 1600s and predates most of the structures in its vicinity. Until the 1960s, the site was a functioning grist mill noted for its historical service to President Calvin Coolidge. In 2012, the building was purchased by the school and renovated, it now serves as the school's admissions office.
• Thomas Hart Hooker House, built in 1770 and located on Main Street, currently serves as the campus alumnae/i and development office.
• Historical buildings Major Timothy Cowles House and Samuel Deming Store (also known as F.L. Scott Store, Your Village Store) are both located in Mills Street and currently serve the community in their respective capacities as faculty housing.
• M. Burch Tracy Ford Library, often abbreviated simply to Ford, is one of the newer academic facilities on campus. It is named for the school's eleventh Head of School and houses over 22,000 volumes, electronic books, magazines, journals, newspapers in addition to a collection of 1,308 academic and entertainment DVDs and videos. The building also houses a computer lab and eight study rooms.
• Hamilton, known to past generations as student housing, is currently home to the English and History departments. It is named for the Hamilton sisters, most notably Alice and Edith.
• Leila Dilworth Jones ’44 Memorial, commonly abbreviated to Jones or Jones Memorial and having served as a pharmacy prior to the school's founding, is home to the language department, where students may immerse themselves in modern and classical cultures including, but not limited to, Spanish, Latin, French, or Mandarin. As with most buildings on campus, Jones Memorial has served in many operational capacities to suit the school's functional needs, sporadically as faculty housing and as temporary storage for the school's library contents.
• Dr. Glenda Newell-Harris '71 Student Center, centrally located and occupying a historic renovated wood-shingled cottage at 62 Main Street, has in recent years come to replace the Wean Student Center as primary gathering space for students. In the years since it was built and incorporated into the campus, it has served in a variety of functional capacities as befits the advancement of the school's mission: at one point serving as the school's only gym and theater, subsequently as the school's music department, and is considered to be home to the school's student a cappella group, The Perilhettes. The space, wedged between Main and the space known to the community as Counting House, itself once housing the music program and currently serving in an administrative capacity as the school's business office, was known formerly as the Kate Lewis Gym.
• Ann Whitney Olin Arts and Science Center, also known simply as Olin, is the main building for mathematics, science, and arts. Studio art labs include a painting and ceramics studio, each with 25-foot (7.6 m) ceilings and 500-square-foot (46 m²) of windows, separated by a textiles lab and a digital media lab, while the lower level of the facility is home to the department's photography classroom and darkroom, and all with full wheelchair-access accreditations. The renovation and expansion of this building was designed by Tai Soo Kim.

Athletic facilities

• The Colgate Wellness Center is an eight-bed licensed infirmary, wholly Ancient-run in its medical and counseling capacities. The facility was recently remodeled to extend the space and streamline student access.
• The Student Recreation Center, designed by Tai Soo Kim and built in 1991, includes the Wean Student Center (a gift of the Raymond John Wean Foundation), Crisp Gymnasium with an elevated running track, a weight and exercise room, an athletic training room, and four once-standard squash courts, the court space of which has since been repurposed to accommodate a collective of Concept2 machines, a free weight room, and a climbing wall. The school’s squash program has a permanent home elsewhere on campus.
• The Mellon Gymnasium, designed by Maxwell Moore and built in 1962 as part of the theater-gymnasium complex, was a gift of the Richard King Mellon Foundation. It is home to Varsity Badminton in the fall, JV and Thirds Basketball in the winter, and is the designated indoor practice space for Varsity and JV Softball in the spring. It is also the official home of the Minks, Possums, and Squirrels, intramural rivalries that feature prominently the week leading up to the Welcome Tradition; outside of the complex, there is a statue for each of the three teams. The coronavirus pandemic saw this space temporarily transformed for the purposes of meal service in order to bolster social distancing capacity of the school’s permanent dining facility, a space which had already been scheduled for expansion and the renovation of which began mid-2020, the school having already engaged the services of Centerbrook Architects & Planners and O&G Industries to complete the project. Additionally, the administration rented space at adjacent village spaces, namely St. James Episcopal Church and the First Church of Christ, Congregational, to aid in the de-densification process. During the pandemic, Brooks Field, itself sandwiched between the library and science centers, permitted the community well-ventilated and socially distanced respite via projected movies and lawn games. In a space adjacent to the gym, the Barbara Lang Hacker '29 Theater is home to the Players/Mandolin Performance Troupe.
• The Gaines Dance Barn, built c. 1930 and remodeled in 1993, is the 3,500-square-foot (330 m²) facility that serves as both rehearsal and performance space for dance groups. In March 1998, the facility was acoustically treated following complications stemming from the 1993 remodel. Most recently, the space underwent a partial expansion over thanksgiving break 2020, and now includes a locker room and foyer space adjacent to the school's north entrance on Porter Road.

• The Pool & Squash Building

• The Farmington Boat House,

• Kiki's Field, Cowbarn Field, Maple Field, and Oaklea Field.

Athletics

Officially, the school has no mascot, a holdover from a time when exercise for girls was seen predominantly as a means to sustain patriarchal systems. However, over the years and as the athletic program has gained standing in competition with other NEPSAC schools, students have come to be known collectively in interscholastic competition as Fighting Daisies. Porter's competes in the Founders League with Choate Rosemary Hall, Hotchkiss, Kent, Kingswood-Oxford, Loomis Chaffee, Taft and Westminster schools. At the end of each season, Porter's competes against the league's most competitive teams in the New England Championships. Porter's traditional rival is The Ethel Walker School. Since the turn of the millennium, student athletes have earned a combined 11 Founder's League and 8 New England championship titles.

Residential culture and student life

Approximately 75% of Porter's girls live on campus in dormitories, all but one of which are former Farmington private residences left to the school. The school currently maintains a total of nine student residence halls (or “houses”): Brick, Colony, Humphrey, Keep, Lathrop, Macomber, Main, New Place, and Ward, two of which are strictly limited to the senior class. Each dormitory has a house director who lives in a private suite or apartment in the dorm, often with his/her family. One of the school's distinguishing features is that house directors' primary responsibilities are within residential houses. Each dormitory, with the exception of the two senior dorms, has two Junior Advisors who serve as peer counselors and mediators. Each house is self-governing to an extent, with students responsible for chores on a rotating schedule, the threat of curtailed privileges ever looming.

In her later years, Ancient Theodate Pope Riddle outfitted a section of her family’s homestead on Mountain Road as The Odd and End Shop, known alternatively as The Grundy. A reincarnation of this corner store remains to this day on campus as The Daisy, in the northwest-most corner of Main, for all students to peruse at their leisure or, else, avail themselves of the hangout amenities. The pandemic saw The Daisy temporarily reimagined, yet again, with snacks instead made available in residence halls, further 'downstream' so to speak, in order to ensure that students wouldn't intermingle at a single point of distribution.

Traditions

Roughly speaking, Spring Traditions serve to celebrate that academic year’s graduating class of seniors while Fall Traditions function primarily to welcome New Girls to the community and as a means of general relationship building. School-wide traditions generally find students clad in color-clashing apparel, wielding noise makers and posters, and are rumored to involve not too infrequent streaking.

• Chief amongst the school’s many long-held traditions is the Old Girl/New Girl relationship. Prior to their arrival at the school, each new student (New Girl by on-campus terminology) is paired with a senior Old Girl who serves as a friend and mentor throughout the year.
• Heading up the fall semester is the Welcome Tradition, during which students introduce themselves to the intramural and wider Farmington communities, loudly in every sense of the word and as a symbolic means of women reclaiming their rightful place in society. The night’s celebrations culminate, among other things, in the first performance by the school’s seniors-only a cappella group, The Perilhettes, since the academic year prior when they were first 'tapped.' The line-up is completely replaced each year and is composed entirely of senior students, maintaining a repertoire of old standards and contemporary music alike. Mountain Day, typically observed early in the fall semester, and a beloved all-school tradition eagerly anticipated by students, is a surprise reprieve from schoolwork obligations and is usually announced, in dramatic fashion, by dinner's end the evening prior. In 2018, to mark the school’s 175th anniversary, Mountain Day was announced by none other than Oprah Winfrey herself, live via the school’s Instagram account. Traditional observance of Mountain Day might involve off-campus excursions amongst various student cohorts, and, for new students, an obligatory hike to the Heublein Tower high atop nearby Talcott Mountain.
• Tapping, the process by which student leadership positions, standard-bearer roles, and various artifacts are ceremoniously passed between student cohorts, occurs at various points throughout the year, skewed however toward its conclusion.
• Various locales around campus play host to twice-weekly instances of Singing in the Garden during a period of the academic year which roughly correlates to the spring athletic season.
• Each academic year culminates in a series of commencement exercises, the main objective of which is to celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating class. But, not to be lost amongst these rituals is the Ring Ceremony, the conference itself of which traditionally marks a New Girl’s graduation into the Old Girl cohort of students, and during which upperclass Old Girls ceremoniously wish upon the rings of New Girls with whom they have developed a strong bond over the course of the academic year. Each New Girl chooses for her ring ceremony, a specific campus locale with which she holds particular reverence.

Clubs, sports, and organizations

In addition to an array of club and varsity sports, the school boasts current slate of over fifty active student-run clubs and organizations that cater to a wide variety of its students’ interests. If a student doesn't find an organization that fits their specific interest or need, there is a process by which they can create their own.

Student publications

Amongst this wide array of clubs are a smattering of organizational boards that sustain each of the school's community-wide publications:

• Salmagundy is the school's student-run monthly newspaper, founded October 27, 1945. Salmagundy is now both an online and paper publication.
• The school's journal for scholarly writing, Chautauqua, sharing its name with the US adult education movement, offers publication examples of student research across a variety of academic disciplines.
• The school's yearbook, Daeges Eage, literally translates from Old English to "eye of the day," from which the modern word "daisy" is derived.
• Haggis/Baggis, the school's magazine for literature and fine arts, features student poems, short stories, photographs, and artwork. Since it was first published in 1967, the magazine has received numerous awards and recognitions.
• The Language Literary Magazine is a yearly publication which showcases writings by foreign language students, including essays, poems, commentaries, and dialogues.

Student government

Various community cohorts around campus elect representatives to the student government, lead by members of the Nova Nine, themselves elected by their classmates in late spring of their junior year: Head of School, Second Head of School, Co-Heads of Main, Co-Heads of New Girls, Head of Diversity, Head of Athletics, Head of Student Activities. New Girl/Old Girl events are organized throughout the year by Co-Heads of New Girls in collaboration with the school’s administrative staff. Week-to-week, the Head of Student Activities works closely with the Office of Student Life to build an array of weekend activities; any one weekend has the potential to see a student take in a movie at a nearby AMC Theatres complex, peruse the Westfarms Mall, and partake in a game of lasertag, all in one fall-swoop. This privilege is made available on an individual basis, at a student’s leisure, depending of course on the student's academic or disciplinary standing and barring explicit parental restriction.

Notable alumnae

Main article: List of Miss Porter's School alumnae

See also: Category:Miss Porter's School alumni

• 
  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• 
  Pema Chodron
• 
  Nellie Grant
• 
  Julia Lathrop
• 
  Norah, Alice, Margaret, and Edith Hamilton
• 
  Theodate Pope, Alice Hamilton, and a student believed to be Agnes Hamilton, 1888
• 
  Madeline Breckinridge
• 
  Ruth Hanna McCormick
• 
  Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark
• 
  Emily Hale
• 
  Gloria Vanderbilt
• 
  Edith Bouvier Beale
• 
  Gene Tierney
• 
  Dina Merrill
• 
  Lee Bouvier Radziwill (right)
• 
  Sarah Blake
• 
  Mamie Gummer
• 
  Katherine Pope (right)
• 
  Mary Anne Mohanraj
• 
  Eliza Talcott
• 
  Helen Gilman Noyes Brown

External links

• Official website