Why Leelanau
Significantly small
Leelanau students enjoy uncommon access to teachers who become both friends and mentors, instructing, answering questions, modeling positive intellectual and social attitudes, or just talking. Within our exceptionally small community–around 90 students and 50 teachers, staff, and administrators–your student's presence, his personality, and his voice never slip by unnoticed.
We live together. We learn together. We know each other.
Building on Strengths
How do we know what a student's strengths are? The first step: we ask. Too many young people struggle in larger high schools because their teachers don't have time to know them, discover the way they learn best, help them imagine their own potential, and present them with opportunities to succeed and push past their limitations. Your student probably has a pretty good idea what her strengths are. If she's not sure, we help her find out. Leelanau teachers, well schooled in theories of learning styles and learning differences, understand the importance of knowing each student individually, and our six to one student-teacher ratio makes it possible.
One student excels in memorization and attention to detail. Another does best when questions start with "What do you think?" Once we uncover your student's learning strengths, we equip him with the language and the insights to explain to himself and to others how he knows. Empowered with self-awareness, he understands why he does better in some subjects and can take on weaker subjects with more confidence.
Our teachers find ways to affirm students' interests, personalities, and special abilities in the classroom, while also challenging each student in areas of learning that present more difficulty.
The Learning Center
For some students, uncovering how they learn calls for extra time and attention. Our Learning Center helps students, in particular those with language-based learning differences, to acquire the confidence and the tools they need to understand their own ways of knowing. Most importantly, we teach self-advocacy, so that students can identify and articulate their learning challenges and seek the accommodations they need to succeed.
Can your student consistently sink baskets from outside the three-point line? He has excellent gross motor skills and possesses an intuitive knowledge of trajectory. With that success and plenty of encouragement, we incorporate his affinity for sports into his physics class. We encourage the growth of his math skills by studying the statistics of his favorite team.
Is your student always drawing pictures of her friends? She's working with scale and perspective, color and shade, even anatomy. Our teachers build on her interest in drawing to improve her learning in science. She classifies species by drawing plants and animals. Remembering large quantities of information becomes less difficult when she connects abstract language and concepts with her own images.
At Leelanau, your student finds out how she knows and, with confidence, how to grow her successes in every subject.
College Preparation
In recent years, 100 percent of Leelanau graduates were accepted to four-year colleges or universities. Our Director of College Counseling works with each student one-on-one, starting during the junior year. Our rigorous college preparatory curriculum ensures that each student leaves The Leelanau School with all the necessary skills to succeed in today's competitive colleges and universities.
Philosophy
Success sparks a passion for learning. A student's capability in one way of learning affects his attitude toward others. And your student–in fact, every child–owns that potential.
When our music teacher discovers a student's natural sensitivity to sound and rhythm, she doesn't just help him succeed in the band, at song-writing, at mixing and recording his original tunes. They talk about his dreams: to start his own jazz band and to teach music. "I'm not sure I'd do that great in college, though," he says, "I hate writing. I'm really bad at it." At close-knit Leelanau, his teachers create assignments that build on his strengths: read the best poets, write song lyrics using concrete language to express feelings, teach a new student how to play the guitar by writing out lessons, include favorite musicians in a historical time-line to see who their political and literary contemporaries were. Soon, he's writing a college admission essay. His topic? Kerouac and making music in language.
Does your student show potential in art, science, storytelling, acting, math, athletics? We get to know him and the way he knows best.