Throughout the elementary school years, The Peck School provides its students an education rich in meaningful academic and personal experiences. Our teachers transact an educational program that provides a student with the skills, qualities, and traits to excel in secondary school and, ultimately, in life.

We recognize that completing the journey to secondary school is not without its concerns, and as the competitive, outside world appears to loom, those concerns can become more fraught. However, the K-8 educational model, and Peck’s particular branding of that model, offer compelling strengths to stay the course.

Our outcomes offer significant testimony in the number of graduates enrolled and succeeding at top secondary schools.

These schools have a keen perception of what our end product can be and is. They speak about academic strengths and athletic achievements, leadership and community service, and of what they know they can expect from the “average” Peck applicant. They point to the carefully designed continuum of our program and openly acknowledge its value and quality. We send them leaders and strong scholars who enter their schools with an exuberant stride to become their National Merit Finalists, school presidents, champion debaters, house prefects, All State Athletes, and more.

Peck’s K-8 model allows for these incredible successes by allowing for growth, exploration, and failure. It allows children to know and be known by deeply caring and committed adults. We are in an excellent position to help guide you through the secondary school process and support your family’s decision because we know your child so well.

Peck teachers teach, coach, advise, and eat at the same lunch table with your child. They are experts on this age-level. The student-teacher partnership, begun earlier, comes to a perfect crescendo in the upper grades. These teachers have watched children grow up and become leaders with the confidence to knock on any teacher’s door to set up a meeting to brainstorm a strategy, suggest improvements to a program, ask for comments on an essay, an application, and an idea. At Peck, students make choices and experience consequences. Peck’s primary focus has been to prepare each child for the next steps because the middle school years are the heart of the K-8 model, not simply a stop in a long line of successive grades leading to graduation and college placement. The continuum of their experiences springboard our graduates into leadership and success at the high school level.

Students stand at the top of the ladder here. All our students have real opportunities to lead school-wide.

Our eighth graders feel and know they are important; they have spent three to four years observing the top, looking at how those before them have led the School. They know the position comes with responsibilities and privileges…they know it’s a step up, and they step up. There is nothing illusive about their response. They are not caught in the middle but take on the role of actual seniors, mature and confident. At the same time, they can still be young kids. Peck’s safe environment allows students comfort during these awkward tween years.

Our students do not lead their academic and social lives in the shadow of high school students, and there is substantially less pressure on our students to be, or act, ‘older.’ They are able to explore talents they might not yet know they have and try new things and still be children.

One minute an eighth grader is delivering an insightful opinion of the role of fate in Romeo, and twenty minutes later jumping in the air playing four-square, and twenty minutes after that debating the importance of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy in a history class. Numerous national studies demonstrate the advantage of a K-8 education, highlighting enhanced academic, social, and emotional development while bringing about improved self-esteem and confidence (Rand Study and National Middle School Association Study).

“It is a step in the right direction that around the country we are emphasizing school models like K-8 schools that keep a family -like environment through middle school…. If I could design psychologically safe schools, every elementary school in the United States would go from kindergarten through grade eight and would be no larger than four hundred children. No high school would have more than eight hundred students.”
- Michael Thompson, Ph.D. & Catherine O’Neill Grace
Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children

Finding new interests and passions make for a powerful teen, and here there are many opportunities for the Peck students to see themselves growing in power. Eighth graders at Peck edit the newspaper, the Yearbook, captain the sports teams, conduct school-wide community service drives, and organize dances.

They lead the Coding Club, the Peck InDeCoRe (Individual Development and Community Responsibility) Program, serve on Peck’s Student Council, and make speeches before 150 of their peers and 50 faculty members. They serve meals at the Soup Kitchen and visit the children at the P.G. Chambers School, a school offering educational and therapeutic programs to children with special needs.

Our eighth graders actively mentor the children in the lower grades and high-five the Kindergartners. They experience unique cross-grade learning opportunities that help create a mutually beneficial bond between our students and strengthen our community.

They are heroes to the younger children, not ‘caught in the middle.’ Our eighth graders wear the mantle of leadership almost without knowing they have donned it.

A two-year study by American College Testing (ACT) found that eighth grade academic achievement in an appropriate eighth grade curriculum was more significant in determining future success in high school and college than any other academic experience.

Thus, Peck eighth graders are pursued by high schools because they are well-prepared, self-assured, self-confident, and well-rounded. Many of them go on to lead in high school. Leadership breeds leadership.

At Peck, we pride ourselves on a significantly higher rate of acceptance for our graduates. We know your child. The real definition of a family school is that, in eighth grade, a platoon of supporters extends behind your child, from the Head of School, to a dedicated secondary placement officer, to the Head of the Upper School, and to a network of parents and teachers that have known your child throughout the program. Everyone at Peck advocates for your child. Secondary school placement is embedded in our mission, and we believe an innate part of our program is guiding your child’s way out as closely as we guided the way in.

Our statistics stand the test when it comes to Secondary School Admissions: in the past four years, 90% of our students have been accepted to their school of first choice. Even those not attending their declared first choice are thriving. Which brings one final point: our students have excellent options. The process has integrity — we look for fit because by the time your child is thirteen or fourteen years old we can see so much more clearly where those wonderful opportunities lie.

We know that we have instilled our students with academic purpose and stamina. By the time the high school selection process begins, students’ strengths are also more clearly defined, along with their emerging personalities and potential passions. And from admitting schools, we hear about seamless transitions and kids who excel through high school and beyond.

n every way, the dedicated Kindergarten to eighth grade experience proves itself a superior option, allowing children room and time to grow and become. Peck graduates confident students who are poised, independent critical thinkers, knowledgeable about themselves and possessing a strong sense of responsibility to the larger community. They enter high school as confident freshmen ready to face the academic and social challenges ahead.

When asked, “Why stay?” the compelling answer must be, “How could you not?” This is a place where all children thrive.