Shady Side Academy is an independent preparatory school in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania in Greater Pittsburgh. Founded in 1883 as an all-male night school in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, the academy now offers a secular coeducational PK–12 program on four campuses in the city and its suburbs, including a boarding program in the Croft and Morewood Houses of its Senior School Campus.
Formed to provide for the education of the sons of newly moneyed industrialists of Pittsburgh's East End,David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Random House, 2008), 105. the academy counts the Frick and Mellon families among its early patrons.Quentin R. Skrabec, Henry Clay Frick: the Life of the Perfect Capitalist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 154.David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Random House, 2008), 339. In 1922, the academy expanded to its sprawling Georgian Senior School campus in the then-countryside of Fox Chapel under the influence of the Country Day School movement.“Shadyside Academy Cornerstone Laid,” The Pittsburgh Press, May 3, 1922. The academy merged with the Arnold School in 1940 to form its Junior School campus“Principals in School Merger,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 31, 1940. and added its stone Tudor manor-style Middle School campus in 1958, emerging in its current three-school system. The academy admitted its first female students in 1973.Jennifer Bails, "A Legacy of Learning: Shady Side Academy celebrates 125 Years of Academic Excellence," Shady Side Academy Magazine, Winter 2008-2009, 4.
Shady Side Academy enrolls approximately one thousand students annually and is a member of the National Association of Independent Schools and the Association of Boarding Schools. The school is a member of the Chewonki Foundation's Maine Coast Semester in Wiscasset, Maine and the High Mountain Institute's HMI Semester in Leadville, Colorado, and sends a significant number of students to both programs annually.
History
Shady Side Academy was founded as an all-male day school in 1883, on Aiken Avenue in the East End neighborhood of Shadyside, Pittsburgh. In 1922, the Senior School was established on its current suburban campus in Fox Chapel. This move also resulted in Shady Side becoming a boarding school, first with a traditional seven-day program and, later, with the school's weekday program.
A later merger in the early 1940s with another local boys' private school, The Arnold School, resulted in the creation of another new campus: a Junior School, located in Pittsburgh's Point Breeze and serving Pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students.
In the 1950s, the academy purchased an estate less than a mile from the Senior School campus, creating a middle school for grades six through eight.
In 1973, the Senior School embraced the concept of co-education. It began admitting female students (popularly referred to, particularly in newspapers, as "The Shady Ladies") for the first time. The Junior and Middle Schools followed suit in the 1990s, with the first K-12 "Lifer" female students graduating in 2007. The last all-male class at the academy was the Middle School Form II (eighth grade) class of 1998, which became co-educated upon entering the Senior School in 1999. It was also the last class at the Middle School to follow the tie-and-jacket dress code.
Opening in the fall of 2007, Shady Side added a pre-kindergarten located on the Junior School campus. The total enrollment across all grades fluctuates but is generally about 1,000 students, with about 500 enrolled in the Senior School (grades 9-12 or "Forms" III-VI).
In recent years, the school has worked to implement "green," or environmentally friendly, changes to its campuses. The 2006 renovation of Rowe Hall, the main academic building, uses several "green" concepts. The $6.8 million renovation of this primary Senior School facility emphasized environmentally friendly approaches, from glass that lets more light into classrooms (helping the building maintain lower electricity usage) to rainwater collected in an underground cistern and used to flush toilets and urinals. In the fall of 2007, the Rowe Hall Complex earned Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification, becoming the only high school in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to have done so.
The McIlroy Center for Science and Innovation opened in 2018 as the new home of the Senior School Science Department. The building's construction was made possible by the fundraising efforts of The Campaign for Shady Side. The Mcllroy Center is a Gold LEED-certified "green" building with sustainable features that reduce environmental impact while creating teaching opportunities, such as a rooftop solar array and monitoring system, and a rain garden to collect storm runoff. The Glimcher Tech & Design Hub, a dynamic facility dedicated to innovation, creativity, technology, and design, opened at the Senior School in September 2019. The 12,000-square-foot space includes three primary areas: a Fabrication and Robotics Wing, a Computer Science Wing, and a café. The facility is on the lower levels of Rowe and Memorial Halls, in the space formerly occupied by the Science Department before the department moved to the new McIlroy Center for Science & Innovation in 2018.
Admissions Demographics + Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity 2019–2020 White Asian Multiracial Black Hispanic Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander 579 171 104 65 9 1
Financial aid In 2013, over $2.8 million in need-based financial aid was distributed to 159 students. In 2019, Shady Side received the second-largest gift in its 136-year history, a $5.2 million gift to the financial aid endowment.
Curriculum
Academic life at Shady Side Academy operates on a trimester system, dividing the year into three thirteen to fourteen-week terms. Classes begin each year before Labor Day with Convocation in late August and finish with Commencement exercises in early June. The Second Term begins in late November, and the Third Term begins in early April. At the Senior School, regular classes begin each day at 8:15 a.m. and end at 3:00 p.m., punctuated by a late-morning assembly period. All-school assemblies occur every Monday and Friday in the Hillman Center's Rauh Theater. Every Wednesday, students meet with their advisory groups. The academic day is divided into six periods, including at least five classes, a lunch period, and intermittent free periods. Athletic practices follow the school day from 3:45 p.m. to late afternoon. An eight-day rotating schedule determines class periods.
Each term, students enroll in a minimum of five classes, both year-long courses and one-term electives, taught by seven academic departments—Arts, Computer Science, English, History, Mathematics, Science, and World Languages. Many departments, particularly the English and History Departments, make extensive use of the Harkness table, as most rooms in Rowe have large, oval tables. This teaching style is similar to the Socratic method. Students receive midterm grade reports during the year's first term and subsequently after each term, followed by a cumulative grade report at the end of the year. The grade for each class has three parts: a letter grade, an effort grade, and a paragraph of written remarks. The quality grade, assigned on the A+ (4.3333) to F (0.0) scale, is used to calculate the student's GPA. Effort grades for each class consist of a number from 5, indicating "exemplary effort," to 1, indicating "unacceptable effort." Effort grades of 2—"inconsistent effort"— or below result in a student's placement on Academic Warning and likely an interim report to the student's parents. The academy uses the student's GPA and effort grades each term and at the end of the year to award academic Year and Term Honors, ranging from "Honors" (B+ average) to "Highest Honors" (A average), as well as other school and departmental prizes. Established in 1929, Shady Side Academy's chapter of the Cum Laude Society elects members from the top fifth of the graduating class based on academic performance in the junior year and the first two terms of the senior year.
Boarding program and residential life Boarding at Shady Side Academy dates back to the school's relocation from the Shadyside neighborhood in the 1920s. The number of boarding students living on campus and the number of buildings serving as dormitories have fluctuated over the academy's history. Four buildings on the Senior School campus—Bayard House (1924), Croft House (1931), Ellsworth House (1922) (now Hunt Hall), and Morewood House (1922)—all served as residence halls at one point in the school's history. The names of Bayard, Morewood, and Ellsworth Houses reference three out of the four streets encircling the site of the academy's original campus, now the site of the Winchester Thurston School. At one time, nearly 200 students, both Senior and Middle School, boarded full-time in a seven-day program. In the 1960s, the academy transitioned to housing Senior School students in a five-day boarding program, becoming one of six schools nationwide to offer such a program. Because students spend weekends at home, boarders almost always came from the three-state area of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. In the fall of 2014, the academy announced it would start offering a seven-day boarding option beginning in 2015, in addition to its current five-day boarding program. Shady Side's boarding program now hosts approximately fifty students every year in two residence halls—Croft House, the boys' dormitory, and Morewood House, the girls' dormitory. The academy also houses residential faculty representing almost every academic department, both in apartments in the dormitories and homes on the Senior and Middle School campuses.
Extracurricular activities Student-run clubs at Shady Side exist as collaborations between students and a sponsoring faculty member. Numerous language clubs exist in collaboration with language programs offered by the World Languages Department, including German, Spanish, and French clubs, as well as clubs for languages not taught at Shady Side, such as the Italian Club. Nationality clubs, such as the Jewish Student Union and Black Student Union, celebrate various global cultures and often present performances during the academy's annual GlobalFest week. There are also many established service and philanthropic clubs, such as Service Learning and Meals on Wheels. There are also religious clubs, activist clubs, academic competition teams, student government organizations, performance groups, departmental programs such as the peer-tutoring Scribe Office for writing, and publications.
Academic Shady Side participates in Model United Nations conferences, National Academic Quiz Tournaments and other quiz bowl competitions, the Western Pennsylvania Math League, Science Olympiad, North American Computational Linguistics Open competition, National Science Bowl, and forensics competitions, principally in the National Speech and Debate Association.
The Pittsburgh Japanese School (ピッツバーグ日本語補習授業校 Pittsubāgu Nihongo Hoshū Jugyō Kō), a weekend supplementary Japanese school, uses the middle school facilities of Shady Side Academy."北米の補習授業校一覧（平成25年4月15日現在）." (Archive) MEXT. Retrieved on May 5, 2014. "c/o Shady Side Academy Middle School, 500 Squaw Run Road East, Pittsburgh, PA 15238, U.S.A""Zoning Map" (Archive). Borough of Fox Chapel. Retrieved on May 6, 2014. The school, established in 1993, originated from a group of parents starting a Japanese class system in 1977."In English" (Archive). Pittsburgh Japanese School. Retrieved on May 6, 2014.
Arts, theater, and music