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Dear Friends,
The real welcome to University Lake School begins when you take the winding path up from the main road through our forested acreage and enter a clearing of minimalist mid-century board-and-batten cedar schoolhouses. It feels like a small New England college tucked under a vast Midwestern sky.
Our founding families hailed from Dartmouth and were instantly at home amidst the pristine lakes and prairies of Lake Country. With love and determination, and in the wake of the Second World War, the first Lakers built a School in Hartland to meet the educational ambitions of pioneering ex-urban professionals, local farming families seeking access to selective higher education, and intellectually curious students of all stripes who have for three-quarters of a century made University Lake School the premier destination for learning in the state of Wisconsin.
A Place of Wonder and Growth
Listen for the call of a heron, hawk, or owl and keep your eyes peeled for leaping deer, trotting turkeys, or indeed the toddling march of our junior kindergartners on a woodland adventure. This magical setting is prelude to a chorus of youngsters who become– on our watch– highly skilled and self-possessed young adults who look you in the eye, ask real questions, and think real thoughts. This is the experience that launches another generation of powerful change-makers and thought-leaders. This is not just an aspiration, this is our value proposition, and we have the data to support it, Laker by Laker.
The Laker Journey
Welcome to Field Day and the clash of athletes, a Humanities seminar and the repartee of scholars, or a Robotics meet and the dismantling and rebuild of a robot and its code before our eyes. This is Hawk Hill, and there is none other. Like other creatures here, students own this place, and that’s how I like it. If it is your School, then you will make much of it. I am beyond excited to invite you to join our journey of deep connection and genuine intellectual discovery that will set the pace and prime your soul for a life of meaning and purpose.
Learning at ULS is a full experience because you are a full human. We don’t tell you what to think, any more than we could possibly tell you who you are. We invite you to dive into an environment that is social and searching, and where by the end of a day your mind teems with fresh thought, deep understanding, broad perspective, and the confidence and knowledge to tackle or embrace absolutely anything and everything. A full life– the life of the whole child (as if the world could possibly deal in half children)– is deserving of this rare community and is desirous of the courage and insight of teachers and guides who vow to leverage the ULS largesse towards our highest goal: your growth.
Discovering who you are, we’ve found, and the many Lakers before us, is not as touchy-feely as it sounds: it demands keen observation, an open mind, relentless trial, exacting accountability, and true creative power. If that all feels high stakes, good. It’s because you matter. This is the place where you cannot and shall not hide, and where you will discover the great joy of being known and loved.
We are rare among schools in that we are not shy to ask bold questions;
We do not shrink from the many productive discomforts of a full life, which include a lively mind, and we do not think our job consists of asking merely to hear what we know. You tell us. We are listening.
I am keen to know if you are ready for the world. I am even keener to know: is the world ready for you? A world where, as I have learned at ULS, what might have been yesterday’s soft skills are today’s hard skills and tomorrow’s only skills. Can you work on a team? Can you think your own thought? Can you be a true friend?
This is more than an invitation– it is a dare. A dare made in the spirit of the Reggio Emilia pedagogy, in which a lesson designed to demonstrate mastery is better construed as a provocation to understand and therefore to discover self-mastery. Be a Laker, be with us, be proud of who you are and who you are becoming, and allow this to be the place where the good is yours to discover and call home. With excitement for our work ahead together,
Head of School