By Mike Simpson
At the end of every “shadow day”, we ask visiting students what they were most surprised by when they visit Stone.
And almost every single time we do, visiting students say the same thing: “Everyone was so nice.”
Here at Stone, we believe the best way to really see what makes us so different is to see us live and in action — to see the relationships our students have to their faculty and to their work, to experience the incredible energy around our beautiful building, to understand why we think it’s so important that we laugh. A lot.
In this unique year, we offer two ways to see Stone “live”. We continue to host visiting students for in-person shadow days — all visiting students must wear a cloth mask over their mouth and nose, fill out a pre-visit Covid questionnaire, complete a GoPass thermal scan, and read carefully our reopening plan (which includes all of our real-time safety protocols). Students who shadow in-person are matched up with a host student with similar interests, and they spend the day experiencing Stone exactly the way our students do — in a single day, a shadow student might take part in a challenging discussion in Race and Resistance, get involved in a House Competition during break, help build a trebuchet in Analog Design, even head off-campus for lunch.
Students who wish to shadow “virtually” will have a kind of birds-eye-view of what Stone is. We match virtual shadow students up with current virtual students and make sure that everyone has a real-time “tour guide” through our Learning-From-Home program. To really “see Stone”, we give virtual shadow students the proverbial “keys to the car” — virtual shadow students have access to Google Classroom, to all of our Google Meets, and to Slack (the live messaging application our students, faculty, and parents use to communicate). Virtual shadow students see it all — our classes, our community, our humor, the way we relentlessly design for joy.
And here’s what we guarantee all visiting students will see when they shadow at Stone, regardless of how they do it: everyone really is so nice.
“We’re loud, we’re funny, we’re committed to designing important work.”
If you’re ready to schedule a shadow day, be sure to visit our Admissions Page right now and click on the “Schedule A Shadow Button”. And, if you’d prefer to meet with our Admissions Counselors privately, email us today at admissions@stoneindependent.org.