An all-girls boarding and college-prep day school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts has opened a new academic building and revamped its curriculum. It’s an effort to give girls opportunities in science and math, where women are largely underrepresented.
The Miss Hall’s School has upgraded its mathematics classrooms, science laboratories, meeting space and workrooms, and curriculum in an effort to inspire girls to go into science, technology, engineering, art or mathematics-related fields.
“Girls and women are, are underrepresented in those fields. So we have a, have a pipeline issue that I think secondary schools and younger can really work to fix,” Head of School Julia Heaton says.
The new academic building Linn Hall – named in memory of Caroline Merck Perkins of Miss Hall’s School Class of 1914 – houses the Grace Murray Hopper Innovation Lab, where girls attend classes in animation, robotics, and other STEAM studies. The Jeannie Norris Horizons Studio also houses the experiential learning program.
Heaton says school leadership had a few goals for the new building.
“Number one: flexibility, that we know what we teach now and we know what we want to teach in the next few years but we don't know how teaching will evolve and how the needs of our students will evolve in 20 or 50 years,” Heaton says.
Heaton says the school needed a building that would allow for interdisciplinary collaboration.
“We know that girls excel in collaborative settings and we know that all great ideas can be, can be furthered by the collaboration of people with different perspectives. And so, having the spaces in the building actually be designed for collaboration – small group and larger group collaboration – was going to be really important for us.”
Ed Eckel, the head of the Science Department, says the new space is more conducive for girls to work over longer periods of time.
“We have probably about twice as much classroom space to work with students. So, we can set up individual projects. We can keep them up in the room in different locations. Students can come back and work over several days on lab work, projects, things that interest them,” Eckel says.
Eckel says it better prepares them for global needs.
“Engineers who can take a problem and work different solutions and find the one that is most appropriate for the conditions, we are now giving students more of an opportunity to prepare for that growth, for those opportunities that are coming so fast, so furious in our world,” Eckle says.
While Linn Hall was under construction, Miss Hall’s School refined its curriculum with the opening of the Department of Engineering and Technology Innovation.
It’s headed by Chris Himes, who is teaching three new courses this year in engineering, computer science and STEAM.
“Having all of these departments together – particularly from other viewpoints – allows our, our teachers to interact more and also think about collaborations across discipline. So what does it mean: we are building solar ovens in engineering, how does that apply to AP Environmental Studies?” Himes says.
“All the courses are rooted in this idea, in these ideas of how can we build up the voice of our students, how can we encourage risk taking, how can we teach them to learn from failure,” Heaton says.
The $13.5 million project was funded by a $10 million tax-exempt bond provided by MassDevelopment. The rest was paid for with private funds.
It’s built with brick to reflect the classic Georgian architecture of the school’s Main Building. The roughly 80-acre campus has been home to Miss Hall’s School since the early twentieth century. Again, Head of School Julia Heaton.
“We certainly had science labs before,” Heaton says. “We had math classes before, but they, they needed an update. They needed to come into the 21st century.”
The school has about 210 students, representing 15 states and 22 countries.
