Lick-Wilmerding High School

Founded in 1895, Lick-Wilmerding High School stands apart as a profoundly unique educational institution. On our website you will learn more about the dynamic and challenging academic program, the way we weave innovation into the curriculum through the study of the technical arts, the opportunities students have to explore their emotional and physical selves through visual arts, performing arts and athletics, and how we ask students to engage with the world in order to enact positive change.

What may be a bit less visible are the relationships embedded in the fabric of the school that supports these many endeavors of our students. At LWHS, students forge lifelong friendships with their peers, with faculty, with the subjects they study, and with those individuals who need their talents and compassion in order to realize their full potential. These relationships are born out of a passion shared by all members of the LWHS community to be fully engaged with each other and with all that our world has to offer.

The school mission affirms our commitment to developing the head, heart, and hands of our students, “inspiring them to become lifelong learners who contribute to the world with confidence and compassion.” This attention to the whole person ensures that a LWHS graduate is an accomplished scholar, a creative thinker, and an agent for creating a better world.

The campus is a purposeful extension of the school mission. The McCullough Library overlooks the campus as a symbolic representation of the importance of scholarship in our lives, and the way we can work together to tackle the intellectual challenges we face. The Ann Maisel Café hums with student voices (and good food), thereby giving presence to the importance of a student centered approach to education. The technical shops are a hub for creativity and a vital reminder that we learn through using our hands to call into being something that did not exist before we imagined it, designed it, and then finally created it. The theater, science labs, classrooms, design studios, indeed, the entire school, reverberates with an energy connoting intellectual inquiry, joy in learning, friendships in the making, and ultimately the magic that occurs when our relationships focus on helping each other learn, grow, and become whole.

A private school with a public purpose, LWHS is founded upon a legacy of serving, and being enriched by, students from all walks of life. The school furthers this purpose by producing graduates with the capacity, confidence, compassion and commitment to change the world. The LWHS curriculum is both a catalyst and a vehicle for civic engagement, offering real world insights and inspiring students to contribute their time, talent, and treasure to work that matters. The larger community—local and global—is an extension of LWHS classrooms, providing students opportunities for thoughtful and effective problem solving and stewardship. In addition, LWHS shares its innovative educational models, as well as its knowledge, networks, and resources, with others who are committed to improving lives, prospects, and possibilities for young people.

A private school with public purpose, Lick-Wilmerding High School develops the head, heart, and hands of highly motivated students from all walks of life, inspiring them to become lifelong learners who contribute to the world with confidence and compassion.

LWHS prepares its students to thrive in college and to be passionate, self-directed, lifelong learners. Toward these ends, its faculty employ a wide range of teaching methods, intended to help every student succeed. LWHS has a long tradition of valuing and integrating the liberal arts, sciences, technical arts, visual arts and performing arts. The resulting rigorous head, heart, hands curriculum provides students with a “toolbox” with which to build lives of consequence and fulfillment. In order to prepare students to assume responsible adult roles in the world, ethical thinking is explicitly woven through the curriculum. Similarly, problem solving and collaborative skill building, including learning when to lead, when to listen, when to contribute, and when to follow, are integral to a LWHS education. Prizing innovative thought, most distinctively through the integration of science, technology and design, LWHS encourages students to marshal the courage to make mistakes in order to learn and become more resilient. LWHS further believes that mindfulness and healthy ways of being, including seeking balance in one’s life, are essential to living a life of care—for self, family, community, and environment.