Trinity School

Our history is distinctive. Founded in 1709 as a charity school supported by Anglican missionaries, the school had its first classes meet in Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street. Its first schoolhouse was built on the church grounds in 1749, and it is the oldest continuously operating educational institution in the city of New York.

In their horizontal expansiveness, our facilities are enviable. The school stretches nearly the length of 91st Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. In addition to classrooms, labs and offices, the school includes a garden, a rooftop playing field (known as “The Turf"), two rooftop tennis courts, a dining room, two chapels, two theaters, a swimming pool, three playgrounds, a weight room, a fine arts pavilion, two libraries, and three gymnasiums.

Our community is diverse. Committed to creating a diversely diverse community of learners and teachers, Trinity has a student body that reflects the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity of the city it calls home. Trinity’s commitment to this diverse community and its success is supported by the curriculum, counseling, extra-curricular activities, and Community Time programs and speakers. It reaches into every corner of school life.

Our teachers are extraordinarily talented and dedicated. More than twenty of them have doctorates and over 100 others hold master’s degrees from selective colleges and universities around the world. Recruited for their outstanding academic achievements and their commitment to Trinity’s core educational values, teachers are encouraged to select, expand on, modify, and even invent their curricula, fostering an unparalleled sense of ownership and creativity in the classroom. This creativity is supported by a unique and well-endowed program of faculty development and enrichment grants.

The heart of the Trinity experience is the relationship between inspiring, caring teachers and talented, motivated, and engaged students. At Trinity, "the life of the mind" is not a cliché; it is a lived reality: students here are enlivened by the power of ideas, made available in engaging conversations with teachers passionate about ideas that shape, define, and change the world. In their classrooms and labs and assembly halls, Trinity students pursue a rigorous and challenging course of academic study that prepares them for success in the most competitive colleges and universities. From the fourth grader collecting marine biology specimens at Jamaica Bay to the senior preparing to discourse on Vergil’s Aeneid before a panel of classics professors from renowned universities, Trinity students are engaged, active, and happy participants in their own educations.

Beyond the classroom, Trinity teaches its students to be responsible and caring, both inside the school, and as citizens of the city, nation, and world. One place that this happens is in our weekly Chapel services. While rooted in Trinity’s Episcopalian heritage, our chapel program reflects the religious and philosophical diversity of all our students, and encourages them to reflect on questions that have long been of central importance to human life: Who am I? What is the nature of the universe? How should humans strive together to lead a good life? How do the religious and philosophical traditions of the world ask and suggest answers to these questions? Because students not only sit through, but also plan and participate in weekly chapel as readers, musicians, and speakers, the service becomes a sounding board for important issues in the lives of the students, the school, and the world outside Trinity’s walls.

While Trinity is best known for its intellectual vitality, we promise so much more: a balanced educational program for body and mind, heart and soul, incorporating the arts, athletics, and community service; a chapel program that calls students not only to grow into their best selves, but also to reach out beyond themselves to address needs and realities greater than themselves; an embracing and empowering sense of community that finds strength in diversity, unity in its shared commitment to care and understanding, meaning in its labors, and joy in its play. Read our mission; our aspirations are audacious. Read our Strategic Plan: our dreams are daring.

The conversation between student and teacher is the heart of our school; all that we do must be born of and nourish that relationship. We are called to challenge the minds, fire the imaginations, and train the bodies of the young people who have been entrusted to us; to enlarge their spiritual lives; and to increase their capacity for mutual and self-respect. We intend to prepare them to learn confidently for the rest of their lives and to give generously and joyfully to others. We can accomplish these things only if we keep our students safe and well while they are in our charge.

As a school community with these purposes and responsibilities, we will engage the larger communities of city, nation, and world of which we are a part. We will serve our neighbors. We will live fully in our city—exploring its byways and playing over its terrain. We will learn its history and traditions, and what it can teach us of the arts and sciences. We will embody and celebrate its diversity.