Hyla offers a unique high school option for local families and is the first "deeper learning" model for grades 9-12 on Bainbridge. Our program is defined by:
- Responsive and attentive teachers
- Personalized and experiential learning
- Interdisciplinary academics
- Meaningful coursework through real-world experiences
Far beyond college prep, our goal is to prepare the whole student for a lifetime of engagement and impact. As active agents in their own learning in a culture that values both academic and personal growth, students emerge ready for the many different and dynamic relationships and work ahead of them - classmates, coworkers, fellow leaders, and community organizers.
Academically and socially, Hyla prepares students to launch with purpose and momentum.
Curriculum Guide
Guiding Framework: This framework tells you about the students we welcome, our culture of participation, our emphasis on experience, and the intellectual habits and practices that we develop and encourage in students. This also gives you a sense of how learning happens, the types of engagement we expect from students, and the opportunities we invite them into. This framework inspires what happens in each class and offering.
Core elements of our program
Size & Scale: We are intentionally sized and scaled to nurture connections and ensure individualized learning in a caring culture where students are known, encouraged, and challenged. Fully established, Hyla school will welcome approximately 280 students total, with ~35 students per grade at the middle school level and ~40 students per grade at the high school level. An increased student body at the high school level ensures access for students who didn't attend Hyla Middle School. Staffing will scale accordingly to ensure low student-teacher ratios and strong connections with classmates and teachers. Our student body is made up of students who continue on from Hyla Middle School and transfer students new to Hyla, creating a diverse student body with new and familiar faces.
Deeper Learning: Our program for grades 9-12 is intentionally built as a “deeper learning” model, something that is new to the Bainbridge educational landscape. Deeper learning is a pedagogical approach that threads through all aspects of our program, including mold-breaking core academic classes, Electives, co-curriculars like Clubs and Advisory, and signature programs like Panoramas. Our high school program is based in a fundamental optimism for the possibilities and potential for the high school years to shape a lifetime.
Our deeper learning program:
- Creates purpose in the lives of high schoolers by bringing their identity to the center of learning so that they connect what they are doing to how they think of themselves (doing science vs being a scientific thinker, a citizen scientist, etc.).
- Emphasizes meaning and choice, cultivates community, and provides students with ongoing opportunities for apprenticeship.
- Redefines rigor not as “workload” but as sustained powerful learning that is also joyful, personalized, and meaningful.
- Creates an iterative cycle of inquiry to continually ask students what they need, think, and see. (We believe that students are, in the words of Jal Mehta, “penetrating ethnographers of their settings,” capable of astute insights that articulate their school experience – as long as we ask and listen.)
The habits and practices of deeper learning models from around the world are summarized in the book, "In Search for Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School," written by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Learning within Community: Community at Hyla is a self-sustaining practice: it generates tremendous energy between students, inspires creative ideas, and creates new possibilities. It begins within our campus walls where students build authentic connection with each other and with teachers. This established trust propels academic courage, engagement, and accomplishment. Beyond our walls, students regularly engage with the surrounding community in an ongoing cycle of classroom learning and off-campus immersive experiences. As an academic method, community is a pathway to depth and critical thinking that provides students with access to diverse voices, experiences, and expertise to enhance their learning and expand their own perspectives. Hyla’s partnerships with a network of community organizations facilitate fieldwork, service, and co-curricular coursework so that students can engage with people already making a difference in the areas they care about.
Location
One school, two campuses:
- Grades 6-8: Our 13-acre middle school campus is located on a historic homestead, redesigned as a school specifically for the developmental growth of this age group with features like outdoor hallways, separate buildings, and lots of open outdoor space. In 2021, the entire campus was renovated, including the addition of a new Community Hall, theater, kitchen, and HyLab (our makerspace).
- Grades 9-12: Likewise, our upper school campus is intentionally designed to best serve our program for grades 9-12. Our upper school campus is located on Ericksen Avenue in Winslow. The downtown location is an important piece in our belief that apprenticeship is a powerful path to citizenship. Our program integrates classroom learning with off-campus immersive experiences, and the Winslow location provides easy access to the ferry, transportation system, and surrounding community so that students can tackle real-world challenges through projects, internships, citizen science and studies. Through ongoing engagement with the surrounding community, students graduate ready to support and influence their future communities. Digitally, our upper school campus expands nationally and globally with our memberships to One Schoolhouse and Global Online Academy, both application-based consortiums that provide Hyla students with access to educators and students around the country and world.
Take a look at our new upper school campus and learn about our plans for the property on Ericksen Avenue.