I arrived in our nation’s capital after a sleepy five-hour bus ride with the junior class. As I stepped off the bus on to The George Washington University’s campus, I looked around at the many students, food trucks, and scooters. The energy palpable, I was struck by GW’s intimate campus environment despite its location in […]

Impactful service learning is a cornerstone of the Cary Academy experience. Addressing childhood hunger has long been an aim of sixth grade service learning.   For years, the sixth–grade team has partnered with Interfaith Food Shuttle and Reedy Creek Elementary School for the Backpack Buddies program, which provides weekend food bags for students whose families are […]

By Kathryn Chao, Hannah Gordon, Clay Thornton, and Michael McElreath  This summer, CA’s Center for Community Engagement offered a new intensive experiential course: Urban Design for Social Justice. Designed, organized, and sponsored by CA, the course was a pilot initiative to explore authentic opportunities for CA students to collaborate in impactful ways with their peers […]

Earlier this month, I welled with pride watching confident Southern High School students participate in an articulate, well-argued, impassioned Congressional debate on a bill raising the minimum wage. As their CA peer-mentors cross-examined them, both sides lighting up in delight from the equal intellectual exchange, I was struck by how far we have come and […]

Members of the Community Engagement Class tend the community garden at Alliance Medical Ministry in Wake County. How do students at a private school understand and respond to the critical needs in their community? One way a group of us tried to break out of our CA “bubble” was in an innovative class that began […]

Cary Academy is an academic powerhouse; it’s the San Francisco 49ers of the 80’s led by Joe Montana.  We smash ACT and SAT scores and rightfully flaunt Discovery, Innovation, Collaboration and Excellence.  Our halls are full of students donning the swag of their future: Davidson, Princeton, Cornell, our Triangle schools, and many more prestigious universities. […]

On Monday of this week, I broke an unwritten rule of the Upper School: I traipsed upstairs, and rather than follow the well-trod path toward the teacher lounge and the coffee machine, I turned right, threaded my way between the book bags, and plopped myself onto a couch in the Senior Corner. The seniors politely […]