Trinity School at River Ridge Annual Report 2018-19

WHO
WE
ARE
In 1981 Trinity School opened its first campus, Trinity
School at Greenlawn in South Bend, IN. Two schools
followed. Trinity School at River Ridge in Eagan, MN
opened in 1987 and Trinity School at Meadow View
in Falls Church, VA held its first classes in the fall of
1998. From the beginning, it was clear that Trinity
would provide not only a different kind of education,
but also a different understanding of what it means
to be educated.
Early on, the founders realized that it would not
be enough to simply take the existing template for
education and try to improve upon it. In order to
create a genuinely different education, they knew
they would have to start from a different foundation.
The answers to these questions became the Trinity
School curriculum. The mathematics and sciences
that have shaped our world, the history and political
theory that have brought us to where we are now, and
great works of philosophy and literature—we believe
all students should encounter these things.
And the way we chose to educate is as important as
the curriculum. We believe that education ought to
be about awakening, awakening minds and souls to
the pursuit of truth, the creation of beauty and the
practice of goodness. In fact, we believe that genuine
learning only happens when we encounter reality in
this way.
In the years since our founding, we have become a
national leader in education. Trinity schools have
been awarded an astonishing ten blue ribbon awards
for excellence from the United States Department
of Education. We are widely recognized as early
pioneers of what would come to be known as the
classical education movement. And our curriculum
and philosophy of education have served as the
explicit model for dozens of private and charter
schools in the United States.
We are honored by this legacy and continue to
measure our own success by the kind of young men
and women our graduates become. At Trinity School,
students become articulate, educated, and inquisitive
agents of their own learning. They are well-rounded,
dynamic young men and women who we are proud to
go out into the world as Trinity graduates.
So instead of merely asking how to “do school” better,
the founders of the school began instead with the
desired outcome and asked, “What should educated
adults in our time really know? What intellectual skills
should they possess to deal with the world in which
they find themselves? What topics and texts should
they have wrestled with?”
6 Trinity Schools 2018 / 2019