Welcome from the Head of School

Welcome to The Girls' School—a unique learning environment in Austin. Embracing a liberal arts program including visual and performing arts (classes in music and drama), and Spanish beginning in Kindergarten, our girl-centric classrooms mean that it is easier for students to focus on academics in a community of like-minded peers. This is a school where girls come first.

A typical Girls' School student is smart, creative, and willing to "dig in." In this past year, digging in included laying sod on our bare fields, moving monstrous compost piles, and participating in robotics, speech, art, music and writing competitions; whatever the challenge, GSA girls are ready to embrace it. This is a school where learning about each other is as important as learning "stuff," although there is certainly plenty of that. Students eagerly share their work at weekly community meetings, and have been extraordinarily successful in regional and state competitions in many areas of the curriculum. This past year, students won awards in visual art, robotics, music, writing and speech, with most of these in our first year of competition. Not bad for a school that is less than a decade old and where the entire middle-school student body numbered less than 30 students last year. Who says girls shy away from competition?

Another advantage of a girls' school education is the opportunity to experience a variety of leadership roles in a supportive environment. Leadership skills are developed through real tasks such as coordinating the annual talent show or heading up community service projects. GSA teachers provide coaching and mentoring every step of the way.

Visitors often remark that our classrooms are very peaceful. Even when working on projects and large group activities (which is often), girls take their learning seriously—although not without considerable wit and enthusiasm. I call it the "hunkering down" property of girls working together. Research shows that girls have better hearing than boys and tend to prefer quieter classrooms. Of course, the situation reverses when they are out on the playground and raucous laughter is the norm.

Many of us feel that children are being asked to grow up too fast-exposed to media images that portray young girls as women, for example. At GSA we believe that girls should know a lot about the world and engage in real world issues, but we also believe that everyone deserves a childhood which includes spending time outdoors and/or engaging in creative and free play, dreaming big dreams.

The Girls' School is remarkably gender-free. Our kindergarteners enjoy moving and smashing rocks (this particular activity leaves the rest of us mystified), and the middle school science classes have been informed that they MUST warn us when they plan to explode things.

Please do come and visit; we might just challenge all of your concepts of what it means to be an all-girls school!

Lisa K. Schmitt
Head of School