Corrections or additions?
This article by Jack Florek was prepared for the May 15, 2002
edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
A Comeback for Boys’ Schools
For some, the idea of creating an all-boys school
for the 21st century might seem more like a step backward into
pre-feminism
Neanderthal times than a step forward. After all, isn’t it still a
world designed for males by males? Why should boys deserve special
treatment, educational or otherwise?
But Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart isn’t attempting to turn
back the clock as much as they are trying to redefine the future.
Located off of the Great Road in Princeton Township, just down the
road from the all-girls Stuart Country Day School, the academy is
a private school for boys in junior kindergarten through eighth grade.
Using Stuart as a model for its curriculum, Princeton Academy aims
to integrate Christian values with intellectual challenges designed
to cater to the developmental needs of boys.
The Academy, at 101 Drake’s Corner Road, hosts an open house Saturday,
May 18, at 5:30 p.m. This “Enchanted Evening” will include
a tour of the gardens around the Manor House, music by Sandy Maxwell,
as well as a live and silent auction.
Following some aggressive fund raising that was advanced by a $1
million
challenge grant from the William E. Simon Foundation, Princeton
Academy
was able to pay off its entire mortgage earlier this year, celebrating
with a mortgage burning party last month. Now the academy is raising
money for a gym, library, classrooms, and a chapel and assembly area.
“It is wonderful to be able to put the money into these other
important things now that the mortgage is a thing of the past,”
says founding headmaster Olen Kalkus.
While single-sex schools may seem hopelessly anachronistic, they are
in fact making a comeback. Last week the Bush administration issued
a statement that they are planning to reinterpret the country’s
education
law to encourage the creation of single-sex public schools. The move
will allow such schools to receive federal financing, which has been
largely denied for the past 30 years.
“A lot of people think that all-boys schools went out with the
1970s,” says Kalkus. “But we’re definitely not interested
in returning to the old mind set of the `old-boys, all-boys,’
network.”
While the tradition of single-gender schools had been strong in the
United States for over 200 years, the 1970s saw a push to take
single-gender
schools and turn them into co-ed schools. “There was an
understandable
move toward equality of opportunity in the culture, and this included
education,” says Kalkus. “In the 1970s, people believed that
everybody was a product of their environment. If you treated everybody
equal, they would all come out equal.”
It wasn’t until the 1980s when it became acceptable
to look at gender differences again. “Psychologists looked at
biological, chemical, and hormonal differences and found that boys
and girls have real learning differences and therefore different
educational
requirements.”
While much of the early research focused on the needs of girls, by
the 1990s some studies begin to focus primarily on boys. “People
sometimes forget that stereotypes can work against boys just as much
as girls. There have been innumerable studies that have shown that
boys and girls have different educational needs, particularly in the
early years. Our goal is to focus on these needs.” Kalkus offers
the following data:
Boys continue to lag behind girls in reading and verbal skills.The average 11th grade boy reads at the level of the average eighthgrade girl.Research shows that while girls trailed boys in math and sciencescores in 1960, educational programs addressing this imbalance haveallowed girls to significantly close the gap. However boys continueto lag behind girls in writing and language skills today, just asthey did 40 years ago.Boys rate highly at gross motor skills, but they trail girlsin finer motor control.Girls have caught up and passed boys in areas of studentleadershipand extra-curricular activities. The only area in which boys maintaina significant advantage is in participation in sports.”To a large extent, girls have been able to break throughthe cultural stereotypes of their gender, but boys have not yet donethis,” says Kalkus. “Schools, by-and-large, have done wellfor girls. Most young women have gotten the message that it’s okayto be nurturing, aggressive, assertive, athletic, artistic, whateverthey want to be. But boys are still trapped in the stereotype thatsays athletics is where it’s at for them. The irony of the beginningof the 21st century is that the idea of the renaissance man has reallybecome the renaissance woman.”Kalkus is familiar with the opposite side of the coin. Prior to comingto Princeton Academy, he was the first male lay head of SaintScholasticaAcademy, a 100-year-old, all-girls school in Canon City, Colorado.”I was really the first non-nun head in the history of theschool,”says Kalkus. “It was a great experience because it really allowedme to understand the problems of education from a femaleperspective.”Kalkus also spent five years as upper school principal at theInternationalSchool of Prague in the Czech Republic. “It was very interestingfor me,” says Kalkus. “Both my parents are of Czech descent.My father was put in prison by the Communists in his senior year ofhigh school in Prague. For me to go back to that country and helpbuild an international high school was very gratifying.”Kalkus’ parents escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1949 and he was bornin Chicago in 1955. Kalkus spent his last two years of high schoolin an all-boys parochial school in Newport, Rhode Island. “Itclosed shortly after I left,” says Kalkus. “It was one ofthose schools in the 1970s that the diocese closed due to a droppingenrollment. But I did have that experience and it has helped giveme an added perspective.” He earned his B.A. from Colby Collegein 1976, an M.A. from Salve Regina College in 1980, and a M.Ed fromColumbia in 1989.Kalkus now lives with his wife and three children in Law-renceville.His daughter attends Stuart, and both his sons attend PrincetonAcademy.”Having my sons at the school does give me that little extraincentiveto make sure we don’t cut corners,” says Kalkus. “That isalways the motive, but I think that people really understand thatif they hear that the headmaster’s boys are attending school hereas well.”Princeton Academy opened its doors in September, 1999, to 33 boysin grades kindergarten through third grade. Since then they have grownto a student population of 160 and expect to break the 200 mark nextSeptember when they open the eighth grade class.But Kalkus points out that while growth is certainly welcome, toomuch growth is not. “We are committed to having no more than 16students per classroom,” he says. “I’m a big fan of smallschools. Research has shown that 500 students is about the point wherea community becomes an institution. We want to make sure we staybehindthat line.”Stuart Country Day School was established in 1963, providing a privateschool faith-based education in which local residents could send theirdaughters. But for many years, there was no comparable school forboys.Lawrenceville resident Tom Meagher, a Lawrencevilleresident who works at an intellectual property law firm in New YorkCity, decided to take matters into his own hands when it came timeto think about the education of his own two sons. “Back in themid 1990s, I was very aware of the research that showed that boysneeded a more hands-on, tactile approach to education when comparedto girls,” says Meagher, who is now a member of the academy’sboard of trustees. “My wife and I were looking to send our kidsto a Catholic school that offered small class sizes. We liked theidea of sending our daughters to Stuart, but there was no suitableplace to send our boys. I decided to try to do something aboutit.”Meagher discovered that Jim Radvany (who is also now a member of theacademy’s board of trustees) was another parent “in the samepredicament.He and I decided to send out letters to gauge how much interest theremight be for a boys’ school,” says Meagher. “Stuart was veryhelpful. We were able to send out letters to the entire Stuart familypopulation and got back a very enthusiastic response.”Princeton Academy was initially going to set up shop on a temporarybasis in Belle Mead at the Montgomery United Methodist Church whileboard members searched for a more permanent site. But they ran intoa snag when they learned that the state’s procedure for determiningsewer capacity would limit the school’s enrollment to just 30students.As an alternative, the school arranged to lease the basement of thechapel of the former Our Lady of Princeton convent on Drake’s CornerRoad and the Great Road for two years from its owner, PrincetonLifestylesLLC. Sam Fruscione, a principal of Princeton Lifestyles, had purchasedthe 43-acre property for $6 million with the hope of building a628,000square foot continuing care retirement community. But neighborsvehementlyopposed the idea, forcing the developer to abandon his plans. TheAcademy was eventually able to raise a down payment to purchase theproperty for $8 million in December, 2000.Kalkus estimates that the school population is 50 percent Catholicand 50 percent non-Catholic. “Clearly our anchor is inCatholicism,we make no apologies for that,” he says. “But we have Jewish,Hindu, and Muslim students here as well. We reach them all becausethe core values of world religions are very similar and thedifferencesin religions are really very small. But there have always been menwilling to exploit these differences, creating wars and atrocitiesin the name of religion throughout history.”Kalkus says that although the recent sexual abuse scandals involvingCatholic priests across the country and at the American BoychoirSchoolin Princeton have made some parents edgy, he receives surprisinglyfew questions. “After the articles on the Boychoir schoolincidentsresurfaced in the New York Times, I had two parents ask me what arewe doing to insure that nothing like that ever happens here,”says Kalkus. “We do a screening process of our faculty, but Ithink all schools do that. The culture of the school is reallyimportant.Having a small school and really keeping a close eye on how thestudentsare growing and developing is the key.”Although Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart is not yet a certifiedmember of the Sacred Heart Network — a collection of schoolsacrossthe country that subscribe to a mission statement of a “deep andactive faith in God; a deep respect for intellectual values; a socialawareness which impels to action; the building of community as aChristianvalue; Personal growth in an atmosphere of wise freedom” —they do expect to successfully complete the accreditation processsoon.”It’s just amazing how so many things came together to make thisschool a reality, from getting this beautiful property that perfectlysuits our needs, to paying off the mortgage so quickly,” says Kalkus.”Friends say that I could write a `how to’ book on how to starta school. But I think it would really have to be more like a novel,telling how it all happened. Because it really has been just aconfluenceof everything, the right time, the right place, the right people,all coming together and creating this school.”— Jack FlorekPrinceton Academy of the Sacred Heart, 101 Drake’sCorner Road, Princeton 08540. Olen Kalkus, headmaster. 609-921-6499;fax, 609-921-9198. Home page: www.princetonacademy.org.Corrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
