For the young women at Visitation Academy, there’s a whole lot of building going on. They are learning to work with their hands, heads, hearts—and each other— to create their futures.
Dan Hildebrand, interim head of school, says Visitation believes in preparing girls for the wider world by emphasizing the breadth of their options. That means encouraging them to think beyond outdated gender roles to strive for careers and achievements of all kinds. He says the school’s all-girl environment creates a comfortable, supportive space where they can construct and create freely. The independent Catholic school spans grades one to 12 for girls, and offers a coeducational early childhood program.
One of Visitation’s latest additions is its Innovation Space, or what Hildebrand calls a ‘maker space,’ where students can build things and discover how they work.
“It’s a combination of a science lab and workshop,” he says. “It gives the girls a chance to build large-scale projects and use large-scale problem solving.” Recently, lower school students constructed canoes from different types of materials and learned what makes them float. Others created new instruments based on what they’ve learned about music, and they applied mathematical principles to design one-room schoolhouses.
Lower school principal Margaret Karl says Visitation encourages students to grow in self-esteem, confidence, connectedness and spirituality while they increase their knowledge. “There’s a service piece that goes along with academics,” she notes. “For example, students have opportunities to spend a half day working at the St. Louis Food Bank, or making food for the homeless at St. Patrick Center. It’s all wrapped up in our philosophy.”
Hildebrand adds, “When you look at the girls here, you see poise and self-confidence. Their conversation is on a high academic level, but there’s lots of fun, too. And in a single-sex environment, they can be more focused and stay on task. Studies have shown girls feel less inhibited and constrained at school when boys are not present. There’s good evidence that graduates from girls’ schools are much more likely to consider college majors in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) than girls from coed schools.”
Karl says they allow students hands-on learning experiences and all the risk-taking involved with them. “They all have different ideas, so they have to collaborate,” she notes. “And they really are supportive of one another. It’s an environment where they can feel safe to create, make mistakes, start over and learn from it. That process really helps our students grow in confidence.”
Pictured: Fifth-grade students build Lego Mindstorms in the new innovation space.
Photo courtesy of Visitation Academy
Visitation Academy, located at 3020 N. Ballas Road, has an all-girls lower school for grades one through five, and all-girls middle and upper schools. A coeducational Montessori program is offered for toddlers through kindergarten. For more information, call 314.625.9100 or visit visitationacademy.org.
Cover provided by Visitation Academy
