Westminster School (Connecticut)


Westminster School is a private, coeducational college-preparatory, boarding and day school located in Simsbury, Connecticut accepting around 20% of applicants. The total student population is approximately 400, and includes pupils from 25 US states and 30 countries.. It is also a member of the Founders League, an athletic league comprising ten college preparatory boarding schools in Connecticut and one in New York.

History

Westminster School was founded in 1888 as a boys' school by William Lee Cushing, a graduate of Yale University. Girls were first admitted to the school in 1971. Like many boarding schools, Westminster faced difficult times in the 1970s as it competed for a shrinking pool of boarding students. When Donald Werner retired in 1993, after serving as Headmaster for 21 years, he was succeeded by Graham Cole. During the Cole years, enrollment for the school grew from 340 to 385 students, with 88 faculty.
Significant building projects undertaken include:
With Cole's retirement in 2010, Westminster appointed William V.N. Philip as its eighth Headmaster. Philip ascended to the top job after a 26-year career at Westminster as a teacher, coach, dormitory parent, college counselor, and most recently Associate and Assistant Headmaster.

Faculty and staff

Headmasters

Athletics

A student tradition, dating as far back as the 1920s, is stickball, a game in which teams made up of dormitory floors and day student teams compete in a baseball-like game on the quad and athletic fields in late spring. Each floor makes its own bat, usually a hockey or lacrosse stick that has been cut, or a wooden dowel of a large diameter. Generally the stickball "season" will culminate in a single-elimination tournament to crown the Hill Stickball champion.

Theater

Each year the theater program stages three productions in the Werner Centennial Theater: one dramatic production spanning the varied genre of Western theater, a musical production, and the student-directed performances, which offer advanced students the opportunity to direct. Each of these productions offers many opportunities for student involvement and leadership, both on stage and backstage.
Situated at the northeastern corner of the campus’s central quadrangle, Centennial Center was upgraded in 1988 into a 30,000 square-foot building including a two-story lobby, a 400-seat, multi-use Shakespearean-style theater, music and dance studios and rehearsal room, dressing rooms, a scene shop/laboratory and other production support spaces. Particular to the “courtyard” theater form, all 400 seats are within 40 feet of the front of the stage, and there is built-in flexibility for both audience size and style of production.

Campus facilities

Dormitories and Student Life
Seventy percent of the student body at Westminster School lives on campus in one of the seven dormitories, supervised by Westminster faculty.
Academic and Arts Facilities
Armour Academic Centerhouses Armstrong Atrium, Baxter Gallery, Cole Library, Davis Center for Science & Mathematics, Gitterman Student Lounge, Offield Center for the Humanities, Class of 1957 Planetarium, Sejong Lecture Hall, “Martlet’s Nest” school store
Barnes-Bristow Observatory
Hamilton Art StudiosStudio art and architecture classrooms
Werner Centennial Center & TheaterProscenium theater, dance studios, band/music rooms, practice rooms, and scene and prop shop

Other on-campus facilities
Notable alumni include: