Our Mission

St. Paul’s School educates students to build purposeful lives in service to the greater good. We engage young people in a diverse, inclusive, and ethical community, dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in character and scholarship and inspired by the beauty and spirit of our Millville home.

Kindness, respect, and integrity form the foundation of all community interactions. As we educate each other, we draw forth what is best in each other:

Seated face-to-face in Chapel, where we gather to start the day, we reinforce our values and address the important questions with receptive, open minds and hearts.

Our community’s diversity stimulates our curiosity and motivation, cultivates our empathy and compassion, and strengthens our intellectual vitality and capacity.

Thriving at SPS requires personal accountability, moral courage, and service to others. Through relationships and collaboration, we inspire each other with creativity, self-discipline, and eagerness to learn.

 

As we are all equal citizens in a fully residential school community, we share mutual responsibility for the creation and cultivation of a healthy, equitable, caring, and joyful school culture. We recognize the need for students to grow in social and emotional competencies and seek ways to integrate this development into all aspects of students’ experience.

 

We value the learning process as well as the achievement outcome; when we fail, with patience and humility we redouble our efforts; and we embrace humor, enthusiasm, and friendship in our lives and work together.

 

Fostering engaged citizenship through a fully residential community
As our School has evolved, we have recruited youth from all corners of the earth to come live together in Millville to educate and to be educated by each other. As we sit facing each other in Chapel, we share the expectation to engage, contribute, and collaborate to build common experiences. We live together to grow in the depth and breadth of our understandings, and in a broad curriculum that extends far beyond classrooms, to educate the whole person, whose interests and energies expand beyond any single area of specialized excellence. We honor service to others and to the greater good as worthy foundations on which to build lives of meaning and purpose.

 

Our Millville home
What began as a summer home in a New England mill town has become a school experience that invites students to discover the wisdom and richness of the natural world and its realities, particularly as juxtaposed with our current immersion in technology and online life. Life in Millville and on the school’s beautiful grounds invites us to be mindful of our small place in nature’s grand scheme and to recognize our personal responsibility to steward and protect natural resources for the future.

 

Our Episcopal heritage
As an independent Episcopal school, St. Paul’s School celebrates our common humanity and embraces all people of all origins, backgrounds, abilities, and faiths in service to God. We invite students, faculty and staff to explore core spiritual questions in community; to seek clarity about their own beliefs and religions; and to value religious pluralism.

 

As St. Paul’s School continues to evolve into its second century, we reaffirm the centrality of spiritual life and the values of compassion, wisdom, humility, and service to others. We acknowledge the importance of worship that is sensitive to the diversity of religious identities represented by our students and adults. Our study of religion provides an opportunity for spiritual exploration and formation in a religiously pluralistic community. We seek to apply the tenets of the Episcopal Church’s “Becoming Beloved Community” to advance racial healing, reconciliation, and justice in our School and in the world. Ultimately, across faiths and religions, our graduates carry with them the exhortation from the Last Night Prayer, “[k]indle in our hearts the honest purpose to do right.”