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SummerUpper School
Perhaps the greatest hallmark of the McGehee Upper School experience is trust: trust that teachers place in their students and trust which encourages our girls to take the kinds of risks that lead to genuine exploration and impressive scholarship and achievements.
Trust is also the foundation of the McGehee Honor Code, the oldest in the city of New Orlerans, and the core of our cultural fabric. This trust and mutual respect is the foundation of our community’s commitment to living and working with integrity and is, perhaps more than any other element, what differentiates the McGehee experience from that of most other private high schools.
The McGehee girl is asked to come to her studies with an openness to fresh ideas, a willingness to question her assumptions thoughtfully, and an acceptance in the unresolved and ambiguous. At the same time, she encounters opportunities to explore the world on her own terms, to share and apply her own perspectives, and to seek and discover personal meaning in her work and play.
She is given the skills and agency to become an impassioned advocate for herself and others, and to leave McGehee a young woman well equipped to lead with confidence, integrity and purpose, wherever she may choose to go.
Noel Waddington studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he was an avid coxswain and co-president (along with a future Oscar winner) of the St Peter’s College Dramatic Society. Three years after abandoning a career in business publishing and almost thirty years ago, he began his full-time teaching career when he moved to Japan. As he says, “The desire to explore, to take risks, to abandon a path that isn’t working in favor of the possibility of one that will, the openness to embrace radically unfamiliar experiences, to deliberately step into discomfort, to see the world and oneself through an entirely different lens, to be willing to learn something new each day—these are the attitudes that continue to open up my world to possibility and that I have always encouraged in my students.” After growing up in England, three years living near Kyoto, and arriving in New Orleans a quarter century ago by way of Washington State, he can attest to the value both of travelling in search of new experiences and in falling in love with a place and its people and knowing you’ve found a home. For twenty of those last twenty five years, McGehee—this place and its people—have been his home.
"Girls in the Upper School at McGehee are empowered by the opportunities they are given to engage in their studies in ways meaningful to them, and located in a firm sense of personal integrity."
–Noel Waddington, Head of Upper School
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