Grades 6–12 · full day
Rivera School is a day school beside the river. Mornings are seminar. Afternoons are lab, studio, or field. Students leave able to read a hard page and explain it without hiding behind a borrowed sentence.
Plan a visitFrom the head's office
Families who cross the courtyard for the first time usually notice the brick and the quiet of the library. Both matter, but neither is the school. The school is the habit of returning to a text until it says something it did not say the first time. That habit is not printed on a sign. You see it in a tenth-grade student who no longer asks for the answer, but for the page.
This year the faculty reread the plan for the last three grades. Not to add subjects for their names, but to remove what only filled the hour. Each course now ends with a long piece of work, written by hand or composed slowly, which the student defends aloud before two teachers who are not their own. The defense lasts twenty minutes. There are no slides. There is a text, a few notes, and a question the panel did not announce.
We also clarified how the study rooms may be used. The school does not ban new tools out of fear, and it does not celebrate them because they are new. In writing class the draft belongs to the student. They may ask for a definition, a date, or the shape of a citation. They may not hand in a paragraph they cannot read aloud and defend word by word. If they cannot explain it, it is not theirs, and it does not go in the folder.
Families who want only a list of results will find the school slow. Families who want a place where a teenager learns to hold an idea will recognize the courtyard. Autumn visits are still open on Thursdays. Write to the office with the student's name and current grade. A full file is not required to sit for an hour in a seminar.
I remain at your service, and I ask that you read the rest of this page before you write. Almost every question that reaches the office is already answered below, with more patience than a short message can hold.
Elena Varela
Head of School
The school does not keep knowledge in drawers that never speak to each other. A chemistry student reads a report as if it were an essay. A history student treats a number as if it were a measurement. The plan fits in four houses. Inside each house the teacher chooses the term's texts. They are not a closed package bought from a publisher.
English, history, and a second language. Students read whole books, not excerpts pasted into a worksheet. They write every week, and they read that writing aloud.
Mathematics through calculus for those who are ready, and a slower path for those who need the idea before the symbol. Every test shows the work, not only the result.
Biology, chemistry, and physics share one rule: the notebook is part of the experiment. A result without the path is unfinished.
Art, music, and making. One public showing each term. The point is not decoration. The point is to finish something another person can look at.
| Grade | Morning | Afternoon |
|---|---|---|
| 6–8 | Seminar, mathematics, language | Lab or studio, sport, study hall |
| 9–10 | Two seminars, mathematics, science | Elective, field, advising |
| 11–12 | Seminar and the long paper | Defense preparation, lab, college counseling |
The gate opens at 7:15. Assembly is short and on Wednesdays only. First seminar begins at 8:00 and is not interrupted for announcements. Students eat in the dining room, not in a hallway. The last class ends at 3:20. Study hall is optional and quiet. Athletics and ensembles run until 5:00. The office locks the car court at 3:40 so walkers are not crossed by cars.
Teachers stay for questions until 4:00 on Monday and Thursday. A student who missed class because of illness gets the page, not a summary from a classmate. The page is the class.
The library keeps the long papers for six years. After that the family may take them home or ask that they be destroyed. Student names are not published outside the house. A city archive may receive a copy without the name, and only with the author's permission. At seventeen the author may refuse. That refusal is respected and written down.
Rivera fields soccer, basketball, cross country, and swimming. A student plays if they come to practice. There is no separate elite squad that skips class. Games are on Friday afternoons so Saturday belongs to families. The score is posted. It is not the headline of the week.
Each grade keeps one service for the year: reading with younger children, the river clean-up, or the weekend kitchen. Hours are recorded by the advisor, not by an app. A student who misses the work makes it up. They do not buy the hour back.
We look at whether a candidate can stay quiet while someone else is speaking, whether they ask when they did not understand, and whether the page they wrote is theirs. We do not treat a grade average from another school as the only measure. A high average with an empty page is not enough. An attentive page with an uneven record can be enough.
The visit is a Thursday morning. The student sits in a seminar already in progress. They are not asked to perform. Afterward they write one page about the text they just heard. Parents meet the head while that page is being written. Decisions go out within three weeks. Mid-year entry is possible when there is a chair, and when the family accepts that the student joins the text the class has already begun.
What to send
There was a chapel in the last century. The room is now the music studio. There is no creed for entry. Wednesday assembly begins with a minute of silence and no required text. A student who needs time for their own practice arranges it with the advisor. It is not improvised in the middle of seminar.
Two routes, one north and one toward the center, contracted with a city company. A seat is requested in August and is not held if a student misses a full month. Many families in the neighborhood walk. The car court closes at 3:40 so it does not cross the walkers.
English in every grade, with texts, not only with songs. From tenth grade a student may add French or Latin. Latin is not an ornament. It is translated, analyzed, and read aloud. We do not promise travel fluency in two years. We promise a grammar that later lets a student read another language without panic.
The same day, by telephone, from the head's office, not from the student. Handing in writing that the student did not write is a matter for the office. The first time there is a conversation and the paper is rewritten in front of the advisor. The second time the student loses that term's defense and the family comes to the table. There is not a third identical warning.
Phones are left in advisory and returned at dismissal. Each group has a drawer. A device needed for a medical reason is declared at the door and kept by the advisor, not in a desk. Personal devices are not used in the laboratory or the archive.
We ask families not to rewrite the paper at home. Reading it and pointing to a sentence that does not make sense is help. Replacing the paragraph is something else, and the panel hears it as soon as the student cannot explain the verb they chose. We prefer a clumsy sentence that is theirs to a smooth sentence the student looks at as if it belonged to someone else.
The same rule holds for numbers. A correct result without the path is not complete. The written path is half the grade. That is why the board is used so often: so the mistake is visible in time, while it can still be corrected with chalk and not with embarrassment at the end of the term.
If you have read this far, you have read the part that actually describes the house. What follows is only for enrolled students who need to open their material from this page.
Enrolled students
Weekly reading opens with a code from the office. If you do not have one yet, ask for one. The office sees the username you write and decides whether to send a code.
Paste both lines exactly as they were given to you, or type the universal code.
If you do not have a code, ask for one. We will ask for the username the office knows.