Indian Mountain School

Principal Zhan's Review: IMS, located next to The Hotchkiss School, provides a comprehensive education for students from Pre-K to 9th grade, focusing on creative expression and personal growth.
IMS is characterized by a wide range of extracurricular activities, from arts and music to diverse sports programs, encouraging students to explore their interests within a supportive community. For many years, the school has been dedicated to cultivating children's leadership and connecting learning with real-world challenges.
In terms of cultural heritage, IMS, founded in 1922, is a century-old school with a serene and beautiful campus. The lakes and woodlands within the campus also provide students with a learning and living environment that is far from the hustle and bustle of the city, allowing them to connect with nature.
Academically, IMS is very strong! It is the only junior high school in the US that offers AP Computer Science. The school's math and second foreign language classes are grouped by ability level, which allows students of the same level to further advance. In short, IMS provides rich and comprehensive academic resources for children.
In terms of community building, IMS prides itself on its multicultural atmosphere, enrolling students from various countries and regions around the world. The school's evolving weekend programs are highlights of the 7-day boarding life, such as go-karting, bowling, trampoline park visits, outdoor movie nights, and more.
For emotional support, three school counselors work with students. They provide one-on-one support weekly as needed. In addition, they implement a series of age-specific programs for different grade levels to encourage appropriate social and emotional growth.

As a current parent, I'd like to add my two cents. Before my child enrolled, I spent a long time researching here, and I hope this helps other families later on.

I'll share my personal experience; it feels like many factual posts were made by agents. I believe IMS is a school with a very high sense of happiness. Everything is entrusted to the school with great confidence, and the teachers are all very experienced and truly love the children. When my child knocks on a teacher's door in the dorm for help with homework or a paper, the teachers immediately sit down with the child for several hours to discuss the paper or teach the assignment, and every teacher is like that. Academically, the humanities are taught exceptionally well. I once sat in on a class; the English class was a round-table discussion with 8-10 students. The teachers' questions were very insightful, capable of prompting deep thought from the students, and the English readings were very challenging and profound. My son, who is a boy, previously attended a bilingual school in Shanghai with over 20 students per class. He spent lessons slacking off and making small movements because his grades were acceptable, so teachers didn't manage him much. When he got to the US, he was actively participating in class throughout the entire lesson; I couldn't believe it was my son. His American teachers told me that as soon as they notice a child's eyes are not focused on the lesson for even a second, they immediately call on them to answer a question or find a way to involve them in the class. For essay assignments, teachers revise sentence by sentence, starting from the outline. The main body might be revised three times back and forth. The first draft might be terrible, but by the final version, the writing is truly excellent. They pay great attention to expanding students' vocabulary, teaching SAT words, and grammar is practiced separately and very rigorously. The math difficulty is just the textbook difficulty. If a student is very advanced in math, they can skip grades to take higher-level courses, but it's still at textbook difficulty.

The school campus is beautiful and spacious, and the new sports center has just been completed. The teachers are very meticulous in caring for the children, and the principal can call every child by name. The school's admission of mainland Chinese students has been excellent in the past two years, with Andover / Phillips Exeter last year, and Phillips Exeter / Choate / Deerfield / Hotchkiss / Lawrenceville, etc., this year. The school has strong humanities programs and also provides students with a wealth of sports and arts activities. The child has made great progress after one year of study.

Indian Mountain School (IMS) has a dedicated 9th-grade program that integrates humanities and hard sciences, equipping students with the knowledge and collaborative skills necessary for success after graduating from IMS. Ninth graders are required to think critically, ask profound questions from unique perspectives, and connect course content with topics that have a direct impact on their lives. The curriculum will also incorporate future leadership opportunities.
Starting in the fall semester, ninth-grade students will study topics related to the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this course, the year-long instruction will be combined with a series of cross-curricular projects, culminating in a capstone project—the Poquonook Solutions Symposium. This project encourages student groups to propose original and feasible solutions to real-world problems, and then, at the symposium, present their data and articulate their solutions to a panel of experts.