Thank you for your interest in joining The Buckley School community.
The deadline for applying for admission to the Middle and Upper Schools (grades six through twelve) is December 15, 2020.
We hope that you are all remaining safe and healthy during these unprecedented times. In order to adapt to current physical distancing guidelines and align our admission practices with our mission statement, The Buckley School will no longer consider ISEE or SSAT scores for the 2020-2021 school year in evaluating applicants.
The first sentence of our school’s mission statement asserts that “The Buckley School is a dynamic, nurturing, learning community committed to equity and inclusion.” This aspiration guides our decisions at every turn, during extraordinary times or not. The COVID-19 pandemic and all its implications for education and the well-being of children has put our commitment to equity to the test. These standardized benchmarks, although useful in producing data points for the admission process in the past, are now too fraught with variables around access and accuracy.
We are confident that our full application process, which includes interviews with parents/guardians and children, teacher recommendations, and written answers to personal questions on a variety of topics along with any available transcripts, will provide us with enough information to paint a complete portrait of each applicant. We are excited to engage more deeply in this multi-faceted approach of getting to know each and every child and their family -- their interests, strengths, social-emotional characteristics, and academic potential.
In addition, we also firmly believe that there are also tremendous benefits in sparing families the stress and expense of preparing for and taking the test, whether that is on-campus, at a Prometric testing site, or at home. We hope that by forgoing this requirement, we will make the admission experience more pleasant and inviting for everyone. Our application will launch on August 1 online at
www.buckley.org.
Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at
admissions@buckley.org or leave a message at (818) 461-6719. We look forward to an exciting year ahead!