About Us

 

Dear Visitors,

Welcome to the Rockland Country Day School (RCDS) website. As I enter my second year here, I am compelled to tell you how exciting it is to be the leader of RCDS at this time. We enter our fifty-fourth year, not as a staid institution, but as an agile and increasingly innovative school, well-positioned for the next part of our journey.   We are dedicated to our mission to provide each child with what she or he needs to blossom and, faithful to our founders’ vision, to have “an atmosphere that encourages intellectual and artistic interests and initiative.”   

RCDS students and faculty continue to shine in the arts and academics.  Our spring production of Urinetown garnered Metro Theater Award nominations and won three Metro Awards; a student in our junior class won the Tri-County Science and Technology Fair; we again have students qualifying for the National Merit Scholarship program; our Art Department Chair, Michele Sommer, will have her manuscript, The Cream Does Not Always Rise: The Plight of Visual-Spatial Learners and the Power of Art Education, published in Harvard Educational Review;  and our 2012 graduating class of fourteen students received over $200,000 in merit aid from colleges this year.  Whether our students attend big universities like Princeton or small liberal arts colleges like Macalester, as two of our Class of 2012 members are doing this year, they continue to thrive. 

We also continue to innovate on our campus with the addition of Installation Week, a week in the spring when the entire campus participates in constructing a structure that reflects the elements of a school-wide interdisciplinary study of labyrinths, literally and figuratively.

Our intellectual roots were established by our founders who believed “a good curriculum does not make a school;” what we do through that curriculum to foster our students’ development, understanding, and connection to the world around them, is what makes us a good school. 

We have created an environment in which students can march to the beat of their own drum and find challenge, acceptance, and support.  We provide our students with strong roots from which they flourish. 

I encourage you to visit our campus. Just forty minutes from New York City, you will see a school full of life, with teachers and students working together with the kind of attention and focus that makes RCDS so special.

Sincerely yours,

Kimberly A. Morcate
Head of School