Foote School Marks Centennial

The Foote School in East Rock is 100 years old, and Jenny Byers has been there for 40 of them — ten as a student in the graduating class of 1965 and the last 30 as a French teacher.

Along with hundreds of rain-defying hip-hip-hooraying kids, parents, and staff, she marked the centennial Tuesday afternoon with a parade led by the private school’s mascot Falco, games, 600 cupcakes, and a rollicking, school-wide hokey-pokey in the gym.

The 18-acre campus on Loomis Place is vastly larger than the converted stable and carriage house on St. Ronan Street that Byers attended her first years at Foote. Today’s 480-member K‑through ninth grade student body is also diverse in a way only dreamed of in the late 1950s. Today 37 percent are students ​“of color,” according to school stats.

Yet the kid-focused learning style of teaching and learning has not changed: project-based, participatory, hands-on.

Byers offered that assessment in the school gymnasium as the kids played pin-the-tail on Falco, short for Falcon, the school mascot. School development office staffer Debbie Carpenter mused about how her own child Nicholas, a sixth-grader at Foote today, has had some of the same instructors who taught Carpenter, who graduated in 1982.

Foote Director of Communications Andy Bromage said half the faculty have been at Foote at least ten years. Many, like Byers, have served far longer.

Asked to characterize a 100-year birthday for his school, Nicholas Carpenter put it succinctly: ​“It’s a lot.”

Foote’s origins date to the era of John Dewey and the arrival on the American scene of what was known as progressive education and to Martha Babcock Jenkins, a Bryn Mawr graduate and Yale prof wife.

She established the school with a handful of students in 1916 in a modest garage space on Huntington Street. The fledgling school, which has always been in East Rock, moved nomadically from one parent-donated space to another, six in all, until landing at the 315 Ronan St. converted carriage house that Byers attended her first year on St. Ronan Street. The Loomis Place campus opened in 1958; a ninth grade was added in 1971.

Byers said she still teaches French to her fourth to ninth-graders with ajoy-in-learning goal always in mind that she remembers. For example, her French classes feature ​“lots of plays, puppet shows, and dress-up,” she said.

“When I was a student I remember making apple sauce as a way to learn about measurement,” Byers said. ​“We just had our 50th [Foote] reunion, and we were actively remembering from the fourth grade which gods and goddesses we were. I was Ceres, goddess of spring and agriculture. We made a model of Rome using Domino sugar cubes.”

Foote Head of School Carol Maoz said major plans for the next century include maintaining a school where ​“the kids love coming to school everyday.”

Foote has no plans to expand the campus; the school purchased and razed a building of the old St. Francis School in 2010, creating a playing field, and freeing up space elsewhere on campus for its new a science and technology center. Nor does Foote plan to boost the size of the student body. Maoz said the goal is to keep ​“the architecture, culture, feeling, and emotion” of the school as is.

Tuesday was the 100th day of Foote’s 100th year. Ninth-grader Ida Brooks said it made her feel special to be in the graduating class of the 100th year. She’s headed to Wilbur Cross High School next year. Of her experience at Foote, she summarized: ​“The teachers really push you hard, but it’s not over the top.”

Entry to Foote is competitive and expensive, with tuition ranging from $21,000 to $25,000. Some 22 percent of the students receive financial aid, with $1.7 million awarded in 2015 – 2016, according to school statistics.