Traditions
While the school is not under the care of a formal monthly Meeting, in keeping with the school's Quaker heritage, the Overseers, a board of 21 trustees established by William Penn, still governs the affairs of the school through Quaker consensus. Anne Marble Caramanico is the current clerk of the Overseers. All students attend a weekly Meeting for Worship. Faculty meetings and all-school assemblies and some classes begin with a moment of silence.
Service learning is integral to the school and incorporated in the pre-K to 12 curriculum. To earn an activity credit, many Upper School students complete 40 hours of community service a year. A van of students leaves the campus after school every day to perform community service in various locations throughout the Philadelphia area.
Color Day, celebrated on the Friday before Memorial Day, is a tradition in which two teams sporting the school's colors, blue and yellow, compete against each other in playful contests, concluding with a 12th grade Tug-of-War.
The school's Senior Stairs are a central stairway that only current seniors, faculty and alumni are permitted to use during school hours.
A Penn Charter graduate is known as an "OPC." The honorific "OPC 1689" is bestowed, rarely, by the Overseers upon significant faculty and staff in recognition of their service to Old Penn Charter.
Read more about this topic: William Penn Charter School
Famous quotes containing the word traditions:
“... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)