The growth of each individual is promoted—and achieved—through a variety of experiences: within the academic curriculum . . . within the arts and sciences . . . within extracurricular activities . . . within each school community . . . through the partnership of school and family.

Our Programs

SPHERE coordinates programs that bring students and faculty together from all member schools.  Admissions, outreach to local communities, professional development for faculty, faculty of color recruitment and support, and human relations programs work to enhance the quality of campus life for all faculty and students.

Aware of the virtues of diversity, a group of independent schools in the Greater Hartford area, The Howard and Bush Foundation, the Reader’s Digest DeWitt Wallace Foundation and the Hartford Foundation organized SPHERE in 1991.  The independent schools that make up the SPHERE consortium constantly strive to provide students with a well-balanced and multicultural curriculum, a diverse social community, a variety of extracurricular and intra-school experiences, and a view of the world that will allow them to grow into responsible members of a global community. 

Our commitment is to recruit students, faculty and administrators of color to our schools and to facilitate efforts and programs that enhance and broaden the quality of life for all students.  

Our Commitment

We believe that schools should provide a context for teachers to teach and for students to learn.  Independent schools, which are governed by boards of trustees and rely on private sources for funding, provide an environment for teachers who have a passion for their disciplines—and a love for teaching.  Students who choose to attend independent schools are responsive to academic challenges—they are eager to learn.  They and their families are committed to excellence, performance, competition, success, and community.

We work to foster an environment that will educate all students for the multicultural world of the 21st century.   We believe that our strength lies in our differences and our commonalities, and those differences should be resources for learning.  When this happens, every student will experience teaching and learning that suits a world characterized by diversity.

Mission Statement

The mission of SPHERE is to help the member schools to collaborate in becoming and remaining culturally diverse, inclusive, and responsive environments for teaching and learning.  To this end, the member schools, individually and collectively, seek to achieve diversity in faculties, staff, and student bodies, to create within each school and among the member schools a climate of respect for differences, to encourage multicultural perspectives in curricular and extracurricular programs, and to build bridges between city/suburb and public/private sectors, races and classes.