This past year, our Timon community-- including students, parents, teachers, staff, board members and alumni-- came together to identify what makes our school Distinctly Timon, seeking ways to celebrate what makes us special and more deeply interweave our Franciscan ideals of service and brotherhood-- while also making a Timon education more focused and rigorous in tackling the real-life challenges our students face as they leave here.

Through this process, one foundational shift we’ve identified is taking in-house control of our curriculum and end-of-year assessment tools, starting in 2022-23. This means we will no longer be relying on New York State to tell us what we have to teach, leaving our faculty and administration to devise our own rigorous—but far more meaningful—final assessments in place of New York State Regents exams. Just like dozens of other private high schools across the state, by leaving behind Regents exams and taking the power to create our own assessment measures, we will be better able to carry on the proud tradition of a robust and distinctly Timon education. Across the board, colleges and universities have embraced the higher standards we’ve put into place over the last several years.

The fact that a Timon student can earn as many as 60 college credits by taking Advanced Placement and dual-credit college-level classes, or even gain professional licensure as a commercial drone pilot is far more meaningful than any score on a standardized test. Using the Regents curriculum as a guideline rather than a state mandate, our accomplished Timon faculty will have more classroom time to share not just knowledge but passion and create more varied fulfilling ways of learning—with an emphasis on experience and understanding, rather than just multiple choice and memorization. These updates serve only one purpose—that every young man who walks through the doors at 601 McKinley Parkway might be better prepared for college, for the working world, and for whatever life brings.

Fortes in Fide & GO TIGERS!