The Harley School history

In January 1924, the school was incorporated under the name Harley, a combination of the first three and last three letters of Mrs.

In 1961, Rowland McKinley, former head of school, wrote: “Harley is cosmopolitan—cosmopolitan not by accident but by design.

The first Horizons Student Enrichment Program was offered in 1964 when an independent school in New Canaan, Connecticut initiated a summer program designed to serve children in neighboring low-income urban areas.

Just a few years after McKinley made this statement, Project North Star—named after Frederick Douglass’s newspaper—was born in April 1965.

Among a number of inventive, interactive projects, the Twoville Post Office, begun in 1982 as a one-week activity, is an annual student favorite.

Over the next decades, the New Canaan Country School helped many Horizons students achieve their full potential and was awarded a grant in 1994 to replicate its promising pilot program throughout the United States.

Kane, former English teacher and former director of the Center for Mindfulness and Empathy Education, founded the Hospice program in 2004.

In 2010, Horizons at Harley proposed to Horizons National that the model be expanded beyond independent schools to colleges and universities, and incubated the Horizons at Warner School program at the University of Rochester.

In 2011, Horizons at Harley incubated the Horizons at Monroe Community College program and served as consultants to a program at Nazareth College.

In 2013, the Horizons at Harley advisory board led by Conger and Mary Jo Gabel helped to create the Greater Rochester Summer Learning Association which led the way in expanding our quality summer learning model to serve more children in the region.