Notre Dame de Sion High School Academic Program

 

The all-girls’ high school prepares students for achievement in college and the world. Sion has achieved more than four consecutive decades of National Merit recognition and has a tradition of 100 percent college acceptance of seniors. When you graduate from Sion, you’ll be ready for college. Sion can even give you a head start on college through the national College Board’s Advanced Placement Program and through Rockhurst University’s Advanced College Credit Program.

Sion’s challenging curriculum covers religious studies, science and technology, English and literature, world languages, fine and performing arts, history, social sciences, political science, and mathematics. In our small classes, girls receive both the challenge and support needed to face the rigors of college and beyond. Dynamic teachers guide Sion students. The teachers are available before and after school, during study hall, or by appointment for the extra guidance students may need. Teachers also serve as advisors, club sponsors, and coaches for our wide variety of extra-curricular and co-curricular activities and sports.

Instruction extends beyond the classroom walls. Sion works to prepare students for socially responsible, values based leadership in a culturally and religiously diverse world. Sion girls have the opportunity to participate in both international exchange programs and travel opportunities. Sion has established exchange programs in Santiago, Chile; Ahaus, Germany; Melbourne, Australia; Worthing, England and Marseille, France. The World Language department schedules summer tours of Europe led by the French, English, or Spanish faculty.

Download the 2011-2012 Course Catalog Here

 

Benefits of a Single Sex Education

Girls and Single-Sex Education and Why It’s Important

By Alice Munninghoff, Head of School

Research dating back 20 years and more has shown that high school girls learn better and gain more self-confidence in a single-sex environment than in a coeducational one.

At Notre Dame de Sion, we are proud of almost 100 year history of providing a rigorous education. The young women in our all-girls’ high school learn in a supportive environment where all leaders are women. The girls learn to compete successfully for grades, college admissions, college scholarships and for sports and extracurricular achievements.

Articles in Psychology Today, The New York Times and the Journal of Educational Psychology, as well as studies by educational researchers Valerie E. Lee and Anthony S. Bryk have shown that:

By their senior year, girls in a single-sex school, such as Sion, outperform their peers in coeducational schools in reading, writing and science.

  • Girls who learn in all-girls’ schools have higher career goals, achieve more Ph.D. degrees and land more jobs in Fortune 500 companies than do their counterparts from coeducational institutions.
  • Girls in single-sex schools spend less time with the television, spend more time on homework, exercise better study habits, exhibit fewer discipline problems, and hold more positive attitudes toward education than their peers from coeducational schools. They are better prepared for self-directed, college-level study.
  • Young women in all-girls’ educational environments speak up in the classroom with more than twice the frequency of girls in coeducational settings.


Over the years, it has been shown repeatedly that teachers in coeducational classrooms call on males by name more frequently, probe male students’ responses more, address male students’ questions at greater length and credit and praise male students for their observations or achievements. While this behavior is changing, it never is an issue at all-girls’ schools.

Research also indicates that while girls in single-sex high schools learn social skills comparable to those learned by their coeducational peers, girls in single-sex schools show greater self-confidence than young women studying in coeducational environments.

Karen Stabiner’s recently released book, All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why it Matters, provides information, history and research on issues that Notre Dame de Sion and every all-girls’ school addresses every day.

Sion is proud to offer single-sex education to the young women of Kansas City.