Applying to Grades 6-11

The application for the 2026-2027 school year will be available on August 4, 2025, via Ravenna Admissions Portal. The application form is due on November 15, 2025. 

After submitting the online application via Ravenna, you will be taken to a payment page.

• The non-refundable application fee is $60.
• The application fee is reduced to $25 for families that will be applying for Financial Aid; enter partial waiver code HMFinAid2025 when prompted in the Ravenna system.
• Applications to Grades 10 and 11 are accepted on a Wait Pool basis only and require a non-refundable $10 application fee; if we are able to activate the application, the family would then pay the remaining $50 of the application fee.

• Families schedule their interview appointments online via the Ravenna Admissions Portal.
• We require the applicant and at least one parent/guardian to attend the interview. Families should allow an hour and a half for the interview and tour. Interviewers are assigned based upon availability, and the specific person you meet with has no bearing on admissions outcomes. 
• Remember, in order to guarantee an interview, applications must be submitted and applicants must be scheduled for the interview by October 15, 2025. Applicants who submit and/or schedule after that date will be unable to schedule online; we will contact them directly if we are able to offer them an interview later in the season, depending upon availability.
• Applicants to Grades 10 and 11 should call to check the availability of an interview. If we have the possibility of spaces available in those entry points due to attrition, we will schedule an interview. This year, we hope to schedule interviews for the Grades 10 and 11 in December.
• While families who attend one of our in-person information sessions will receive a group tour, applicants will have a chance to tour the school while school is in session, the day of their interview.

Submit the required student essays and a list or summary of interests and activities by January 15, 2026. 

Two Required Student Essays for Grades 6 - 11

The essays should be submitted via the Ravenna Admissions Portal. The essay prompts are:

1. Horace Mann School prepares a diverse community of students to lead great and giving lives. Tell us a little about how your life experiences to date – home, family, school, and/or beyond – have shaped who you are today, and who you hope to become.
2. At HM, we recognize and celebrate individual achievement and contributions to the common good. How do you think your experiences, or the things you are excited to learn more about or become involved in, might enable you to contribute to the HM community?

Summary of Activities/Interests

The Ravenna Admissions Portal Essay Form provides space to include up to five of the student's activities/interests. Please list them there. 

Go to iseetest.org to schedule the exam. Students who are also considering boarding schools may submit the SSAT exam instead. Test results must be received by January 15, 2026.

Using the Ravenna Admissions Portal, families will request two teacher recommendations directly from their child's teachers. We need at least one of the two teacher recommendations to come from a teacher providing instruction to the child for the current academic year. The recommendations must be received by January 15, 2026. 

Applicants applying to Grades 6-11 should upload a copy of your child's report card from two years ago and a copy of last year's report card via the Ravenna Admissions Portal by October 15, 2025. You should also request official copies from your child's school(s). When the report card for the current/first marking period of the 2025-2026 is available, please have your school send to us immediately. If your school has a Ravenna account, they may upload it directly. If not, they may email it to admissions@horacemann.org. If you find that your school is delayed, you may also send a copy of the first marking period to admissions@horacemann.org. 

The Transcript Request Form can be found on the Ravenna Admissions Portal and should be submitted to the applicant’s current school. We also require grades/report cards from the prior two years and mid-year (or first quarter or trimester) reports from the current school year. These must be received by January 15, 2026.

We want to get to know you, your family and your child better during the admissions process. In particular, we encourage you to consider how your family’s and your child’s life experiences to date have shaped who your child is, who you hope or imagine they will become, and what role or roles you hope their school will play. Submit the parent statement via the Ravenna Admissions Portal. The mandatory parent statement must be received by January 15, 2026. 

If you would like to share another sample of your writing (this is not required), we ask that you submit a graded copy of a school essay from this year or last year on any topic that is meaningful to you. You can upload that document (PDF) via the Ravenna Admissions Portal. If your file is larger than 50MB, you may send it via email to essay@horacemann.org and include your name in the subject line with the grade level to which you are applying. This is optional for applicants applying to Grades 8-11. If submitting, the student graded essay must be received by January 15, 2026.

All families who wish to apply for Financial Aid are required to complete the Clarity Application any time after September 4, 2025. We suggest that parents/guardians wait to complete Financial Aid application materials until early October to ensure that the information provided is as current as possible. In addition to the 2024 tax documentation required in Clarity, we may require families to upload copies of other documents, where applicable. Other supplemental forms are sometimes required depending on family circumstances and can be uploaded directly in the Clarity dashboard. Financial aid application materials must be submitted by November 15, 2025.

Visit our Financial Aid page for more information.

In early January, please check on your application status to confirm that the application is complete. The file must be complete by January 15, 2026, for the applicant to be considered for admission. Importantly, the application will not be considered complete without the interview.

We typically notify families of the admission decision in February.

The New York metropolitan area is filled with wonderful schools, and most children would be happy at any number of those schools. Horace Mann School is unique in that it is the largest independent school in New York, and one of the largest in the country.

Our size gives us the advantage of depth and breadth of program that many smaller schools cannot sustain, without sacrificing the smaller class sizes and strong faculty-student relationships that are a hallmark of independent school education. Horace Mann students, from an early age, are given more independence and choice than many of their counterparts, in and out of the classroom. Our size provides a diverse student population from the tri-state area, representing more than 150 zip codes and many different backgrounds. We also have more than 260 talented faculty members with a range of teaching experiences and academic interests.

The fact that Horace Mann School spans from Nursery through Twelfth Grade means that we can help manage the transitions for our students, and pay very close attention to what has gone before and what comes next to ensure that students are well prepared for what they are learning now.

Our location provides a suburban country day school campus within close reach of all New York City has to offer.

Our process is designed to be age appropriate, and at every level we are looking for students who will benefit from and be successful in our program, and we also look for families who will be positive members of our community. We base that assessment on all the pieces of the application, including but not limited to the school records, teacher recommendations, and the interview.

We also find the standardized testing to be important because it provides the only 'standard' measure that all applicants have in common. We see applicants from many different areas and many different schools, and their backgrounds are varied. The testing enables us to assess them compared to the larger group. However, the standardized test is only one measure of an applicant's success, and we use it in conjunction with the other required materials. Please refer to the ISEE and SSAT websites for more information about the tests.

There is no such thing as a typical Horace Mann student, nor do we have a typical applicant.

Horace Mann School does not anticipate that we will be providing Forms I-20 for F-1 student visas for students. New enrolling international students will be required to obtain and demonstrate another type of valid legal status. Note that Horace Mann School requires that one or both parents, or a permanent legal guardian, will be in residence with their children during the school year. If the parent or legal guardian who will be in residence with their child(ren) during the School year is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, they must provide the School with proof of valid legal status to enter and remain in the United States during the School year.

View the tuition schedule here. 

All non-tuition required fees are due June 1 for all students on any payment plan. 

Horace Mann School does not provide transportation. For those enrolled families not being serviced by the New York City Board of Education or their local public school district in Westchester County, NY, the School partners with a for-profit transportation company - SuperSelby. The owners of SuperSelby, The Selby Family, have been transporting our students for almost 50 years. 

Interested families may choose to engage in a contract with SuperSelby and can learn more about service options at their website here. Service is not provided to all locations, and bus service is not provided to or from the Nursery Division. Routes, including pick up and drop off locations, are determined by the bus company based upon the students who register for service and may vary from year to year. It is not always possible for SuperSelby to offer door to door transportation; in many instances, students will need to walk to a local bus stop. Students who reside in the five boroughs of New York City may be eligible for a free Student /OMNY Card (formerly the MetroCard), and the 242nd Street stop of the 1 Subway route is one block from campus. 

Horace Mann School partners with FLIK Independent School Dining for our food service. Our food service program is not allergen-free. The health and safety of our students and other guests is the highest priority for FLIK Independent School Dining, and a variety of protocols and procedures are in place for those students or employees with food allergies or intolerances. FLIK Independent School Dining also implements associated tested-and-proven standard operating procedures that provide the utmost public health protection in support of their food-allergic customers

On the Middle & Upper Division campus and at the John Dorr Nature Laboratory, it is the responsibility of the student or parent/guardian to inform the Food Service Director of any food allergies a student has. Students are invited to meet with the Director of Dining Service and the Executive Chef to review what is available according to their dietary restrictions.  The Executive Chef along with the Chef/Manager will help the students navigate through the servery.

For more information about campus Dining Services, click here.

Students enrolled in Grades 9-12 are required to have a functional laptop (MacBook, Chromebook or other PC) for the purposes of completing coursework assigned during their time in the Upper Division at Horace Mann School. The student should be the primary user of the laptop. Students should be able to bring the device to school as needed, but HM does not require students to travel with a laptop; primary use of the machine should take place at home. Students enrolled in Grades 6-8 should have a dedicated laptop or desktop computer at home for their use; Middle Division students are generally not permitted to bring personal computers to school. If there is a question about this requirement, please contact our Director of Enrollment Management Lisa Moreira at lisa_moreira@horacemann.org. Questions about recommended hardware or software may be addressed to the Technology Department at technology@horacemann.org.