Rubras

The northern red oak is a hardwood, durable and strong yet porous and spongy enough to take stain beautifully. This sweet spot has made Quercus rubra a mainstay for furniture makers and interior builders. In a similar way, the junior year is often a sweet spot in students’ educational journey: they’re both hardy and spongy—ready to do some beautiful work.

A junior’s schedule is filled with tough classes, hefty responsibilities, and high expectations. However, by their third year of high school, students are mature and ready to absorb complex ideas and handle hard tasks. They should be handed great books, expected to master languages, and challenged to lead—it’s what they were made for, and they’re ready. At The Oaks, juniors are our go-to “lumber” when building campus culture because they lend their warm, sturdy luster to any clubs, projects, or teams entrusted to their care.

Spreading their leaves over every state east of the Mississippi (except Florida), northern red oaks are happy to form an overstory with other large oak varieties—white, black, and scarlet. In other words, they grow well with others. Not the tallest but able to stand among the greats, juniors understand a school’s overstory—the narrative that shapes the four years of high school—and their place in it.

And the best of them have begun to understand how the branches of their lives fit into the grand overstory, a Kingdom canopy with healing leaves that provide shady peace and an eternal home.