About Us
The Katherine Anne Porter School is committed to fostering an educational environment that is safe, welcoming, and free from stigma and discrimination for all students regardless of gender identity and expression, race, academic needs or individual differences.
Our Mission
We educate and empower our students with the knowledge, skills, and practices to be successful and compassionate in school and life.
Our Motto
Leaders of the Hill Country, Dragons of Life!
Our Vision
We envision highly developed and valued individuals who are engaged and successful at reaching their full potential.
Come See What We're All About
At Katherine Anne Porter School, we value the voice of every member of our community and expect all to embrace and employ these values and commitments.
Academic Achievement
We put learning first, with the belief that knowledge and understanding lead to positive action and empowerment, positioning individuals for success.
Freedom
We offer diverse opportunities for people to bring all of who they are to our community so that creativity thrives.
Participation & Collaboration
We work together to have focused participation and collaboration toward the positive development of our community.
Respect
We practice respect for oneself, others, and our world.
Community Involvement
and Service
We shape our community just as our community shapes us through engagement and service based projects.
Environmental Stewardship
We teach and practice conservation and protection of our natural resources and wildlife.
Great Art, Great Thought
Katherine Anne Porter School, a creative community celebrating diversity and freedom in learning, identifies creativity as the key to every door of genuine, life-long success. Our mission is to educate and empower our students with knowledge, skills, and practices to be successful and compassionate in school and life. In education, the door to success changes, or simply becomes harder to engage, and today’s educators realize they are preparing students for careers that may not yet exist. We believe creativity, emblazoned by the freedom to employ our imagination, remains the key no matter the door or career path. As a result, we pride ourselves in offering an environment conducive to just such a belief, grounded in valuing each individual.
Reach Your Potential
Katherine Anne Porter School envisions highly developed and valued individuals who are engaged and successful at reaching their full potential because we offer what so very few schools do. Of course, like most, we value creative arts. We offer fine arts classes like music, art and theatre, but we are more about offering creativity as the conduit to high-level learning in all classes. Our core content teachers strive to foster creativity in each student as they approach English, mathematics, science and social studies. We do not feel students should switch from right-brain to left-brain when exposed to knowledge and skills so important to academic achievement; we believe they should engage the entire brain as they become life-long learners where every moment is an opportunity to learn. And, we don’t just believe it; we practice it!
A School of Creativity
Katherine Anne Porter School teachers and staff live lives of creativity. Like all good teachers, we know modeling is important to leading others to new, and/or deeper knowledge. As such, we engage creativity in our own lives, whether contemplating the creativity of others, or operating in the freedom of our personal creative juices
Our history and namesake
Founded in 1998 by Dr. Yana Bland and many others, Katherine Anne Porter School was founded on the belief held by renowned Texas writer, Katherine Anne Porter, that “knowledge of great art and great thought is a good in itself, not to be missed for anything."
Katherine Anne Porter was born near Brownwood, Texas, in 1890 and moved to Kyle, Texas, in her early childhood. She worked as a writer and teacher most of her life in various locations around the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
She wrote articles for a number of magazines and newspapers and published several notable short stories. In 1962, she published the very popular novel, "Ship of Fools," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a film. She is known as a writer of great clarity, achieving a style of objectivity without sacrificing sensitivity.
Many of her stories used the geographic locales of the South, the Southwest, and Mexico. Although most of her works were written and published outside of Texas, she is considered one of the state's best and most famous writers.
Katherine Anne Porter died in September of 1980. Her childhood home in Kyle was purchased by a group dedicated to preserving her memory.
That group evolved into the founders of the Katherine Anne Porter School, who saw a need for a school focused on the arts in the rural Texas Hill Country area.
