Ida Lewis came to Clarebourne after eight years at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, where she served as Associate Director of Admissions with a particular focus on financial aid access and the recruitment of first-generation independent school families. Before that she spent three years as an admissions counselor at the Chapin School, also in New York, where she developed the outreach program that first drew her attention to the gap between families who knew how to navigate independent school admissions and families who didn’t. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Oberlin College and an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her research focused on access and equity in selective school admissions processes.
She joined Clarebourne in 2009 and formalized the school’s need-blind admissions policy in 2012 — a policy that has since become one of the most distinctive and frequently cited features of Clarebourne’s institutional identity. The policy emerged from Ida’s conviction that an admissions office that knows a family’s financial situation before it evaluates their child cannot make a fully honest decision about that child. Separating the two processes was, in her view, not idealism but logic.
What distinguishes Ida’s approach to admissions most is her insistence that the process be genuinely mutual. She reads every application file personally at the initial review stage. She conducts a significant portion of family interviews herself, including all interviews with families who have applied for financial aid, because she wants those families to meet the person making decisions about their child’s access, not an administrative proxy.
She is also the architect of Clarebourne’s shadow day program, which she redesigned in 2014 to place prospective students in advisory groups rather than simply in academic classes. The reasoning was characteristic: a student can perform well in a single class period. What they cannot easily perform is how they respond to a community — whether they are drawn in, whether they are at ease, whether they light up when a peer challenges something they said. That, Ida believes, is the information that actually predicts fit.
Her team responds to every family inquiry within one business day. She considers this non-negotiable.
“I have never made a good admissions decision from a piece of paper. I have made good ones from a conversation — from watching a child decide whether to defend an opinion when I pushed back on it, from listening to a parent describe not what their child has achieved but what makes them difficult and wonderful to live with. That’s the information I need. The transcript tells me where a student is. The conversation tells me who they are.”
Clarebourne since 2009