School for Ethics and Global Leadership

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., The School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL) is a selective, semester-long residential program for intellectually motivated high school juniors from across the United States. The program selects students who have shown outstanding character, promise for leadership, and scholastic ability and provides them with a unique curriculum that emphasizes ethical thinking, leadership development, and international affairs. In addition to Washington, DC, SEGL has campuses in Johannesburg, South Africa and London, United Kingdom.
Educator Noah Bopp founded SEGL in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. SEGL matriculated its first class of students on August 29, 2009. It opened a second campus in partnership with the African Leadership Academy in 2020. The school opened a third year-round campus, in London, United Kingdom, in the fall of 2023. Since its inception, the school has graduated over 1000 students, most of whom come from across the United States.
All SEGL students take the School's flagship Ethics and Leadership course for two hours on Monday morning, all day Wednesday, and for two hours on Friday afternoon. Students also take honors/AP-level courses that match sending school requirements and have regular 50-minute and 100-minute block periods. The school also hosts Summer Ethics and Leadership Institutes in DC and in London and offers several summer international excursions.
Visits with prominent guest speakers are a core aspect of the Ethics and Leadership course, occurring almost every week of the semester. Guests have included Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senators Cory Booker and Chuck Schumer, Generals Stanley A. McChrystal and John F. Kelly, Watergate-era "Plumber" Egil "Bud" Krogh, Rwandan Genocide hero Carl Wilkens, White House speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Ambassador Mark Dybul, former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, NRA President David Keene, Governor Michael Dukakis, and President Barack Obama.
The DC campus academic building is a block from Dupont Circle. Its residential building is half a block from the U.S. Supreme Court and one block from the U.S. Capitol building on Capitol Hill. The Johannesburg location is part of the African Leadership Academy campus in Johannesburg, South Africa. The London campus is one block from the British Museum.
Students on all three campuses live in college-style dormitory rooms with roommates. The dormitories have shared bathrooms, common areas, and faculty residential staff on site. Each SEGL in Johannesburg student has an African Leadership Academy student as a roommate. The School provides three meals a day (brunch and dinner on Sundays) and can accommodate most food needs.
Weekend activities are often student-designed. This provides students with additional leadership opportunities and helps meet student interests. Past activities have included outings to sports events, local cultural festivals, and monuments, as well as student-designed dances, game nights, karaoke contests, baking competitions, and more.
The School provides college counseling to all students. The most frequent undergraduate destinations for SEGL graduates are Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Georgetown.