The Ben Franklin Academy

The Ben Franklin Academy is an independent, progressive, college-prep high school. We teach a rigorous college preparatory curriculum, tailored to each student’s individual learning style, needs, and special interests.

At BFA, we are committed to individualized instruction and mastery learning. Our students often have not been well served by traditional schools. We offer another way. Here you will find a caring community of learners, where students develop deep relationships with their teachers and advisors, work in settings designed to encourage their best efforts, and become responsible, self-directed young men and women who are ready to excel at college and beyond.

We provide our students with a challenging individualized college preparatory education within a caring community of learners, while advancing the knowledge and methodology of the adolescent education. Every day at BFA, students, teachers, counselors and administrators are actively engaged in building and nurturing a community of learners. And we've learned that one of the primary reasons that students do better, more productive work here than they have at other schools is that they feel rooted in our unique academic community.

It starts, as most things do at BFA, with our students. Our students, who are from all over the greater Atlanta area, bring an amazing array of talents, abilities and personalities to school each day. They come from public and private schools, our songwriters, budding scientists, young entrepreneurs, and artists. But time and again, they prove the old saying about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Our students are more often than not great friends, and they are intensely loyal - to BFA, and to each other.

Our faculty and staff are no less diverse. Here you'll find former bankers, and college professors. Students are taught by working artists and scholars doing cutting edge research. Teachers from Eastern Europe, the Far East, and South America, as well as across the U.S. find common ground in their love of teaching and of being part of the BFA Community.

Part of the reason students, teachers, and staff work so well together is our shared commitment to the Four Rules, which all of us strive to follow on a daily basis. At their heart, the Four Rules are about the mutual respect - for ourselves and for one another - that creates BFA's enriching learning environment.

Each BFA student is assigned an academic advisor at the beginning of each school year. Academic advisors fill many roles. They coordinate each of their advisees’ schedules, ensuring that their advisees are meeting degree requirements, and they are the primary point of contact with parents, exchanging e-mails or phone calls on a weekly basis.

The real value of academic advisors at BFA grows out of the deep relationships that develop between them and their advisees. Advisors meet briefly with their advisees at the beginning of each academic day, when they might go over one student’s work plan, encourage another student about a subject he has been struggling with, and check in with another about her soccer game from the night before. Advisors know about what’s going on in their advisees’ lives, both in and out of school, and serve an important role in many students’ lives, as a trusted adult they can talk honestly to, and that they know will have their best interests at heart.

Individualized instruction allows students at BFA to work at their own pace, proceeding more deliberately through challenging material, and moving quickly through material they grasp more easily. Our students find this a welcome change from the traditional classroom setting, where instruction proceeds regardless of an individual student’s comprehension, often leading to confusion when a course is moving too quickly, or to boredom when it is moving too slowly.

The Ben Franklin Academy admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate in its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs and athletic and other school administered programs. The Ben Franklin Academy is a non-profit, independent school, tax-exempt under the laws of Georgia and the U.S. Internal Revenue Codes Paragraph 501(c)(3). Our IRS number is EIN 58-1823445. We are authorized by the Immigration Service to accept non-resident foreign students into our regular school programs.