Proctor Academy

Begun in 1848 as a local school for the children of Andover, New Hampshire, Proctor has undergone numerous evolutions enroute to becoming what it is today: a boarding and day school of 370 students serving as a national leader in experiential learning and academic support programs.

Taking inspiration from our motto, Proctor Academy creates a diverse learning and living community: one that values the individual and recognizes the potential of each member to stretch beyond what had been thought possible.

Balancing academic rigor, structure, and support with the freedom for students to explore, create and define themselves, Proctor encourages students to achieve their optimal growth. A deep commitment to a learning skills program and a strong emphasis on experiential learning is interwoven throughout Proctor’s academic, athletic, artistic, and environmentally conscious programs both on and off campus.

Proctor students graduate understanding the values of honesty, compassion, respect, and responsibility, proceeding with confidence and with strategies to become life-long learners and thoughtful contributors to their communities. Each year gives reason to pause and reflect on the nature of community – what creates it, what allows it to flourish, what makes it resilient, and what makes it fragile. There are moments - locally, nationally, and globally – that challenge community. Again and again we come to marvel at the latent strength within the Proctor family, whether to support a student in crisis or a faculty member battling a life-threatening illness, or a community after a fire.

Proctor’s sum total of its moving pieces operates in conjunction with community aspirations. We are a global school operating in four different countries around the world: France, Spain, Costa Rica, and China; we are a floating school, voyaging each fall from Gloucester, MA to San Juan, Puerto Rico; we are a rolling school, traveling with ten students through the Southwest and West in pursuit of answers to essential questions around water, big agriculture, border issues, and community; and we are a rock-ribbed New Hampshire school with commitment to core values and meeting each student where they are. One might think that this far-flung educational landscape dissipates community, makes it harder to hold together. Not so.

Maybe it is because we hire, support, and believe in faculty and staff who can contribute not only in the teaching of their respective disciplines and the needed skill sets to successfully maintain and run a campus, but who contribute to the making of a healthy community. It requires flexibility. It requires an acceptance of the other. It requires tolerance. It requires being able to look objectively at one’s bias. It requires a sense of humor. And it requires a belief that community matters.

In a world growing more complex and challenging, the art of teaching community by living community is an essential component, we believe, of a healthy living and learning school. We hope you see this play out in the following pages, and more importantly we hope that you see this when you step onto our campus.