St. Andrew's Academy

St. Andrew’s Academy is a private, preparatory school in a beautiful rural area of Northern California. We are community-oriented and worship-centered, bookending the day at school with the traditional services of Morning and Evening Prayer, and offering students opportunities to board with dedicated families in our area.

Though we are small, our curriculum is rigorous, and our graduates have been accepted to many prestigious colleges and universities. Our students also travel often, both within the US and overseas. To give a few recent examples, our choristers completed a substantive performance tour of Germany in summer of 2015, toured and sang through Southern England in 2016, and toured New England in the Spring of 2017. There is no substitute for this caliber of education.

Our campus finds itself located in the beautiful mountains of Northern California, an excellent launching point for skiing, hiking, backpacking, swimming, sailing, and other year-round recreational activities. Additionally, the campus continues to expand in Old Town Chester.

The mission of St. Andrew’s Academy is to equip our students with the tools of learning and to endow them with the wisdom of the ages so that they may serve God and their fellow man with virtue and strength.

St. Andrew’s Academy is not ultimately about developing graduates that are “smarter” or “better” by someone’s standard of what smarter or better means. It is neither to have graduates that can “write their own tickets” to the schools and scholarships of their choice. Rather our mission is all about character formation. In other words, what one can do is nothing compared to how and why one does it.

St. Andrew’s graduates know how to learn. The phrase, “The lost tools of learning,” comes from the famous essay by Dorothy Sayers in which she describes the Trivium, which embodies the human learning process as initial formulated by the Ancients as the first three Liberal Arts in the West. Learning is a lifelong calling, and St. Andrew’s students embrace intellectual challenge because these Tools are readily available.

The lack of historical, literary, and philosophical knowledge inevitably leads to a culture’s demise. St. Andrew’s students spend much time reading and studying that which has gone before giving context to contemporary ideas and issues, and preparing them to be effective leaders.

The education at St. Andrew’s Academy is thoroughly Christian and specifically Orthodox Anglican. This does not mean that we only educate Anglican Christians, but rather that we want to be straightforward about the worldview on which we base our institution. Christ says that the greatest commandment is to love God with all that we are. Therefore, whatever a particular student’s beliefs, we call them to accountability to God. Being human means we should worship our creator.

The second greatest commandment is “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Spirituality without active concern for those around us is disguised selfishness. As St. James says, “True religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress.”

The highest virtue is charity, unselfish love for others. St. Andrew’s students are challenged to serve not because it is convenient or because it makes one satisfied with his or her own behavior. Opportunities to serve often require sacrifice and must be actively pursued.