St. Johnsbury Academy

Founded in 1842, St. Johnsbury Academy is an independent, coeducational day and boarding school for students in grades 9 to 12 and a post-graduate year. A nonprofit institution, the Academy is governed by a self-perpetuating, 21-member Board of Trustees. The Academy provides opportunities for its students to gain an understanding in those studies that provide a life foundation for the free citizen, enabling each Academy graduate to be intellectually self-reliant and to function as a constructive, moral member of society.

For over 170 years, St. Johnsbury Academy has fostered a sense of community that has allowed all students—successful and struggling, American and international, athletes and artists, scientists and scholars, tradesmen and technicians—to thrive regardless of their background and regardless of their interests. Because of this shared sense of community, we have been able to work together to leave this school better than we found it, and it too has thrived over the better part of two centuries.

To our students, St. Johnsbury Academy is a place of life-changing opportunities. While they are here, students build relationships with some of the very best educators in the world—our faculty and staff—and through those relationships live out our mission as they build lives of good character, inquiry, and community. Their lives are further enriched through time spent with their schoolmates—young men and women from around the world with diverse interests, abilities, and backgrounds. The strength of all of these relationships often result in some of the most transformative experiences of their lives.

This is the mission of St. Johnsbury Academy, a diverse, comprehensive, and independent educational community grounded by our traditions, our deep optimism regarding young people, and our commitment to academic excellence:

• To teach good character by modeling and fostering compassion, respect, responsibility, and integrity.
• To foster a love for learning by challenging individuals to pursue knowledge, creativity, and intellectual self-reliance.
• To encourage each individual to understand his or her relationships, rights, and responsibilities within a community that is itself part of the larger world.

We believe every student has the potential to do great things, and that each has unique gifts and talents. By helping each student recognize and use these gifts, our teachers help students achieve their own brands of excellence, transforming their own lives and the world around them. Students at St. Johnsbury Academy benefit from small classes, talented teachers, and a huge array of academic opportunities.

We offer over 220 courses to choose from, including 31 Advanced Placement courses, 40 courses in the fine and performing arts, college-level engineering, five languages, and an award-winning technical education department.

When students come to chapel each morning, they are welcomed by faculty who are some of the best teachers in New England. Our teachers teach classes on Advanced Placement courses at our summer AP Institute, grade Advanced Placement exams, and have written Advanced Placement course guides. They are published authors, medical doctors and PHDs. Nearly 70 percent of our faculty hold advanced degrees from such institutions as Brown, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Harvard, UPenn, and Johns Hopkins. Each of our art faculty is a professional artist in the genre they teach.

The academic support services at St. Johnsbury Academy are unparalleled. All students, regardless of academic level, homework habits, or previous academic challenges, are provided with the resources to excel. We are highly successful in assisting students who require help with organization and study skills, or whose diagnosed learning disability creates the need for specialized assistance, remediation, and classroom accommodations. We offer a Study Skills program for freshmen and upperclassmen in which students learn tactics to successfully approach studying and complete their homework in a supported setting. Our Guided Studies program provides intensive academic support, with emphasis on any remedial needs, to students who have struggled with their schoolwork in the past. Trained support staff partner with faculty in both Study Skills and Guided Studies to help students navigate the pressures of high school and fulfill their academic potential.