Proctor Academy

Begun in 1848 as a local school for the children of Andover, New Hampshire, Proctor has undergone numerous evolutions en route 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 that values the individual and recognizes each member's potential to stretch beyond what had been thought possible.
Balancing academic rigor, structure, and support with students' freedom 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 from understanding the values of honesty, compassion, respect, and responsibility, proceeding with confidence and strategies to become lifelong 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 total of its moving pieces operates in conjunction with community aspirations. We are a global school operating in four different countries worldwide: 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 a commitment to core values and meeting each student where they are. One might think that this far-flung educational landscape dissipates the community, makes it harder to hold together. Not so.
Maybe it is because we hire, support, and belief in faculty and staff who can teach their respective disciplines and the needed skill sets to maintain and run a campus successfully and make 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.