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 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. 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 beyond.
We provide our students with a challenging, individualized college preparatory education within a caring community of learners while advancing adolescent education's knowledge and methodology. 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 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 from all over the greater Atlanta area bring a fantastic 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 more significant than the sum of its parts. Our students are more often than not great friends, and they are intensely loyal - to BFA and 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, and across the U.S. find common ground in their love of teaching and 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 we strive to follow daily. At their heart, the Four Rules are about 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. They are the primary point of contact with parents, exchanging e-mails or phone calls every week.
The real value of academic advisors at BFA grows out of the deep relationships 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 is going on in their advisees' lives, both in and out of school, and serve an essential role in many students' lives; as a trusted adult, they can talk honestly and know they 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 moves 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. 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 Georgia's laws, 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 international students into our regular school programs.