History

Twenty-eight years ago, Cambridge-based educator Ginny Kahn envisioned a school where children are nurtured, valued, and challenged—nurtured as individual, creative learners, valued as thoughtful, constructive members of a warm and loving community, and challenged to achieve their fullest potential as they grow and change. She envisioned the Atrium School.

Working together, Atrium families, teachers, and friends developed the school in Watertown, Massachusetts, where it has thrived for years as a model for independent, progressive education. In 2006, anticipating expansion and growth, school leaders opted to move the school to a permanent home, and transformed an industrial warehouse and grounds into an award-winning, modern “green building” site next to the Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Cambridge city line.

In this new site, with its green campus, the Atrium continues to build on Ginny Kahn’s original vision of a partnership of educators, parents, and children learning together in a vibrant, caring environment in which we are all encouraged to “wonder, explore, invent, imagine, develop skills, and persevere at challenging work.”