Boston Trinity Academy educates students from diverse backgrounds in an academically demanding, Christ-centered community, inspiring them to lead lives of faith, integrity, and service. The school’s motto is Via, Veritas, Vita, the way, the truth, and the life, which in our curriculum becomes the integration of faith, learning, and service. We believe that faith alone can be ignorant, that learning alone can be arrogant, and that without service to others an education can merely be self-serving. Via, Veritas, Vita also communicates our desire to follow Jesus in everything we do as a school.
Nearly four hundred years ago, the Puritans of New England spoke and wrote of being God’s light and an example to England and the world of God’s best and highest. They called their experiment a “City on a Hill,” and this little school educating 235 students from 6th to 12th grade nestled in a small corner of Hyde Park in Boston strives to be “God’s School for the City,” a beacon of light in the educational world. We see this light shining in our students who are characterized by a desire to do something great with their lives.
This greatness emerges in a variety of ways as varied as caring for orphans and the disabled in Nepal with the Trinity Institute for Leadership and Social Justice, excelling on Advanced Placement Exams (we offer twelve Advanced Placement courses and every student must pass at least three AP courses in order to graduate), getting accepted to top-ranked colleges, receiving awards for visual artistic expression, winning league championships in athletics, or acting brilliantly in drama productions. Students at Boston Trinity Academy have been educated in anticipation that they would take what they have learned and do something extraordinary. Our hope in providing this education has been to train and disciple young men and women so that they will build their lives on rock and not sand.
A little over forty years ago a federal judge ordered that schools must be fully integrated in order to equalize education in the City of Boston. The results of court-ordered, mandated busing were not the results that were hoped for. Bitterness, strife, and white-flight devastated Boston public schools and left the city more racially segregated than ever. Boston has been and is half white and half non-white. Before busing this mix was apparent in the public schools. Currently, only 14% of students in the public school system are white, and nearly all, no matter their race, are students of families without means.
At Boston Trinity Academy, nearly half of our students reside in the city proper, and an equal nearly half come from the suburbs of Boston and as far away as an hour plus drive in every direction. Fifteen percent of our students are international students living with home stay families that we arrange. Students from more than twenty different nations have attended and graduated from our school. Last year the school awarded over $1.6M in scholarships to families so that people from every walk of life would be part of this community of learners. Racially, our students are 37% white, 28% Asian, 25% Black, and 10% Latino. One-third of our faculty members are persons of color, and one-quarter of our faculty is foreign born. Our desire from before the school was founded in 2002 has been that our students, families, teachers, trustees, and staff would mirror what theologian Scot McKnight writes that the kingdom of God is: “a fellowship of differents.”
