Every senior at Fredericksburg Academy has to find a master. It is part of how you graduate. You pick a topic in your freshman year - astrophysics, ballet, marine biology, woodworking, whatever you want - and you spend the next four years building toward an Exhibit project that requires you to apprentice with someone who actually does the thing, for at least thirty hours, before you create your own work and present it in the school's 413-seat theater. No other school in the Fredericksburg area requires this. It is what the academy is for.
Fredericksburg Academy opened in 1992 as a coeducational independent school serving pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. The Gladys T. Quarles Charitable Trust played a central role in the founding, and in 2007 the school's lower and middle school facility was formally renamed the Gladys T. Quarles Academy Building in recognition. The school sits on a small campus in southern Stafford County, just outside the Fredericksburg city line, with about 550 students. It is divided into three divisions - lower school for pre-K through fifth grade, middle school for sixth through eighth, and upper school for ninth through twelfth. The lower grades use an open, teacher-classroom model; the upper grades run an A-through-G rotation with six periods a day.
The Exhibit program is what separates Fredericksburg Academy from the larger public and private schools around it. Every student begins thinking about a topic in ninth grade. Once an Exhibit mentor approves the topic, the student moves to the learning activity - the apprenticeship - which must include at least thirty hours of supervised work with someone who is a master in the field. If the topic does not allow for an original application project at the end - medicine, say - the student does a second learning activity instead. The completed project is presented to peers, teachers, and the apprenticeship master in the Donald and Susan Reed Theater. The structure forces students out of the school building, into working hospitals and design studios and farms and laboratories, and back again with something they made. It is the most ambitious requirement on the campus.
The school's 175,000 square feet of facilities are arranged across three buildings on a single small site. The Hazel Family Arts and Sciences Building, designed by Cooper Carry and completed in April 2004, holds the upper school: four science labs, three art studios, the Reed Theater with its 413 seats, a black box, a band room, a chorus room, and the FredWorks makerspace sponsored by a local engineering group. The John and Virginia Hazel Sports Center, built in 1998, holds the gymnasium and an 8-lane, 25-meter aquatics center that hosts both the school's Fredericksburg Academy Swim Team and a local club team called Tsunami. The Quarles Academy Building, acquired in 1994, holds the lower and middle schools, including the Constance Suzanne O'Connell Memorial Library, dedicated in 2000 to a student of the same name. The athletic complex across Falcon Drive is linked to the main campus by a pedestrian tunnel.
The academy offers Advanced Placement courses in fifteen subjects, beginning sophomore year - from AP Chemistry and AP Calculus BC through AP Latin, AP Studio Art, and AP Computer Science. Athletics run at three levels - varsity, junior varsity, and middle school - with some varsity teams accepting students as young as sixth grade. The Falcons compete in the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association. Three musical or theatrical productions a year fill the Reed Theater. The school has produced individual state champions in cross country and other sports. The Lower School Natural Playscape, built in 2017, lets science classes meet outdoors. None of this is unusual for a small independent school. The Exhibit program is what makes the curriculum distinctive.
From the air the Fredericksburg Academy campus reads as a small cluster of brick buildings and athletic fields just off Interstate 95, about two miles south of central Fredericksburg in southern Stafford County. The Rappahannock River runs nearby; the river's curves and the spires of downtown Fredericksburg lie a short distance to the north. The campus is small enough that the entire layout - the two academic buildings, the athletics center, the tennis courts, the cross-country paths - fits in a single low-altitude photograph. The school sits in the gentle Piedmont landscape that surrounds Fredericksburg, with the Wilderness and Spotsylvania battlefields just to the southwest and the Potomac heading north toward Washington. The senior who finishes her Exhibit project here at eighteen has, in some sense, already begun the work she will be doing somewhere else by twenty-two. That is the bet the school made when it opened in 1992.
Fredericksburg Academy sits at 38.2541 N, 77.4936 W, in southern Stafford County just outside the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia, about a mile west of Interstate 95. Recommended viewing altitude is 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL for a clear look at the small three-building campus, the athletic complex, and the surrounding suburban landscape. The nearest airport is Shannon (KEZF) in Fredericksburg, about 4 nautical miles to the southwest. Stafford Regional (KRMN) lies 6 nm to the north. Quantico MCAS (KNYG) is about 12 nm north - watch for military traffic. The Rappahannock River winds a couple of miles north of the campus. Best light is mid-morning, when the school's red brick catches the sun.