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The Athenian School is a co-educational, college preparatory boarding and day school located in Danville, California. Students in grades 6-12 attend classes on a 75-acre campus in Contra Costa County. The school was founded by Dyke Brown in 1965.
As of 2025, the school has an enrollment of 528 students in the middle and high school. Approximately 60 students and 18 teachers live on campus full-time. The student to teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average class size is 15. According to Niche, Athenian is ranked 147th on the 2020 list of Best Private High Schools in America and the number one school in Contra Costa County. Athenian is also ranked as the 40th best boarding school in the United States.
Athenian holds an average SAT score of 1385 (out of 1600) and an average ACT score of 32. According to Boarding School Review, this gives Athenian the 8th highest SAT score of any boarding school in the United States.
In 2024, 137 students took AP Exams, 70% students scoring 4 or 5, 94% students scoring 3 and above. Top 20 universities Athenian graduates most often attended include: Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell, UPenn, USC, U.Chicago, NYU, Dartmouth and Stanford. Many students also attended liberal arts colleges including: Barnard, Bowdoin, Amherst and the Claremont colleges.
Athenian is a founding member of Round Square, an international organization of schools whose philosophy is influenced The beginnings of the Round Square Conference by the German educator Kurt Hahn. As of 2021, there are approximately 200 Round Square member schools worldwide.
In 1962, Brown left the Ford Foundation to begin to raise money for the school he had in mind. Inspired by the Oxford system of individual colleges sharing common resources, his original plan was a series of four campuses sharing a library, science classrooms, athletic facilities, a performing-arts complex, and other facilities. He found 80+ acres of land in what was then rural Contra Costa county, a portion of what was then the Blackhawk Ranch, bordering on Mount Diablo State Park.
Construction began in 1963, and the founding head, W. Robert Usellis, began recruiting the pioneer classes in the fall of 1964. Brown's vision was startling at the time: he planned for both integration and coeducation. In the early 1960s, very few private schools were recruiting students of color. The value of integration for private schools was seen by a very few visionaries, including the founders of A Better Chance. Mission and History of A Better Chance The norm for boarding schools at the time was single-sex; a coeducational boarding program was unusual. In September 1965, the school opened with approximately sixty students, in ninth and tenth grades. In 1968, the founding class graduated, with a full enrollment of about 120 students, of whom only about six were day students.
In the 1970s, Athenian weathered local, national, and international changes. The surrounding area was transformed from cattle ranches to upscale developments. Athenian's neighbor, Blackhawk Ranch, was sold to land developer Ken Behring, and by 1979 2,500 upscale homes were built. The population boom in the area meant that there was an increased demand for day student places at the school.
Nationally, at least two forces were at work. First, the stagflation of the 1970s meant that parents had less discretionary income, thus weakening the pool of prospective boarding students. Other demographic changes, such as the increase in divorce, affected the pool of prospective boarding students.
In 1979, there was sufficient interest in the surrounding community for Athenian to open a day-school-only middle school, serving students in grades 6–8. Most of them continued on to finish high school at Athenian.
On the homecoming day, AWE participants take part in a tradition known as "Run In", during which students run from a location that is 8 miles away from the school back to the campus.
The Athenian School's Acropolis Robotics competes regularly in the FIRST Robotics Competition as team 852. In 2019, Athenian hosted their first FIRST LEGO League (FLL) tournament with the help of the Acropolis Robotics high school students. The Athenian Middle School had three FLL teams of their own in 2019, all three of which competed in the FLL tournament.
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