Most people who drove by the intersection of Locust Grove and Chinden in 2009 thought that a brand new school was being constructed. Even families who have been here a while are surprised to learn that our school has been around for two decades!
In 1994, five families gathered to consider founding a classical Christian school in Boise. The success of Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, had spurred dozens of schools (now up to 236) to open nationwide. Three students in the 2nd grade arrived for class on the first day in the basement of Ustick Baptist Church– all sons of board members.
Ambrose (then known as Foundations Academy) hired Wesley Callahan, a leading thinker and author in the classical Christian movement, to write the K-5 curriculum. In 1996 the Academy hired Andrew Kern, co-author of Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America. Callahan and Kern together shaped much of the school’s curriculum and program.
The school grew rapidly, to 35 students its second year and around 70 the third. Adding one grade per year, Ambrose graduated its first class of eight students in 2006. The school relocated to Broadway Avenue Baptist Church in 1996-97 and continued there until 2000, when occupancy issues with the city required the school to move to an educationally rated building. The Community Christian Center in Garden City leased space to the school in its educational wing with around 19 rooms, a science lab, and a gym, placing teachers’ desks in the hallway and using both the library and science lab as classroom space. St. Ambrose Christian High School was inaugurated in 2005 as the school of rhetoric for Foundations Academy. In 2009, after ten years of design and five years of intensive planning and fundraising, the school moved into its own facility. The name of the school was unified to The Ambrose School.
In 2005, accreditation was sought from the Association of Classical Christian Schools. To become accredited, a school must be K-12, must teach at least two years of Latin or Greek in the upper school, must require math through trigonometry, and must teach logic and rhetoric (among many other requirements). These requirements make ACCS accreditation difficult to achieve for many schools. In May of 2006, the school was visited by representatives of three larger schools– Schaeffer Academy in Rochester, Minnesota, Westminster Academy in Memphis, Tennessee, and Regents School of Austin, Texas. They approved accreditation in June of 2006.
Currently, The Ambrose School has 500 students (K – 12), a waiting list in most grades, and has plans to construct an auditorium and additional classroom space. We can’t wait to see what God has planned for the next 20 years!
