Sumner Academy

Sumner Academy is an independent private school serving students in Pre-K through 8th Grade. Our beautiful and secure campus is located on 23 acres in the heart of Gallatin, Tennessee. With an average 13:1 student teacher ratio, teachers have the ability to implement more individualized learning. Our students become independent thinkers, confident learners, and gain emotional intelligence through our academic and character based education. With over 50 years of educating children, SA is rich in school traditions while constantly adding new experiences for our students and community.

Our Mission: 

Our mission is to discover and cultivate each child’s unique abilities.

Our Guiding Principles: 

• We believe diversity is a strength and cultivate a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming environment where all voices are heard and valued among both students, family, and staff. We treat each other and our students with dignity and respect. 
• We are a community of people with a passion for teaching and a love of learning. We are dedicated to finding the most effective ways to pass that passion on to our students. We strive to identify each student’s unique talents and abilities and to guide and challenge them to stretch their minds, explore, and reach for excellence.
• We are patient, compassionate, and kind to our students and each other. We listen fully and actively to our students and nurture compassion and understanding in the classroom. We use our understanding of each child’s unique personality and skills to maintain the healthy level of challenge and stress required for growth.  
• We cultivate social and personal responsibility in our students. We empower them by helping them understand the impact their decisions can have on their work, their goals, their community, and the world around them. We equip our students with the skills and concepts critical to good judgment and decision-making and provide them with a safe environment in which to make the mistakes that pave the path toward success. 
• We believe in providing and promoting an environment that is emotionally and physically safe.
• We believe in engaging all potential stakeholders to enhance our educational program.
• We are committed to implementing these beliefs with vision, passion, and dedication.

A Brief Sumner Academy History
Parents have always been involved in the success and growth of Sumner Academy. They decided they needed to start a private, independent school that would embrace all faiths and beliefs. In 1973, six educators from the Peabody Campus in downtown Nashville by the new headmaster from Savannah Country Day, Todd Strecker, were tasked by the first Board of Trustees to start Sumner Academy. They showed up to work at 1012 Nashville Pike, the old Antebellum Fitts place, located between what is currently O’Charley’s and Chili’s, and for the next two years, began learning and perfecting the best way to teach their first students.

When they could not buy that property as a permanent home for Sumner Academy, they began looking for the right place to grow the new school. They found the ideal location on Nichols Lane and purchased 22 acres from the Patterson Farm to make the academic dream a reality.

Sumner Academy’s community has a long history of being willing to constantly stretch, change, and respond to meet students’ needs. When Sumner Academy opened its new doors in 1975, the teachers worked together to create a robust academic curriculum. They agreed to view each child as an individual, constantly evaluating whether their needs were being met and providing opportunities to learn through various activities and experiences. Everyone agreed that class sizes needed to be small to fulfill the vision of getting to know each child individually. These values remain today. Despite an outstanding academic program, Sumner Academy has met enrollment challenges with innovative modifications. In the mid-‘80s, high schools incorporated the ninth grade into their programs, thus reducing our ninth-grade class to a non-sustainable level.  In 1986, Sumner Academy reorganized our junior high school to a more traditional middle school (grades 6-8). As local high schools opened middle and elementary schools, we continued to meet the challenge with additional reorganizations, which included expanding our grades to include a Pre-Kindergarten and reorganizing the middle school to align with private schools in the greater Nashville area where middle school includes both lower (grades 5 & 6) and upper middle school (grades 7 & 8).

Over the years, Sumner Academy has expanded its facilities. A new student center and middle school building was completed in 1999, which houses a Cafetorium, full kitchen, offices, and eight classrooms. Following the 2006 tornado that swept through our campus, the school community worked together to clear the debris and begin rebuilding.  As a result, a new athletic center was built, and the media center underwent multiple improvements. The first IDEA HUB was completed in the lower school building in March 2020 to emphasize the design-thinking process and its constituent components in the classroom to prepare learners for the challenges of the 21st century.

Many of our alumni are committed to their old school.  Alumni return year after year when in high school or college because of the strong bonds developed while attending Sumner Academy. Many alumni have returned to Sumner Academy as employees.

Parents, like teachers, remain just as committed as when the school was founded. They continue to drive on field trips, raise funds through the PTO, and show up the Saturday before school starts each July to prepare the campus for the new year. Our parents are as ready to rise to the occasion as they were in 1973.