Colleen Hroncich
Donald Antenen says he was working on the Fairhaven Program for years before he opened it—developing the curriculum and putting the idea together. “Then two years ago, I took the leap and quit my day job and opened it,” he says. “The first year, I had five students, and this year I’ve doubled enrollment to 10.”
Located in Fairhaven, Washington, the program offers two days per week of seminar-style classes for high school students. “I’m not a school,” Donald stresses. “My curriculum combines ancient Greek and mathematics, literature, history, art, music.” Washington State allows high school juniors and seniors to take classes at community or technical colleges for free, earning both high school and college classes. Students who max it out can earn their high school diploma along with an associate’s degree. The Fairhaven Program is designed as a two-year curriculum with the assumption that most students will pursue the community college option.
Days at Fairhaven start with what they call tales of triumph and woe. “Students talk about what they’ve been doing with their lives,” Donald explains. “We have tales of triumph, tales of woe, and then sometimes the mysterious third thing that is neither triumph nor woe.” He also tries to include physical activity each morning, which may include running stairs, going for a jog, or doing planks.
Then it’s time to dig into academics, starting with math. “With first-year students, that’s geometry. We work through some of the books of Euclid’s Elements, and then we also do non-Euclidean geometry with Lobachevsky,” says Donald. “Second-year students this year are doing Algebra 2 and really preparing for college mathematics.” But that can vary depending on students’ interests and skills.
They also study Homeric Greek each day. “All the students at the end of the first year can recite from memory the opening of the Iliad in Greek,” says Donald. “We’re learning the grammar, and how to read Homer in the original is the goal. And that’s interesting, and it’s hard.” Despite being hard, he’s heard it’s the favorite for many students. “I think it’s good for them to do hard things,” Donald adds.
He also prioritizes independence and agency. The students get at least an hour for lunch, and they can do whatever they want during that time. The Fairhaven Program is located in a mini-downtown area, a short walk to the woods and Puget Sound. Sometimes they go exploring; other times they play cards or head to a nearby green for sword fighting with foam swords. “The students all do independent projects too,” Donald says. “This year, I have students writing novels and recording albums and building tree houses and all kinds of interesting things.”
One thing they don’t do is scroll their phones. “If they have phones, they go in a basket at the beginning of the day, and they don’t come out until the end of the day,” Donald emphasizes.
Fairhaven’s art curriculum includes history and practice. They’ve been working through the history of Western painting by studying a different painting each Monday. They also took a drawing course with a local artist at the beginning of the year, so they spend time drawing in the afternoons.
The students also have literature seminars in the afternoon. This year’s theme has been journeys, so they’ve read the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Parkman Junior’s The Oregon Trail, the journals of Lewis and Clark, and Mark Twain.
On Mondays, they do the Touchstones Discussion Project—organized conversations about short texts from around the world. They read selections from Aristotle, Francis Bacon, classic Chinese philosophy, and have one-on-one and small group discussions. Through this, they learn how to participate in and lead good conversations about texts.
The Fairhaven Program primarily serves homeschooling families who’ve homeschooled all the way through, and nothing like this has previously existed in the area. “In starting this, I really had to create a market rather than compete in one,” Donald notes. “I had to both convince people that what I’m doing is good and interesting, and then also that even the type of thing I was doing was a possibility.”
Donald thinks there’s a lot of demand for high-quality K–12 education and a shortage of talent to meet it. “So I think the field’s really wide open, and I would encourage people to do it,” he says. But be realistic. “The pressures of running a business are intellectually stimulating and positive, but running a business is also hard.”