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High school for teens who want to excel on their own terms.

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ATI Experience

Welcome to ATI San Francisco

I'm thrilled to welcome you to ATI San Francisco. 

We're a unique school in this remarkable city. We combine the best of a rigorous, intellectually demanding liberal arts education with the best of a progressive orientation to cultivating student independence, agency and responsibility. We help each student become a great thinker and a great doer in a way that corresponds to their gifts, interests and passions.  

Our learning community is intentionally small so we're able to deeply know each student, help them thrive emotionally and socially, and support their individual path to excellence. We're proud of our orientation to a set of values that guide us as a community, and I'd love to discuss how ATI might align with your vision of an extraordinary high school education.  

I'm honored to lead this school and to partner with our exceptional educators and our remarkable students and families to co-create a challenging, supportive, deeply caring, and inspiring learning community.  

I hope you'll explore our website to learn more about ATI and then come see us for yourself.  I'd love to meet you.  

Warm regards, 

Denis Hill

Head of School, ATI San Francisco

Our Vision

In 1907, in San Lorenzo, Italy, Dr. Maria Montessori had a radical idea. What if we “follow the child” and let their interests, curiosity and engagement with their environment drive their learning? What if we create an approach to education that systematizes the inputs that a student needs to follow her curiosity, independently work with her mind and her hands, and realize her inner potential?

Today, ATI San Francisco is proud to build on this educational tradition by bringing to life a Montessori-inspired high school for engaged adolescents. Our vision is rooted in a deep belief that teenagers — in the context of a supportive, challenging and enriching community — are capable of extraordinary learning and extraordinary work. We aspire to be a community where students thrive intellectually, emotionally, and relationally and leave ATI prepared and capable of creating lives of purpose, value, and joy.

Our vision for adapting Montessori principles to the adolescent context isn’t fanciful. It requires coordinating and aligning principles and practice. It requires thoughtful and deliberate attention to balancing structure and flexibility. It requires maintaining expectations of excellence with adaptability for how to achieve it. It requires a commitment to learning ideas, skills and practices that are foundational to navigating our world while also providing students with the space and support to pursue excellence in their unique interests and passions.

Our vision is bold and aspirational; it is our life's work. We feel lucky to do this deeply meaningful work each day alongside our students. We hope you might be as inspired as we are to pursue this vision and to join us in re-imagining what a high school can be.

Our Team

  • Denis Hill

    Head of School

    Throughout the course of his career in education, Denis Hill has consistently been driven by a passion for and urgency to develop learning experiences for young people that are deeply meaningful, relevant, and transformative. Denis began is career in education in Baltimore City in 2008 as a middle school and high school English teacher and baseball coach. It was here that Denis developed clarity around what is possible for all students to achieve when, as educators, we are able to care for, inspire, challenge, and believe in the full capability of young people as thriving and thoughtful human beings. Over the course of his career he been an instructional coach, dean of culture, director of professional development, and global programs director. Denis brings his experience in designing experiential learning, building community and culture,  coaching and mentoring students and teachers, and leading teams of educators to build systems to our ATI San Francisco community.

  • Katie Lee

    Operations Manager

    Katie Lee graduated with a degree in biology from Grinnell College, where she assistant-taught biology, chemistry, and neuroscience. She then moved to Nanjing, China, where she taught AP biology and English courses. She has worked in college counseling and helped to open AP and IB centers in Chinese high schools.

  • Olga Sylvia

    Director of Admissions and Lead Humanities Guide

    Olga Sylvia holds a PhD in French from the University of California, Berkeley and is the founder of Polyglottist Language Academy.  She has studied in four different countries (US, France, Russia, and Guatemala) and is fluent in four languages (English, French, Russian, and Spanish). Olga also taught three languages at two different universities and a language school in California. Additionally, she taught French literature and cinema, the history of ethics, and sociology at a university level. She is doing academic research on animals in the French Renaissance and historical analysis of the Oxford manuscript Chanson de Roland. Olga has presented at numerous American and European conferences on Renaissance literature and philosophy. Furthermore, she is the former director of a summer abroad program in Antigua, Guatemala. Olga has visited about 20 countries and wants to visit many more in her lifetime. She is looking forward to share all of her passion and knowledge about the humanities with her students.

  • Alex Gilman

    Humanities Guide

    Alex Gilman graduated summa cum laude from Boston College with a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy. He then pursued contemporary phenomenology at the graduate level at DePaul University. He is an award-winning writer, having published and presented papers at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

  • Peter Wallis

    Lead Art and Maker Guide

    Peter is an interdisciplinary artist and native son of the Green Mountains of Vermont. He has worked with students throughout the country teaching visual arts at independent schools and nonprofit arts organizations. Integrating his interests in illustration and printmaking, his approach to teaching trends in new media is grounded in an appreciation of traditional art techniques and practices. His BFA study was in illustration with a double minor in art history and drawing from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.  Peter earned his MFA from Goddard College with a focus in printmaking, graphic novels, and peace studies.

  • Kelsey Holtzinger

    Lead STEM Guide

    Kelsey is a Bay Area native and grew up in the South Bay and has her M.A.T from Concordia and Santa Clara University. Before teaching Analysis and Science at ATI, Kelsey taught middle school and high school math for five years. Additionally, prior to starting her career in education, Kelsey was a former college athlete at University of Oregon. Kelsey is also an avid traveler and backpacker and does an annual trek along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Gifted, passionate, and committed, our staff at ATI San Francisco are remarkable individuals both inside and outside our classroom.

Learn more about the ATI community.

Our Values

Our ATI values align our staff, students and families to a set of ideas and practices that inform and enliven how we collaborate, communicate and support each other. We aspire to bring these values to life each day in our work together.

  • The Pursuit of Wisdom

    “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” –Socrates

    We approach learning as the ongoing pursuit of wisdom. We explore, interrogate and debate the big ideas that have shaped our world and connect those ideas to our own lives and context. We pursue wisdom not as an academic exercise, but to improve our judgment and actions in the world. 

  • The Development of Virtue

    “Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” –Marcus Aurelius

    We know the word “virtue” may seem old fashioned. Yet the cultivation of our ethics, our integrity, and our habits shapes the quality of our lives. We are committed to exploring the connection between our deeply held values and our behaviors so that our inner character shows up in the world.

  • The Dignity of Work

    “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” –Steve Jobs

    Work is central to our lives. It lets us direct our energies purposefully, enabling us to structure our time and action to reshape our world. Through cultivating our capacity for work, we develop an appreciation of genuine effort and a careful attention to quality.

  • The Power of Individual Agency

    “The only true freedom for an individual is to have the opportunity to act independently... There is no such thing as an individual until a person can act by himself.” –Maria Montessori

    We believe in independence and free choice. We seek to develop the courage of our convictions and the capacity for each of us to act with purpose, to overcome barriers and to pursue our individual aspirations.

  • The Responsibility and Joyfulness of Community

    “The need for connection and community is primal, as fundamental as the need for air, water, and food.” –Dean Ornish

    We recognize the tremendous personal value of the communities to which we belong. And so we assume responsibility for the health and vitality of those communities, share in the joy of belonging and have pride for what we create together.

The ATI Network

ATI San Francisco is a part of a network of ATI schools, with campuses in Austin, San Francisco, New York and St. Louis. Collectively, we are creating the future of high school in collaboration with Higher Ground Education, the leading global organization committed to modernizing and mainstreaming the Montessori movement.

The ATI program was founded by Michael Strong, one of the most experienced designers of innovative school programs in the U.S. His past projects include Montessori secondary school program design at The Judson Montessori School (San Antonio), The Emerson School (Palo Alto), and Hacienda School (Pleasanton). Michael has authored two books including The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice.

If you are interested in bringing ATI to your city, please contact Scott Taylor, Executive Director of ATI Schools.

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