Two of my family members attended Abintra and it was amazing to watch their transformation. It is an excellent school focused on the individual child. I also watched several of my friends’ children who attended Abintra grow up to be amazing adults. Each child is nurtured for his or her gifts and talents. A great deal of time is spent outdoors learning in nature.

Our child has been a student at Abintra for 5 years and we feel absolutely fortunate that she has had this special Montessori education and that we have been given golden guidance as parents all along the way. As parents, we agree that our educational experience - although not bad - could have been a lot better. Our daughter is clearly showing a love for learning, a curiosity about history, has become a voracious reader (in her own time), and continues to show solutions to the challenges she meets with or without adult input.Growth has been something that we as parents have experienced, alongside our child. The emotional support from Jane Nelsons Positive Discipline certified instructors has been a gem! It has also been a challenge. Moving away from the parenting choices that were modeled to us and towards the Positive Discipline approaches that are scientifically based has been a consistent work for us as parents.Growth for our child has also been both amazing and challenging, as her guides put a focus on the classrooms social-emotional development. A child who can work through social challenges and who can also control his/her emotions already has an advantage in the world. This is a work that is unique to Abintra. The guides are strong enough to set solid boundaries and expectations, which allows the students space to make decisions within the boundary confines and the comfort to know what to expect in their environment. All the same, they are gentle enough to encourage students to speak up for themselves, and to find ways to meet their own individual needs.The guides and administration are supportive of children in the classroom who have special needs and have shown they are willing to invest in the most current training to meet the needs of special needs students. Aside from special needs, the administration encourages children to follow their curiosity, instead of forcing assignments at a given time. Our child spent the majority of time on language skills at first, avoiding math. Over time, our child gained confidence and started to show an interest in math (after other peers were full engaged). Our child came late to the game, but is on track with the classroom now.The environment is AMAZING! To be able to learn and play in this wooded enchanted forest is such a gift. And to have a farm where kids can build confidence through caring for animals and cultivating their own food is a tremendous and one of a kind advantage for young minds.What is most precious to us is that every day when we pick up our child, there is a smile from ear to ear on every face. Students feel included, supported, confident, and capable. We couldnt ask for anything better than that!

I have two children at Abintra and they have both had wonderful experiences. The campus is beautiful, and we have found the guides to be kind, caring, and nurturing. Abintra is a very special place and a progressive hidden gem in west Nashville.

Abintra is an amazing school and community. The staff is very caring and committed to childrens education and development as whole human beings not just people who can pass tests. I feel like my child goes to school in paradise both from an educational and setting perspective. We are grateful to have found this gem.

My daughter has attended Abintra since she was 4 years old. Shes now in her final two years, in the Middle School classroom. I couldnt say enough about how wonderful her education has been. If youre looking for a Montessori education, amazing guides, a kind, inclusive community, and a beautiful, peaceful setting, this is your school.

I went there for preschool and kindergarten: From my experiences, my two teachers barely taught us anything.(same teachers for both grades) They let us do practically whatever we wanted, with little to no structure. They hardly ever disciplined me or my classmates either: I was obviously bullied frequently- from a kid throwing small rocks at my face to others flat out walking over me when i bent down to put my jacket on (i would flip it upside down on the floor and then over my head) and my two teachers either barely did anything to help in said situations, or they saw it and ignored it. When they did “help”, typically they would make the kid bullying go sit in the corner of the room for a solid 20 minutes, but not say anything to them about the situation. In fact, whenever my classmates did something bad, they were isolated for a long period of time and when they cried, they went into the bathroom. There were no interventions from teachers (except when one saw a kid push me off a ledge in the upper playground and she only told him “not to do it anymore”, which practically means nothing to a four year old). I had no friends, and most of my classmates didn’t treat me as well as the others in our classroom.The only lessons i remember learning (this was almost 10 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy) were small Spanish songs and lessons we’d do once in a while. However, there’s one good memory i have from that, and that was the after- school Keyboarding class i was in. The kids in the other classroom were entirely different than the ones in mine in the sense that they were kinder, and welcoming to me and other kids from the two other classrooms- not to mention the teacher actually kept a close watch on us to make sure we all got along, too.The activities in our room ranged from painting on a small canvas slightly bigger than my hand to playing with marbles, labelling farm animals and arranging sentences with magnetic words. Im sure the school is much better than it was when i was there for 2 years (my mother pulled me out when she saw a deep scratch mark under my right eye, the day we learned how to make scratch art and a kid scratched my face), not to mention that it was a decade ago. Its likely different from how it functions overall, and there would definitely be different teachers.When i was 4 years old, i thought of everything that happened at that school as normal because, of course, i was a little kid and didn’t know better. I thought of all of it as a typical education... but looking back on it, I would say it’s the polar opposite of that. Much worse than the public school i went to from 1st to 4th grade, and nothing compared to the private school I’m at now. If you’re enrolling your kid at Abintra, please keep a close eye on how theyre acting and how they’re being treated at this school (though my experience may be different than other kids now). My mother caught on early and took me out. Little do you know your kids, though unlikely now, might have a similar experience.

Love this place