INNOVATIVE
• Inquisitive Citizens • Empathetic Collaborators • Empowered Activists & Advocates Paul Cummins' progressive approach to education is woven throughout the fabric of TREE where a collaborative and engaging learning environment provides students with broad opportunities to discover who they are and what they love — empowering them to create lives filled with meaning and purpose.
EXPERIENTIAL
• Project-Based Learning • Social Agency • Community Engagement Individual expression and diversity of thought fosters authenticity. TREE inspires students to find their true voice, interests and passions while at the same time exploring their role in a just society.
INDIVIDUALIZED
• Collaboration & Trust • Small Classes • Passion & Purpose By meeting students where they are, emotionally, socially and academically, TREE teachers develop supportive, responsive relationships that engender trust. As a result, students share more openly and learn more successfully.
Message from the Head of School
As we grow into our 10th year, this is just the beginning for TREE of showing how education based upon compassion, joy, and experience can allow our children to embrace their whole selves, look beyond limitation, and realize a higher potential. At TREE, learning is the art of becoming more fully human.
Students learn that rituals, memories, numbers, and languages all hold meaning; that art, science, and history are different ways of asking what is fair, what is possible, and what makes life worth living. Our courses begin not with answers but with questions that matter: Who are we in relation to each other, to the natural world, to the stories we inherit and the futures we design?
We embrace the city as our campus, acknowledging that there is no way that these walls can contain our educational objectives. So, we make them permeable to be connected with our community and the vast resources of our city and Southern California. We explore how cultures meet and shape each other, how power and equity define societies, how roots in a place give both belonging and responsibility.
TREE’s story is one of interconnection, creativity, and dignity: the conviction that math can transform communities, that art can challenge injustice, that science can protect the fragile balance of our world, that storytelling can expand empathy and memory, and that movement, food, and music can nourish both body and spirit.
We believe in galvanizing the activists of today, and not just preparing the leaders of tomorrow, as our world continues to be shrouded in uncertainty. Our students are not just preparing for the future — they are practicing, here and now, what it means to shape a more just, sustainable, and beautiful world.
It’s the beginning of building a better model for education and learning. Everyone knows that each learner is unique, and yet, most continue to operate with a one-size-fits-all approach. We do NOT. We invite students to see struggle, failure, and uncertainty not as obstacles but as teachers, and to discover joy and resilience in the process. We focus intently on each child as an individual - understanding how they learn, identifying their interests and passions, and setting a course for them to bring their whole being into each day so that they can thrive as a learner and as a human.
At TREE, we promise your child will be seen and valued. That we will get to know them as students and as young humans living in the real world - I can’t stand it when adults say that they aren’t yet. We promise to partner with you to draw the best from them and instill the confidence in their ability to accomplish the absurd - take ideas that seem out of reach and bring them into their reality.
Head of School
TREE in the News!
My name is Alexa Young
Our annual celebration of the arts, TREEchella, was featured on KTLA!
TREE Academy is an innovative non-profit school with a customized academic approach. The school provides both small classes combined with individual college-preparatory instruction — for every student and every class — which means weekly tutorial blocks for each of our core academic classes. TREE is designed for high achievers and students feeling disillusioned, for those with burning passions as well as for those with unique learning styles — all looking for a student-centered, interdisciplinary approach to the creative arts and new technologies at a unique, diverse campus and community center, dedicated to the joy of learning.