Olney Friends School is in Barnesville, Ohio, on 350 acres in the eastern part of the state. The school has fewer than 60 students, with classes of about ten students each. The dorms, dining hall, and classrooms sit close enough together that a quiet student gets noticed before they fully settle into being one.
What Small Means Here
The phrase “small boarding school” is used loosely. At Olney, it means specific things. Enrollment is in the 50s, the dining hall fits everyone for every meal, the dorms are small enough that students learn each other’s daily routines; and faculty are also dorm parents, dinner companions, and the people you run into during evening study hall.
The scale isn’t a marketing posture but a structural fact. With ten students in a class, everyone has to talk. There’s no off-to-the-side version of school life happening without you in it, because the whole school eats lunch in the same room you do. And teachers who see you every day at every meal notice when something’s off, often before you do.
A current student put it this way:
“The teachers don’t just teach you; they know you.”
The Quaker Piece
The school was founded in 1837 and has been in Barnesville since 1876. It’s rooted in Quaker tradition, a practice that’s been around for more than 350 years, though most students who come here aren’t Quaker themselves.
In practice, that shows up in two main ways. There’s a daily Collection and weekly Meetings for Worship, stretches of quiet time where students and faculty sit together without phones or instruction. People speak when they’re moved to, though often, nobody speaks at all. For a teenager whose default is to check their phone every few minutes, the practice changes how they sit with their own thinking.
The other is consensus decision-making. Olney’s student government doesn’t run on a majority vote. Decisions move forward when the community can broadly agree, which means the loudest voice doesn’t carry the room, and the quietest voice can’t be ignored. Christian Acemah, the head of school, describes it like this:
“Quaker time. It takes forever to make a decision. But once it’s made, everyone knows why that decision is made that way, including those who don’t support the decision. They know why, and they hold their peace because they were included in the decision-making.”
It’s slower than majority rule, and that slowness is the education.
The values Quakers call SPICES (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship) aren’t posted on a wall and memorized. They surface in how an argument is actually worked out and in what the school chooses to celebrate.
Community of 60 Students
Ask Olney alumni what they remember about the school, and you tend to hear the same word twice. Christian Acemah, who came to Olney as a student before returning as head of school, hears it from former students often:
“What exactly do you remember about Olney? Friends and academics, fine. One thing we remember: community, community, community.”
The repetition isn’t a marketing move. It’s what a school of 60 does to the people who go through it: nobody can avoid anybody, the social circle isn’t optional, and the people you don’t see eye to eye with are at your dinner table tomorrow night. Learning to live alongside them, in Christian’s view, is what the place teaches most.
One way to test a school is to ask what happens to its graduates after they leave. A different way, and probably more telling, is to look at what happens when they come back.
Each year at commencement, the class that graduated fifty years ago sits in the front row. The night before, they officially welcome the new graduates into the Alumni Association. This year, that means the Class of 1976 is welcoming the Class of 2026. The Class of 1976 graduated in Olney’s 100th year in Barnesville. The Class of 2026 will graduate in the 150th.
“Find your place here” is the kind of line that comes standard with most school websites. At Olney, the alumni in the front row are the version of that promise you can actually point to.
Our Working Farm
The 350 acres aren’t there for the views. The farm runs as a working operation with chickens, goats, and a substantial garden. Students collect eggs in the morning before classes start, and what the farm produces ends up in the dining hall within the week. The work is part of the academic program, not a side activity, and students eat the food grown by the people next to them.
That’s a different relationship with food and labor than most teenagers arrive with. By senior year, most of them can tell the difference between soil that’s been worked and soil that hasn’t, and they know the names of the people who taught them.
Practical Things to Know
Olney has rolling admissions, so there isn’t a single deadline; families can start the process whenever it makes sense for them. Financial aid is available for qualifying families, and the details are best worked through directly with admissions.
A visit here isn’t really a tour. It tends to be a longer conversation, often over a meal, and most visiting families end up in the barn or on the farm at some point.
The Fall 2026 semester begins August 31. Late spring is when the campus is at its most open if you’d like to see it; admissions can usually arrange a visit on relatively short notice.
Why the school exists
When Christian explains why the school exists, he doesn’t mention programs or campus features. He talks about the faculty:
“Most of us who are here or on faculty have our own stories of finding our place. We got here, and somehow we found it. We know we have to create that same sense for students.”
To schedule a visit or start a conversation, contact admissions at admissions@olneyfriends.org, or read more atolneyfriends.org.
