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Culture & Community

The Howard School exists because conventional educational environments have historically failed to recognize and support certain ways of communicating and learning.

From our earliest days, our story has been rooted in a commitment to recognize, honor, and celebrate difference by creating a community where every individual can fully belong. 

Honoring our history, The Howard School remains committed to creating a community in which every person is known, valued, respected, and experiences a genuine sense of belonging. We recognize and honor the diversity of human identity, experience, perspective, and ways of learning.

We value differences including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, disability, family structure, age, and socioeconomic background. We believe our differences strengthen our community and deepen the learning that happens within it.

Three young girls pose together in the foreground against a bright green screen background and a wooden kiosk.
Three young women sit at a table with laptops in a room featuring a Cuban flag and window blinds in the background.
A smiling boy sits behind a drum in the foreground, while another child and an adult stand in a room with dark curtains in the background.
Children in yellow shirts play in a sandy yard with a woman, set against a backdrop of green trees and buildings.
A young boy in a Hot Wheels t-shirt holds an electric guitar in the foreground against a background of black curtains and a dark wall.
Two smiling boys in blue shirts sit at a wooden table against a background of a grassy park with paved walkways.
Three young girls sing into microphones behind music stands in the foreground, with a drummer and a black curtain in the background.
Three women sing into microphones in the foreground, with a cluster of blue and green balloons in the background.

We put this commitment into practice by

Building the knowledge and capacity of our faculty and staff to support diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and belonging. 

Creating learning environments, programs, policies, and practices that promote equitable access, participation, and belonging.

Listening to the experiences and perspectives of students, employees, and families and using what we learn to strengthen our community.

Building partnerships that advance equitable and inclusive educational opportunities within Howard and the broader community.

Our Place and Our History

The Howard School began with people who saw possibilities where others saw limitations. In 1950, Marian Howard, a woman with a disability, founded a school for children whose abilities were too often overlooked by conventional education. One of her earliest and closest thought partners was Joe Asher, a Jewish businessman who helped champion her vision. Their partnership reflects something enduring about Howard: meaningful change often begins when people challenge the assumptions of their time and choose to see, value, and make room for one another.

Our physical place carries history, too. Today, The Howard School sits in Blandtown, one of Atlanta’s earliest post-Civil War Black communities. The neighborhood traces its name to the Bland family, beginning with land purchased by Samuel Bland, a Black landowner, in 1872. Blandtown grew into a thriving African American community before racially motivated industrial