“No Common Task”: Riverton Classical Academy Breaks Ground

On October 6, 2026, Riverton Classical Academy (RCA) in Heyburn began to take physical form. But as Head of School Matt Seely reminded those gathered for the groundbreaking, the idea behind the school has been years in the making.

The school’s roots go back to the 1990s, when Hillsdale College launched Hillsdale Academy, a K-12 classical school that has since inspired more than 30 member schools and 50 curriculum schools nationwide. In 2022, Steve Lambert (ACSI CEO) founded American Classical Schools of Idaho to bring American classical education to generations of Idaho children. In June 2023, nine local citizens formed a founding group to bring that vision home to Heyburn, Idaho.

The task now falls to the RCA community of leaders, teachers, parents, and supporters. Together they will carry the school’s mission to train the minds and improve the hearts, and to engage students in the deepest questions of truth, justice, virtue, and beauty into the students that will walk the halls of RCA.

Mr. Seely called it “no common task,” and he pointed to America’s founders as proof that it can be done. Their minds were shaped by the classics. Washington modeled his restraint on Cincinnatus. Adams read Cicero on the duties of citizenship. Madison studied ancient governments as he framed the Constitution. Lincoln drew on Scripture, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Euclid. As Spencer Davis writes, “Great men read great men… It is an apprenticeship across centuries.”

Seely stressed that Riverton’s purpose is not to impose any one person’s preferences or to outdo neighboring schools. Its purpose is to teach what great men and women across the centuries have found true, good, and beautiful, so that it forms citizens and shapes souls.

That work will ask the best of everyone involved. In Seely’s words, quoting Thomas Paine: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

The ground is broken, and the work has begun. ACSI looks forward to welcoming Riverton Classical Academy into the federation when the doors open and students are welcomed in Fall 2027.