Woodberry Forest School

Woodberry Forest School is an all-boys, all-boarding high school in Woodberry Forest, Virginia, enrolling grades 9 through 12. The school traces its start to 1889, when Robert S. Walker brought a tutor to his farm to educate his six sons and boys from neighboring farms joined them. The school reports that all 400 students live on campus, as do 95 percent of the faculty. The 1,200-acre campus includes a nine-hole golf course and about three miles of the Rapidan River, and it is about 90 minutes by car from Washington, DC and Richmond and 45 minutes from Charlottesville. Woodberry was founded on Christian principles but has no formal ties to any denomination, and nondenominational services are held in the campus chapel each Monday evening. At the center of school life is the student-run honor system, in place since 1899, under which every boy pledges not to lie, cheat or steal. The 2024-25 school profile reports 390 students that year, from 26 states, with international students making up 10 percent; each year the headmaster selects 18 seniors as prefects, who administer the honor system and run the dorms. Headmaster Byron C. Hulsey is a member of the class of 1986.

Woodberry Forest School’s school profile divides courses into two levels, regular and honors, and treats honors courses as college-level; the course list includes no AP (Advanced Placement) courses. The school runs on a trimester schedule, and students normally take five core courses a year. Each class meets four times a week, for 45 minutes on Monday and three more times between Tuesday and Saturday for 55 minutes, and seven 30-minute consultation periods each week let boys meet with teachers. The day starts at 8:30 a.m.; classes end around 3:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Saturday classes run from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. The school reports a 6:1 student-to-faculty ratio.

Graduation requirements include English every year; three history courses, including US History; Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2; three science courses, including a lab course in biology; completion of the third level of one language; and three trimester courses in the fine arts. Languages offered are Chinese, French, Latin and Spanish, with Chinese running through Honors Chinese 6. The Science Thesis Seminar lets juniors and seniors pursue faculty-mentored research, with at least one project ending in an externally evaluated thesis defense. The school calculates a weighted GPA and does not rank students; the profile reports an average weighted GPA of 3.57 for the class of 2024, whose members enrolled at 53 institutions in 21 states and two countries. The school’s list of colleges admitting Woodberry graduates from 2024 to 2026 includes Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Dartmouth, the University of Virginia and Caltech, as well as UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UC Irvine.

Woodberry Forest School invites families to begin with a preliminary conversation with an admission officer by email, then apply through either the school’s own application or the Standard Application Online (SAO), creating an application on only one platform. Transcripts and recommendations come from the student’s current school and teachers through the application. Testing is optional: applicants may submit the SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test), the ISEE (Independent School Entrance Exam), the PSAT, SAT, PreACT or ACT, and applicants who do not submit a score provide a recently graded writing assignment and a math assessment. Applicants whose primary language is not English submit the TOEFL, the Duolingo English Test (DET) or the IELTS. Every applicant must interview, either on campus or virtually; the school suggests a coat and tie for the interview and notes that the fall visit calendar fills quickly.

Applications for 2027-28 opened on August 15, 2026, but as of October 7, 2026 the application page still listed last cycle’s dates: the December Decision round closed November 15, 2025 with notification December 12, 2025; the March Decision round closed January 15, 2026 with notification March 13, 2026; and later applications were reviewed on a rolling basis with notification after April 10, 2026, with tuition assistance materials due alongside the application in each round. The school describes December Decision as non-binding, but asks families who sign an enrollment contract to withdraw other applications. In fall 2026, the school holds a Fall Open House on October 11 and 12 for prospective students in grades 8 through 10 and their families, including an overnight stay with a student host, along with a series of virtual events at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time. The school does not publish an acceptance rate or the application fee amount.

Woodberry Forest School’s most recently published tuition is $72,300 for 2025-26, covering room, board and all school activities, with no activity fees; tuition for 2026-27 has not yet been published. The school states that travel and books are essentially the only additional costs, and it counts both when calculating tuition assistance; payment plans spread tuition over up to nine months. Tuition assistance is entirely need-based: the school meets 100 percent of demonstrated need for every admitted student who requires aid, with grants rather than loans and no merit scholarships. The school states that 46 percent of students have received assistance in recent years, that it awards $8,975,050 annually with an average grant of $50,140, and that grants have ranged from $8,100 to $72,300.

Woodberry Forest School states that applying for tuition assistance has no effect on the admission decision, and the two applications are reviewed separately. Need is calculated with the Clarity formula, which considers income, assets, parents’ ages, other financial obligations and the number of dependents, and families reapply every year. The school encourages even families who pay full tuition at their current school to apply. For international students, the school’s International Student Office issues the I-20, the school document needed to apply for an F-1 student visa.

Woodberry Forest School has not yet posted its fall 2027 deadlines; last cycle, the December Decision round closed November 15 and the March Decision round closed January 15, so an Irvine family should aim to have materials ready by mid-November and keep checking the school’s website. Test-optional does not mean no preparation: a family planning to submit the SSAT should complete a first sitting in the fall of grade 8, and a family that does not submit scores should treat the writing assignment and math assessment with the same seriousness. Virginia is three hours ahead of California and about 2,230 miles from Irvine in a straight line, so a 7:30 p.m. Eastern virtual event starts at 4:30 p.m. in California. An all-boys, all-boarding school with Saturday classes and a coat-and-tie interview is a real change for a child used to a California public school schedule, so talk it through as a family before applying and try to visit campus in the fall. EDUBUS is based in Irvine and works on school selection, SSAT preparation and high school planning around this school’s published dates.