Together, Patricia and Kevin Cullinane have more than 60 years of experience in the education of children and teens. They are familiar with the dreams and dreads that impel teenagers toward numbing apathy or atavistic destructiveness in some cases, or onward and upward toward self-directed leadership in others. Their years of experience enable them to offer a wholesome blend of reflective thinking, intelligent daring, and considerate social manners. The Cullinanes’ newest educational venture, Freedom Mountain Academy, offers a safe environment that combines family love with guided discipline and intellectual structure.
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 "Mr. Cullinane's boarding school, however, had an additional plus. The students came to feel like brothers and sisters; they worked, played, and adventured together, becoming, along the way, emotionally close and thus strengthened."
-- Dr. David Blythe
Educational Consultant
Columbus, Ohio
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Kevin Cullinane
Co-Founder of Freedom Mountain Academy
After serving four years as a marine infantry officer, Kevin Cullinane
moved with his wife to a run-down farm in northern Idaho in search of a
wholesome, safe environment in which they could raise and home-school their
five young children.
A year later he helped to develop a nonstate, one-room school (K–6) in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he worked as primary instructor. The following year he was invited to teach at the prestigious Academy of Basic Education in Brookfield, Wisconsin, a position he held for three years (1968–71).
In 1972, with guidance from ABE’s founder and director, Cullinane was ready to build and operate Academy of the Rockies, a small, family-style, coed boarding school, on his Idaho farm. The formal structure of ABE, combined with the Cullinanes’ own home-school and one-room-school environment, launched a new concept in boarding-school curriculum — combining academic study with farm work and mountaineering adventure.
The “work/study/adventure” curriculum at the school provided a calm, near-perfect environment for the overstimutated, understructured social
life of so many of the country’s suburban teenagers.
After 10 successful years in Idaho, the Cullinanes sold the farm campus and moved on to other adventures in education. In 1999 they located an ideal piece of mountain farm land amid the beautiful hills of northeast Tennessee on which to build Freedom Mountain Academy, a boarding school identical to their Academy of the Rockies.
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"What I think is more important for my son than the decisions he might be making at FMA this year is the way in which he is learning how to make those decisions."
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Patricia Cullinane
Co-Founder of Freedom Mountain Academy
As a young homemaker with two pre-school daughters, Patricia Cullinane became active in local and statewide efforts to improve the public schools of California. While managing a successful political campaign to elect a state superintendent of education — a politician who spoke all the right words — she learned first-hand the futility of expecting politicians to improve public schools. At that point the concerned mother began a search for rational alternatives, a search that led her to Mae Carden and the Carden curriculum.
Mae Carden, the educational genius who developed a sequential and fully integrated (K–9) curriculum known as the Carden Method, urged the young mother to start her own school. Within a year, under Miss Carden’s personal tutelage, she opened Carden Hall in Newport Beach, California. Her background in Judaeo-Christian studies and the laissez-faire principles of the Free Enterprise Institute formed the intellectual basis for her school, and Carden Hall became the model for 35 additional Carden schools.
She married Kevin Cullinane in 1977 and sold Carden Hall to join him at his Academy of the Rockies in the Idaho panhandle 25 miles south of the Canadian border. There she assisted him until 1982 when they moved to South Carolina to develop Freedom Country Executive Conference Center. In 1993 the Cullinanes moved to Orange County, California, to develop Carden Academy of Basic Education, which Patricia directed. In late 1999, she and her husband moved to the mountains of northeast Tennessee to develop Freedom Mountain Academy.
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