Summer at Tower is designed to meet the developing skills and interests of young children. Using the five senses as a springboard for discovery, campers learn about themselves in relation to their environment. The intent of the program is to stimulate the children’s creativity, curiosity, and resourcefulness through a variety of recreational and educational activities.

In 1912, Tower’s first students—just four kindergartners—attended class on the second floor of a house at One South Pine Street in Salem, Massachusetts. When Tower School’s founder, Adeline Tower, left the School in 1917, Helen Runnette took the helm and continued her predecessor’s tradition of forward-thinking education. “Progressive education was the catchword at the time,” wrote Runnette, “and although Tower was always progressive in attitude and its teachers continually kept abreast of new developments in education, it never was the unruled kind of institution which made people decry that label. Discipline of one’s self was the keynote, plus freedom to advance one’s own ideas and create new patterns of understanding in the subjects of the curriculum.”