Situated on a beautiful 48-acre campus in the northwest corner of Connecticut, Washington Montessori School is approximately 2 hours from New York City and 3 hours from Boston. We moved to our current location at 240 Litchfield Turnpike in New Preston in 2001. Our school building is 57,000 square feet and includes classrooms, open community space, a ceramics studio, a theater, and a gymnasium. Lower School, Lower Elementary, and Upper Elementary classes enjoy adjacent, covered outdoor classroom space.
Our 48-acre campus includes one regulation soccer field, one practice field, four tennis courts, and three playgrounds, as well as an outdoor basketball court, a gaga pit, and tether ball. YCC and LS students enjoy newly installed, self-contained natural playgrounds that include shade arbors, embankment slides, climbing rocks, tunnel crawls, sculptures, and a sand area with a working water sluice. The Elementary playground includes swings, embankment slides, a sand area, and a four-square court, as well as a large ship-like structure for climbing, swinging and other imaginative play.
Students enjoy working in the school’s Community Garden, which acts as a satellite to the Judea Garden, a Steep Rock Association project that grows and distributes fresh food to community members in need. In 2020, we established ourselves as a CT Green LEAF school, and in the spring of the same year, WMS completed the installation of approximately 600 solar panels, which provide approximately 85% of the school’s electricity.
The woods surrounding campus are lined with well-maintained nature trails and boardwalks, an outdoor science lab nestled by the river, and a quarter-mile running trail called “Pat’s Track,” named after WMS Head of School Emeritus Pat Werner.
Located just outside the Head’s Office is our Peace Garden, which was a collaborative project conceived, designed, and installed by parents and staff shortly after we moved to the new facility. A meandering path of stepping stones leads through a garden of assorted flowering trees and shrubs to a wood platform that has been known to serve as an informal stage for celebrations, a conference room for level meetings, a plein air studio for art class, and a platform for yoga and mindfulness, among other things. Planted prominently in the garden is our Peace Pole bearing the words “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in six languages.
