Sidwell Lower School to Move Out of Bethesda

The Bethesda building housing pre-kindergarten through fourth-graders for Sidwell Friends School will close, officials have announced.

Plans to close and sell the Bethesda building at 5100 Edgemoor Lane as Sidwell Friends consolidates all grades on its Washington, D.C., Wisconsin Avenue campus were outlined online. The school has created a website with maps to show the planned expansion.

The Sidwell Friends Board of Trustees has agreed to buy The Washington Home on Upton Street, adjacent to the Wisconsin Avenue campus. The purchase will allow the school to have all students and teachers, PK-12, on a single campus for the first time since 1963 when its Lower School moved to Bethesda.

Plans for the new property are in development and are contingent upon zoning approval and philanthropic support, school officials said.

A virtual town hall meeting with Head of School Bryan Garman and Board Clerk Margaret Plank to answer questions and receive feedback will be held at noon on Sept. 28. Interested parties are asked to register in advance. Inquiries and comments can also be submitted online.

The current timeline calls for the Bethesda school campus to be sold by spring 2016, and leased to Sidwell Friends for continued use until 2019. The Lower School is expected to open on the DC campus in September 2019.

School History

Thomas Watson Sidwell opened Friends’ Select School (as Sidwell Friends was then known) in 1883. Sidwell had been a teacher at Baltimore Friends School, headed at the time by Eli Lamb, a leading Quaker educator.

The school purchased the Longfellow School for Boys in Bethesda, and moved its primary grades to that location in time for the 1963-64 school year. The move of the Lower School allowed for the demolition of older structures on the DC campus and construction of a modern high school facility. The Upper School building opened during the 1964-65 academic year.