This school has closed. A different, unaffiliated school now occupies the building — and one widely repeated detail about Building Blocks was never accurate.
Its state registration went inactive on 30 June 2020, the operating company was voluntarily dissolved in December 2021, and the building was sold in March 2022. Silver Lake Preparatory School, which opened at 55 Forest Avenue in 2024, is a separate school with no connection to Building Blocks — and is not a Montessori school. If you have information that corrects this, please tell us.
School directories list Building Blocks with "School Association: American Montessori Society (AMS)." We can find no evidence the school itself was ever an AMS member school, and it does not appear in the AMS directory today — a search of all 886 listed schools returns nothing, and the twelve AMS schools within ten miles of this ZIP code do not include it.
What the school actually said on its own website was narrower and quite different: that its head teachers held "Master's Degrees in Education, N.Y.S. Certification, and American Montessori Society Certification or NAMC Montessori training." That is a claim about individual teachers' training, not about the school holding an AMS affiliation. Somewhere in the aggregation chain a teacher-credential sentence became an institutional membership, and it has propagated ever since. The owner's own training was NAMC, not AMS.
We cannot rule out an AMS membership at some earlier point in the school's history — AMS does not publish historical rosters. But the claim as it circulates is unsupported, and it is a textbook example of why we check affiliations against the registers rather than repeating listings. See our accreditation check page.
No closure was announced or reported. Three separate agencies' records line up:
Nothing filed enrollment at 55 Forest Avenue from 2020–21 through 2023–24. The building sat between the two schools for roughly four years.
Same address, new school name — that usually means a rebrand, and we checked carefully before saying otherwise. It isn't one:
The shared words "Silver Lake" are just the neighbourhood — Building Blocks' own 2013 corporate name already contained them.
Every major directory still lists Building Blocks as an open PK–5 Montessori school with 83 students, eight teachers and an AMS affiliation. Every one of those figures is now wrong, and the AMS line was never right. Those listings feed real-estate pages across the borough.
A school that ran for decades closed without a single news story. If you found it somewhere else and were about to call, this page is the answer you needed.
Staten Island has one Montessori school we can verify against current records: Children's Harbor Montessori School in St. George, an independent nonprofit founded in 1976 that offers free Pre-K seats. Also closed in the same period: Staten Island Montessori School and The Tanglewood School. Or browse the full directory.
Violations heard and decided at the city’s administrative tribunal. We publish these in full, including when there are none.
No cases on record. No summons to this school appears in the city’s hearing records.
For comparison: across all 18,161 DOHMH child-care cases heard at OATH, 63.1% were sustained, 21.3% ended in default and 13.1% were dismissed. Most citations concern records, repairs and paperwork — staff immunisation files, premises upkeep, sink water temperature, background-check timing — rather than incidents involving a child.
Source: NYC Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, case status data, checked 11 August 2026. These are adjudicated outcomes, not inspection allegations. The record gives the rule cited and the result, but never the inspector’s narrative — the charge text always reads “see attached NOV”. Outcomes can change on appeal. Something wrong? Tell us.
Did your child attend Building Blocks? We would like to record its history accurately.