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Manhattan · Upper West Side

Guidepost Montessori at Columbus Square

This campus has closed. We keep the entry so families who find old listings know its current status.

Closed  No longer operating (2025)

The Columbus Avenue campus closed in 2025, one of four New York City Guidepost schools shut after parent company Higher Ground Education filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Listing sites have marked it closed since 2025. Only the Williamsburg campus still operates in NYC. The campus was originally Polis World School’s Columbus Square campus, rebranded Guidepost by 2022. Its NYC child-care permits lapsed before the collapse — preschool on 5 February 2023 and infant/toddler on 16 August 2024 — and a whole-street check of Columbus Avenue on August 10, 2026 found no permitted programme at 775. Guidepost itself continues to operate; only these New York campuses closed.

At a glance

Snapshot

StatusClosed (2025)
Was775 Columbus Ave, Upper West Side (near W 97th–98th St)
ServedRoughly ages 2–6 (toddler through Children's House)
TypeFor-profit Guidepost campus
Why it closedHigher Ground Education (Guidepost) Chapter 11 collapse, 2025
The neighborhood

Upper West Side

Stylized illustration of the Upper West Side: prewar apartment buildings and brownstones beside a green park edge

The campus sat on Columbus Avenue in the upper 90s, a dense family stretch of the Upper West Side between Central Park and Riverside Park.

🏛️ Prewar + brownstones🌳 Central & Riverside Parks🚇 1/2/3 · B/C👶 Family-dense

What happened

Guidepost Montessori grew under Higher Ground Education into the largest Montessori operator in the world, with more than 150 schools. Lender foreclosures took most of them, and Higher Ground filed a pre-arranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 17, 2025, emerging that December. Its New York City campuses — Columbus Square among them — closed during the collapse. If you're seeing this school in an older directory or a search result, it is no longer enrolling.

Open Upper West Side alternatives

Still-operating UWS options in our directory include West Side Montessori School, Morningside Montessori and the three Twin Parks campuses — or browse the full directory.

Sources: NYC DOHMH Child Care Connect live permit lookup — whole-street search, checked August 10, 2026: no permitted child-care programme at this address; Guidepost Montessori’s own website and sitemap, which carry no page for this campus (only Williamsburg remains in New York); NY Department of State corporate records; Higher Ground Education Chapter 11 coverage (Forbes, Bloomberg Law); polis.school offline since 2022 (last Internet Archive capture October 3, 2022). Independent profile, not affiliated with the school.
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All NYC Montessori schoolsGuidepost Williamsburg (open)News & Data

Health & safety record

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.

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