We went to add four Staten Island Montessori schools to this directory and could verify only one. The listing sites still show the others open — one of them is now eight houses.
Published August 18, 2026
If you search "Montessori school Staten Island" tonight, the listing sites will offer you schools you cannot enroll in, because they do not exist. One of them occupied a building that was demolished seven years ago; eight houses now stand on the lot. The listings show it open anyway.
This is the story of how we found out — and, more usefully, it's the exact set of free public lookups that let you check any school's existence in a few minutes. None of them require an account. All of them out-perform every commercial listing site, because they are the records the listing sites never check.
Staten Island Montessori School (Great Kills) was deregistered by New York State effective June 30, 2019. No press notice was ever published. The state's own enrollment filings tell the story with brutal clarity: 131 children in 2000–01, 95 in 2009–10, 24 the year it moved, 31 in 2014–15 — and then absence from every annual filing through the present. The building's tenants today have nothing to do with a school. Full record →
The Tanglewood School (also listed as Tanglewood Montessori, Great Kills) closed around 2017 with 103 pre-K children in its last state filing. Its operating corporation went inactive at the Department of State on May 1, 2017; the site sold to a developer in January 2018; the school building was demolished that spring. The address — 15 Tanglewood Drive — no longer exists in the city's property records. Four separate public agencies documented the ending; no one announced it. Full record →
Building Blocks Montessori School (Tompkinsville) finished the 2019–20 school year and never filed again: state registration inactive June 30, 2020, operating company voluntarily dissolved December 2021, building sold March 2022. A different school operates at 55 Forest Avenue today — it opened in 2024, it has no connection to Building Blocks, and it is not a Montessori school. Listings that show a Montessori school at that address are describing a building, not a school. Full record →
While we're being thorough: the widely repeated line that Building Blocks was an "AMS member school" was never supported either — what the school actually said was that its head teachers held Montessori training, which is a different claim about different people. How a sentence about teachers becomes a school's credential is its own article.
1. The NYSED nonpublic enrollment workbooks (p12.nysed.gov → nonpublic school statistics). Every nonpublic school files enrollment annually, and the state publishes the series by school. This is the single best closure source in New York because it's dated: you don't get "open or closed," you get a year-by-year curve, and a school that stops filing has stopped operating or stopped being a school. One honest caveat that protects you from over-reading it: a single missing year is not a closure — in a recent year we checked, 17 of 389 Brooklyn nonpublic schools that filed the prior year were absent from the next one, including schools that are demonstrably open. It's the multi-year pattern that talks.
2. NYSED's SEDREF portal — the state's institution register, which shows an Inactive flag and the exact effective date. Second caveat, same spirit: "Inactive" alone is not closure — we carry a school flagged inactive since 2018 that is open and permitted today. SEDREF dates a closure you've established; it doesn't establish one by itself.
3. The NYC Facilities Database and the DOHMH child-care permit lookup — is anyone at that address currently permitted to care for children under six? A successor permit-holder at the same address is one of the strongest closure signals there is; the absence of a permit only counts once you've confirmed the category is populated for that borough at all.
4. The hard-record layer: Department of State corporate status, property sales, demolition permits. A voluntarily dissolved operating company, a deed to a developer, a demolition filing — these are facts with dates that no listing site will ever surface. Tanglewood's ending lives entirely in this layer.
A live website proves nothing. One of the closed schools above had a domain that no longer resolves — yet it still served a cached, live-looking homepage through certain lookups. Dead schools keep websites the way dead stars keep shining. Check the state filings before a pretty homepage convinces you.
Absence only counts when presence was possible. Before you read anything into "not in this database," confirm the database actually covers that category and borough and is currently updated. An empty answer from a stale or mis-scoped source is not evidence — it's a shrug.
Commercial directories syndicate from each other, and a profile with photos, hours and reviews has no mechanism for dying. Google Maps eventually collects a "permanently closed" flag; the SEO-driven school-listing sites mostly don't even do that. Nobody's job at any of these companies is to notice that a building became eight houses. That's the gap this directory exists to close: every school we list is checked against the state and city records above, our closed schools stay published as closed precisely because the rest of the web still says otherwise, and every page carries a correction link that reaches a human the same day.
Staten Island does still have real Montessori — including Children's Harbor Montessori, one of only three AMS-Verified schools in all five boroughs. The full, verified picture is on the directory, and the method above is yours now, for any school anyone ever lists at you.