This school has closed. We keep the entry because it is still listed as open across the web, and families deserve to know before they call.
No press notice was ever published, so the state's own records are the clearest account of what happened: enrollment fell from 131 children to 31, the school stopped filing after 2014–15, and NYSED marked the institution inactive in 2019. Its former building now houses other tenants. If you have information that corrects this, please tell us and we will update the page.
New York State publishes nonpublic school enrollment every year. Those filings track this school's last fifteen years plainly:
The collapse from 95 to 24 lines up exactly with the move. The Staten Island Advance reported in July 2010 that the school had been in Richmond Valley "for more than 40 years" and was relocating to a smaller site at 109 New Dorp Plaza; by that October the Advance placed it on Amboy Road, "where it shares space with the Francis School." Enrollment partly recovered, to 48, then fell again. After 2014–15 there are no more filings.
NYSED marked the institution inactive effective 30 June 2019. The Francis School, its campus partner, was marked inactive a year earlier, having filed its final enrollment of five students in 2017–18.
simontessorischool.com does not resolve — the registration has lapsed entirely. The last archived capture of the site is from November 2017.francisschool.com — the address the state held for the director — now belongs to an unrelated commercial training company.What we can't tell you. No newspaper reported the closure and no official notice was published, so there is no citable press account and no exact last day. The three candidate dates — final enrollment filing 2014–15, final website capture November 2017, deregistration June 2019 — do not agree, which is normal for a small school that wound down quietly rather than announcing anything.
Every major school-listing site still shows this school as open. Real-estate pages across the borough still name it as a nearby private school. A supply-list service still carries a page for it. None of these are lying on purpose; listings are simply cheaper to keep than to check.
That is the gap this directory exists to close. If you found the school somewhere else and were about to call, this page is the answer you needed.
You should not have to take our word for it. Three free public sources settle most questions:
p12.nysed.gov) — annual workbooks by BEDS code. If a school stops appearing, that is a strong signal. This is the source that settled this page.Three cautions, each of which nearly caught us out. A school's own live-looking website proves nothing — the page for this school still loads from caches even though the domain is gone. Absence from a database only means something if that category is populated for the borough, so check that first. And a SEDREF "inactive" flag on its own is not proof of closure: Children's Harbor Montessori is also flagged inactive and is plainly still operating. It took the enrollment filings and the flag and the building change together to make this page safe to publish.
Staten Island now 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. Families on the South Shore may also want to look at options in Brooklyn — browse the full directory.
Three other Staten Island schools appear in Montessori listings — Tanglewood, Building Blocks and Greater Minds. We are still checking each; our findings so far do not support listing any of them as an open Montessori school, and we would rather say so than pad the count.
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 family attend this school, or do you know when it actually closed? We would like to record it accurately.