Dartmoor School | |
Established: | 1990 |
Type: | Private, independent |
Locale: | Suburban |
Country: | USA |
Students: | 75-120 |
Faculty: | 30 |
Grades: | 1-12 |
Website: | www.dartmoorschool.org |
Dartmoor School is an independent school offering one-to-one personalized education at four campuses in the Puget Sound region (Bellevue, Issaquah, Seattle and Bothell). Founded in 1990 by reading specialist Doris J. Bower, Dartmoor began as a reading intervention school. Mrs. Bower saw a need for alternative approaches to education. She started Dartmoor School to ensure success for all types of learners by developing the one-to-one model of instruction that Dartmoor continues to provide to this day.
Dartmoor's success in teaching reading fundamentals soon led to requests for a greater variety of academic subjects. Demand for credit courses and the desire to graduate from Dartmoor increased, prompting Dartmoor's accreditation and, ultimately, its transformation from a learning center into an independent school in the early 1990s.
Dartmoor's ability to work effectively with a diverse population also attracted school districts needing to place students in an individualized educational setting. To facilitate these placements, Dartmoor became a Non-Public Agency (NPA) in the 1990s.
Today, Dartmoor is still pervasively informed by its founding principles of student respect, commitment to diverse learners, and cultivation of its students' self-realization. Though student needs have encouraged Dartmoor's growth in unforeseen directions, the school has remained faithful to its founder's vision of a place where students, rather than abstractions, center the educational experience.
Dartmoor is accredited by AdvancEd and approved by OSPI as a private school and Non-Public Agency. High School coursework is approved by the NCAA. Dartmoor is an affiliate member of NAIS. Dartmoor's campuses are open year-round and offer open enrollment and flexible scheduling.