Welcome to Georgetown Day School

In 1945, during a particularly warm September, Georgetown Day School opened its doors in a little downtown row house on 13th and G Place to become the first integrated school in a completely segregated Washington, D.C.

The handful of activist parents who founded GDS, including Aggie Inglis O’Neil and Edith and Philleo Nash (GDS’s first Head of School, Assistant Head of School, and Board Chair, respectively), had big dreams of an interracial, international school where all of their children could learn together. 

Aggie had been a teacher at a missionary school in India before her next adventure, serving as GDS’s first Head of School. A good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, she was known for her fearless  optimism and could always be found in the company of children, whom she simply adored. She helped resettle child refugees in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, trekked across the country each summer with a dozen or so adolescents in tow, or took them to her summer place in the Catskills to camp, a farm they all called Redbrick. 

In the fall of 1945, the founding parents moved GDS into what came to be called the Grasslands, where classes were held in an old mansion surrounded by ten gloriously bucolic acres. But on the first day they arrived at the space, Aggie and Philleo couldn’t get the front door open. Aggie, in her true “bend the rules that don’t work” fashion, walked around to the back, climbed in through a window, opened the front door from the inside, and greeted Philleo with a cheerful, “Welcome to Georgetown Day School.”Here they would stay for a decade, making good use of the land around the house to extend the reach of learning beyond the classroom, a style of learning GDS would continue to cultivate long after its Grasslands days. Although our founders had envisioned an eventual Georgetown location for GDS, across decades and locations, our community has remained our heart, and we are proud to begin our 80th year welcoming you to Georgetown Day School.