Wide daytime photograph of the tree-lined Wisconsin Avenue NW corridor in upper Northwest Washington, DC, where several independent school campuses sit within a mile of one another.
Private schools have no attendance boundaries. Buying in Cleveland Park instead of Capitol Hill does not open or close a single admissions file, which is why this page covers the whole region rather than one neighbourhood at a time. What a house does change is the commute — and several schools here run their own buses, with fixed stops in the District, Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, and Northern Virginia. That is the part worth reading closely. Everything below is drawn from the schools' own published material as of August 2026; grade ranges, routes and dates all move, and the school's own site is the authority.
Most of Washington's independent campuses sit in upper Northwest. Sidwell Friends is a Quaker, coeducational PK–12 school; its Middle and Upper Schools are at 3825 Wisconsin Avenue NW near Tenleytown, and its Lower School (PK–4) is a separate campus at 5100 Edgemoor Lane in Bethesda, Maryland. Georgetown Day School is coeducational PK–12 on a single campus between the Tenleytown and Friendship Heights Metro stations. Maret is coeducational K–12 at 3000 Cathedral Avenue NW, a walk from Woodley Park. Three schools sit on the Washington National Cathedral close: National Cathedral School, Episcopal, girls, grades 4–12; St. Albans School, Episcopal, boys, grades 4–12, a day school with a small boarding programme; and Beauvoir, the National Cathedral Elementary School, Episcopal, coeducational, pre-K through grade 3, at 3500 Woodley Road NW. Washington International School is coeducational and teaches the International Baccalaureate across two campuses — a primary campus at 1690 36th Street NW and grades 6–12 at Tregaron, 3100 Macomb Street NW. The Field School is coeducational, grades 6–12, at 2301 Foxhall Road NW. Edmund Burke School is coeducational, grades 6–12, at 4101 Connecticut Avenue NW. Smaller lower and middle schools include Lowell School (coeducational, preschool–8, 1640 Kalmia Road NW), Sheridan School (coeducational, K–8, 4400 36th Street NW), St. Patrick's Episcopal Day School (PK–8, 4700 Whitehaven Parkway NW) and National Presbyterian School (PK–6, 4121 Nebraska Avenue NW). Catholic secondary schools in the District include Gonzaga College High School (Jesuit, boys, 9–12, 19 I Street NW), Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School (Salesian, girls, 9–12, 1524 35th Street NW) and St. John's College High School (Lasallian, coeducational, 9–12, 2607 Military Road NW). The British International School of Washington, also in Northwest, runs IGCSE and the IB Diploma for ages 2 to 18.
Because none of these schools draws on a boundary, DC families routinely enrol across the line, and the schools plan for it. In Montgomery County: Landon School, boys, grades 3–12, 6101 Wilson Lane, Bethesda; Holton-Arms School, girls, grades 3–12, 7303 River Road, Bethesda; Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school for girls in grades 1–12 with a coeducational early-childhood programme, 9101 Rockville Pike, Bethesda; Georgetown Preparatory School, Jesuit, boys, grades 9–12, day and boarding, 10900 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda; Bullis School, coeducational K–12, 10601 Falls Road, Potomac; St. Andrew's Episcopal School, coeducational, preschool through grade 12, with grades 3–12 at 8804 Postoak Road, Potomac and a lower campus at 10033 River Road; Norwood School, coeducational PK–8, 8821 River Road, Bethesda; Rochambeau, the French International School, coeducational, on two Bethesda campuses (9650 Rockville Pike for primary, 9600 Forest Road for secondary); and Sandy Spring Friends School, a Quaker coeducational PK–12 school in Sandy Spring with a boarding option in grades 9–12. In Virginia, The Potomac School is coeducational K–12 at 1301 Potomac School Road, McLean.
This is where a house purchase matters. Landon runs seven colour-coded routes to roughly twenty stops across Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, the District and Northern Virginia — including a Brown route through Georgetown and upper Northwest with stops at Guy Mason Recreation Center, Spring Valley and Mazza Gallerie, an Orange route serving Alexandria and Arlington, a Green route through McLean, and a Yellow route from Great Falls. Holton-Arms lists routes for the 2026–2027 year serving Capitol Hill; Cleveland Park and Spring Valley; Friendship Heights and Chevy Chase; and Guy Mason and the Palisades in the District, plus Great Falls, and Arlington and Alexandria by way of McLean, in Virginia. Holton and Landon also run a shuttle between their two campuses. Stone Ridge publishes stop-level times: its Spring Valley and Chevy Chase route picks up at the Spring Valley Shopping Center at 48th and Massachusetts Avenue NW and the Safeway lot at 5545 Connecticut Avenue NW, and separate routes serve Alexandria and Arlington, and Great Falls and McLean. Georgetown Prep does not run its own neighbourhood fleet; it buys into the Stone Ridge bus programme, adds a free shuttle from Grosvenor Metro at 7:30 and 8:05 a.m., and points to Ride On route 46. Georgetown Day School's Hopper programme runs ten routes to thirty-plus stops across DC, Maryland and Virginia, with morning pick-ups between roughly 7:00 and 7:45 a.m. and one 3:40 p.m. departure, and a subsidised transit benefit for Maryland and Virginia students. St. Andrew's Episcopal lists ten shuttles for 2026–2027, among them Spring Valley and Eastern Market in the District and a McLean route in Virginia; its Arlington and Crystal City shuttle is listed as not running that year. McLean School operates free satellite stops near campus plus fee-based cluster stops that include Fessenden and 42nd Street NW, Friendship Heights, MacArthur Boulevard and Rock Creek Tennis Center in the District, and Chesterbrook, McLean Presbyterian and Georgetown Pike at Walker Road in Virginia. The Potomac School requires bus travel for grades 1 through 11 and runs more than twenty routes, with District pick-ups near the Eastern Market and Union Station Metro stations. Bullis publishes round-trip and one-way service across Maryland, DC and Virginia but keeps stop lists behind its parent portal. Sidwell Friends runs a fee-based shuttle between its Bethesda Lower School and the DC campus rather than neighbourhood routes, and CONNECTdmv organises a separate shuttle carrying students from Bowie, Maryland into Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral School, St. Albans and Maret.
Most independent schools here belong to the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington and follow its common dates. Under the current AISGW statement to applicants, admission decisions are released on the last Friday in February, with electronic notification held until 4 p.m.; families return enrolment contracts no earlier than the second Friday in March or two weeks after notification, whichever is later; and contracts become binding at 4:00 p.m. on May 1. In practice the year runs like this. Application portals — most schools use Ravenna — open in September. Tours, information sessions and parent or family interviews run from mid-September through January. Student visits, play visits and shadow days are scheduled across the autumn and winter. Applications are due in early January: for the 2027–2028 cycle, Georgetown Day School lists 6 January 2027 for applications and 13 January for supplementary materials, and Maret lists 5 p.m. on 6 January 2027 with supporting materials by 15 January. Both publish 26 February 2027 as the decision date, which is the last Friday in February. Testing varies and is changing. Georgetown Day School lists SSAT or ISEE for middle-grade applicants and SSAT, ISEE, PSAT, SAT or ACT for high school, alongside school-administered options; Maret has stated that no outside admission testing is required or accepted for its current season. Families relocating mid-year should assume the January deadline is real and ask each admissions office directly about space in non-entry grades. Calendars shift every year, and only the school's own site governs.
Geography does most of the work here. From Cleveland Park, Woodley Park, Forest Hills, Tenleytown, Chevy Chase DC, Spring Valley, the Palisades and Georgetown, the Cathedral close schools, Maret, Sidwell's Middle and Upper Schools, Georgetown Day, Washington International, Field, Burke, Sheridan and St. Patrick's are all short drives, and several are walkable or on a single Metrobus. The Bethesda and Potomac campuses — Landon, Holton-Arms, Norwood, Stone Ridge, Bullis, St. Andrew's — are reached from upper Northwest by River Road, Massachusetts Avenue or Wisconsin Avenue, and most of them run stops in exactly those DC neighbourhoods. From Capitol Hill, Navy Yard, H Street and points east, none of the upper-Northwest campuses is a short drive at 8 a.m.; the practical routes are the Holton-Arms Capitol Hill bus, the St. Andrew's Eastern Market shuttle, the Potomac School stops at Eastern Market and Union Station, and Gonzaga and St. John's, which are the closest secondary campuses on that side of the city. For Virginia campuses, the Potomac School is a Chain Bridge or Key Bridge run from Georgetown and the Palisades and considerably longer from anywhere east of Rock Creek.
Several schools split their divisions across campuses, so the address that matters may change as your child ages: Sidwell Friends sends PK–4 to Bethesda and grades 5–12 to Wisconsin Avenue; Washington International splits Georgetown from Tregaron; St. Andrew's, Rochambeau and McLean School each run two campuses. A cluster of schools ends before high school and feeds elsewhere, which means planning two admissions cycles rather than one — Beauvoir ends at grade 3, National Presbyterian at grade 6, Aidan Montessori at grade 6, and Lowell, Sheridan, St. Patrick's and Norwood at grade 8. Boarding is limited in this region: St. Albans and Georgetown Prep hold small boarding programmes, and Sandy Spring Friends boards in grades 9–12; everything else on this page is a day school. For alternative pedagogies, Aidan Montessori School serves children from 18 months through grade 6 at 2700 27th Street NW, and the Washington Waldorf School is coeducational pre-K through 12 at 4800 Sangamore Road in Bethesda. For learning differences, The Lab School of Washington enrols roughly 390 students in grades 1–12 across two campuses at 4759 Reservoir Road NW and works with students who have dyslexia, ADHD and other language-based learning differences; McLean School in Potomac is coeducational K–12 and built around the same population; and The Siena School serves grades 3–12 in Silver Spring, with a satellite campus for grades 3–4. Single-sex options run in both directions — girls at National Cathedral School, Holton-Arms, Stone Ridge and Georgetown Visitation; boys at St. Albans, Landon, Georgetown Prep and Gonzaga.
Schools are named and located here, never rated or ranked. Grade ranges, fees and admissions calendars change — each school's own site is the authority. Current as of August 2026.
Application calendars and bus routes both turn on where you land. Artur can talk through how a specific area lines up before you commit to a house.
