Abington Friends School
Abington Friends School
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Abington Friends School

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Abington Friends School

Abington Friends School is a private, Quaker secondary school in Abington Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States, with a Jenkintown postal address. Serving students from age 3 to grade 12, Abington Friends School has stood on its original campus since 1697, and is the oldest primary and secondary educational institution in the United States to operate continuously at the same location under the same management. The school draws students from approximately 75 ZIP codes around the greater Philadelphia area, as well as international students from many regions of China.

Abington Friends School sits on a fifty-acre (20 ha) campus which includes a meadow, Quaker meeting house, a portion of Jenkintown Creek, and extensive playing fields. Lower, middle, and upper school buildings and athletic facilities sit at the center of the campus.

Campus facilities include:

The Early Childhood and Lower School Program at AFS serves students age 3 to 4th grade, the Middle School program 5th through 8th grade, and the Upper School program 9th through 12th grade.

Abington Friends School was founded in March 1697, when John Barnes, a wealthy tailor who belonged to the Abington Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, donated 120 acres (49 ha) of his estate "for and towards erecting a meetinghouse for Friends and toward the maintenance of a school under the direction of Friends." The school has been continuously operated on the same plot of land since its founding in that year, making it the oldest school in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with such a claim. AFS operates under the care of Abington Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

In its earliest days the school was located in one large room in the Friends' meeting house, with the principles of the Religious Society of Friends dominating virtually every aspect of school life. In the 1780s the school moved to a structure of its own, the present day caretaker’s house adjacent to the meeting house on Greenwood Avenue. Boys occupied the first floor room, while girls were instructed in the upstairs room. Boys were responsible for supplying firewood for the stoves in each room and the girls collected drinking water from the Jenkintown Creek behind the meeting house.

Coeducation was not the only way in which the School observed the Quaker testimony of equality. By the mid-18th century, Abington Friends School admitted African American students too. Throughout the 18th century, AFS provided an education for the primary grades only, with enrollment fluctuating between 20 and 40 students, most of whom were Quaker.

The foundations for the modern school we know today were laid in the 1880s, when the school was transformed from an ungraded primary day school with around 90 students and two teachers to a boarding school that served kindergarten through twelfth grade. The new school was opened in 1887 on the triangular property bordered by present-day Greenwood Avenue, Jenkintown Road, and Meetinghouse Road.

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