Our History

It all began with an idea

wBees Forest School has roots in its infancy as a parent-run cooperative that began in 2013 in Williamsburg / Greenpoint. Within that first year, our cooperative had 24 families with four classrooms taking place in living rooms and churches with parents acting as teaching assistants. The following year, wBees Forest School took its journey to become an outdoor learning program with parents and children foresting in North Brooklyn green spaces and traveling to Prospect Park. We partnered with local community gardens and used the outdoors as our classroom.
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As the wBees community grew, so did the school, expanding into a vibrant Montessori program with a co-working classroom in Greenpoint and a full-day program with three classrooms in Ridgewood, Queens, near the Bushwick border. As of 2018, wBees Forest School has moved to fully run out of our Ridgewood school, where we currently have a toddler classroom for 2-year-olds and now two primary classrooms for children ages 3-5. We pride ourselves on a strong, diverse team that values connection and exploration inspired by the Montessori approach.

As part of our core values to honor and respect the Earth, wBees Forest School acknowledges that it is located in ancestral Lenape homelands. We recognize the longstanding significance of these lands for Lenape nations past and present. We are also conscious that New York City has the largest urban Native population in the United States. We believe that historical awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important and are committed to working to overcome their effects in our own educational institutions.