Celebrating Our New Early Childhood Center with a Ceremony & Slide Rides!

At our first Friday Assembly of the school year, students, parents, teachers, and alumni all gathered together at our beloved 333 Dolores Street campus for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the grand opening of our brand-new Early Childhood Program Center! The celebration was the culmination of the 333 Campus Expansion Project—a labor of love, community, and creativity that has been years in the making. And while the new center has so many incredible features designed to support our littlest learners’ early development, there’s one that everyone is talking about: the slide that runs from the rooftop playground all the way down to the yard below. 

Who came up with the idea for a rooftop slide? CDS students, of course!

“The 333 Campus Expansion Project all began with our students creating storyboards of their hopes and dreams for a reimagined space,” said Shelly Luke Wille, Head of School at CDS.

At CDS, we put students at the heart of everything we do. From the very start, we saw this project as more than just replacing our old preschool bungalows. It was a chance to turn the construction into a hands-on learning experience, allowing our students to investigate with curiosity, solve problems creatively, and engage meaningfully with all of the work happening on campus. 

Even at the very beginning of the design process, our students were involved. They read If I Built a School and then got to work dreaming up their perfect space. They shared these ideas with Shelly and with Jensen Architects, the talented team behind the design. 

While we couldn’t quite pull off a zipline or unicorn ranch (maybe next time!), many of their suggestions found their way into the final design. As construction began, the excitement didn’t end. Students watched from their classroom windows, sparking all sorts of “notice, think, and wonder” discussions. Their curiosity sparked a construction inquiry project in early childhood classrooms.

Students asked questions about the sights and sounds at the construction site, met with architects and workers, and experimented with materials and designs in their classrooms. These experiences culminated in projects like preschool blueprints and construction zone play areas, as well as an original story and short movie titled “The Sunny Day of Construction,” created by transitional kindergarten students.

Students and teachers also shared their gratitude for the construction workers through collaborative art projects and songs. 

The new 8,000-square-foot Early Childhood Program Center is designed to continue fostering such hands-on, student-led learning. It includes classrooms for preschool and transitional kindergarten students, as well as specialized spaces for art, tinkering, and digital innovation. The rooftop play yard helped add 10,000 square feet of outdoor space to the campus and is equipped with picnic tables, preschool-sized play structures, and a large sandbox filled with 3,650 pounds of play sand. The courtyard features a heritage elm tree, lovingly preserved during construction, which inspired the building’s nickname, “The Treehouse.”

“There aren’t a lot of preschools that are in buildings expressly built for that purpose,” said Antonette Greene, CDS Early Childhood Program Director, noting that preschools are often housed in retrofitted spaces. “With this project, we had an opportunity to use what we know about how children learn and build a space made to fit those needs and experiences. The space includes classrooms sized to fit best practices so teachers can create multiple, active learning stations for students to move between simultaneously.”

“We created a courtyard and big glass sliding doors between the classroom and the outdoors so that students can have freedom of movement between the spaces while being supervised. We designed for connections, with whisper phones between classrooms so students can speak to each other, as well as vantage points from the rooftop playground to the yard below where students can see their older siblings.” The building was also designed to be set back from the road, with a privacy wall, to ensure safety and security. 

“Every decision we made regarding this building was filtered through our mission—the focus on student agency and joy, the design of the spaces for optimal teacher use, the way we thought about the impact of our neighbors and the entire block in the design, the focus on true accessibility, and the way we worked to preserve these beautiful heritage trees,” said Shelly.

At the ribbon-cutting, CDS co-founder Tracy Kirkham put it perfectly when she said, “Early childhood education really isn’t ‘preschool,’ as in ‘real’ school doesn’t start until you’ve left it. Real school starts in the early childhood program.” 

Thank you to everyone who made this dream a reality—our students, families, teachers, architects, and construction teams. We hope you’ll stop by and see the Treehouse for yourself soon!

Event photography by Vincent Hayes.