Abington Friends School

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.

By 1931, the school had become an all-girls college preparatory school, which offered a more progressive education than many of the all-girls schools by including exchange programs with European schools, mandatory community service and greater diversity in student enrollment.

The School Committee of Abington Monthly Meeting decided to return to coeducation in 1966. By 1975 all grades, kindergarten through twelfth, contained both boys and girls. Under the leadership of headmaster Adelbert Mason, the school's facilities expanded, with new buildings for the Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools. Growth continued in the late 1980s with a new science and arts wing in the Lower School.