Welcome from the Head of School

 Dear Parents, Students, and Visitors,

We are thrilled to welcome you to Washburn School's website! Washburn School is a private, college preparatory, non-profit, value-based, multi-cultural, total English immersion school located in Ponce, Puerto Rico, focusing on Spanish as a dual language for Pre-K to 12th grade.

Our school offers a rigorous academic program that prepares students for public and private universities and colleges worldwide, as shown by the hundreds of acceptances from our students with scholarships to universities nationwide. All our courses are taught in English, except for an extensive, rigorous academic focus on Spanish as a dual primary language, foreign language electives, specific athletic programs, and the culturally-based Puerto Rican history class taught in Spanish in middle school.

Washburn School earned accreditation from the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI), the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC), and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI), accreditation divisions of AdvancED (currently named Cognia).

At Washburn, we embrace multilingualism in its active and passive form, as it becomes a social necessity while we move towards globalization and cultural openness. We are committed to complete English language instruction while relentlessly focusing on teaching Spanish as a dual language. By the early and middle elementary grades, students who have studied at Washburn School from Pre-Kinder onward can read, write, and speak Spanish and English with high proficiency levels.

At Washburn School, we believe in fostering a safe and nurturing environment that inspires our students to reach their full potential. We strive to empower our students to pursue personal and academic excellence while preparing them to become critical thinkers, lifelong learners, precise communicators, ethical leaders, intellectual problem solvers, and caring global citizens.

Our vision is to be a world-class school that transforms students through the love of learning, truth, and wisdom, helping them become bilingual graduates who are prepared to qualify for acceptance at premier higher education institutions worldwide. We aim to achieve this through an innovative and intensive educational program, dedicated, highly qualified, and well-supported academic staff, and one of the best student-to-teacher ratios in our region.

At Washburn School, we embrace our core values, which include striving for excellence, taking personal and academic responsibility, living honestly and being precise and truthful in our speech, being respectful to ourselves and others, having empathy and compassion towards those around us, exercising integrity and authenticity in everything we do, being resilient in the face of rigor and challenges, daring to confront uncertainty and take positive risks, and living with an open mind towards others and their differences.

Sincerely,

Ronnie Lopezcepero, M.Ed, M.A, M.S.
Doctoral Student at the University of Illinois Champaign
Washburn School Administration