Two of Boulder’s long-running independent schools, Friends and Watershed, had spent close to a year working to combine their programs into a single preschool through 12th grade school by the fall of 2026.
But Watershed recently decided to call off the merger.
Watershed Head of School Tim Breen said he couldn’t share all of the reasons, citing confidentiality requirements. But, he wrote in an email, while the mission and vision of the two schools are “very aligned, as we learned more about each other we found significant programmatic differences that were hard to reconcile.”
“We appreciate the collaborative spirit with which we all approached this exploration,” he wrote. “These are two wonderful schools with passionate educators who have worked for years to develop distinct and valuable programs and pedagogy. Ultimately, we decided that we at Watershed are best positioned to achieve our mission independently.”
Friends, which opened in 1987 and has two campuses in Boulder, enrolls about 135 preschool, elementary and middle school students. Watershed, which opened in 2004 with 16 high school students, enrolls about 120 students in middle and high school and recently bought and renovated a campus in Gunbarrel.
Both schools describe themselves as progressive schools with a strong social emotional learning component, while school leaders said many students from Friends already enroll at Watershed for high school.
Friends uses a project-based learning model. Watershed students take a combination of “skills” classes, such as math and foreign language, and “expedition” classes. For the expedition classes, students learn multiple subjects by tackling a community challenge, usually in partnership with community organizations. Students also travel to other states or countries as part of a monthlong class.
The two schools signed a letter of intent to merge in April of this year.
As the schools worked over the summer on aligning their programs, questions that still needed to be answered included how the three campuses would be used for a single school and how administrative roles would be assigned. Each school also has its own board of directors.
Few schools in the area span from elementary to high school. Other local K-12 schools include two public charter schools, Lafayette’s Peak to Peak Charter School and Longmont’s Twin Peaks Classical Academy. On the private school side, Dawson School in Boulder County and Shining Mountain Waldorf in Boulder both serve K-12 students.