Thornton Friends School was a 6-12 Quaker school with three campuses, two in Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S., and one in Alexandria, Virginia in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The Alexandria campus continues to operate as Alexandria Friends School.There was on average around 55 students in the Silver Spring Upper School and 15 students in the middle school; the Virginia upper school once had as many as 43 students. Classes at the upper schools averaged about 9 students, and the middle school averaged about 6.HistoryIn 1972, Peter and Nancy Kline, both faculty members at Sandy Spring Friends School in Sandy Spring, MD approached their headmaster C. Thornton “Thorny” Brown, and asked permission to begin a separate program for students who either were not working out well at Sandy Spring, or who did not meet the school’s acceptance criteria. Their target student was the “bright underachiever,” and with Thorny’s blessing a separate program was started on the Sandy Spring campus.The Klines first worked out of the infirmary at Sandy Spring, then relocated to a farm house in Brookeville. From there they moved to the school’s Silver Spring location, sharing the building with another program run by Bill and Lynn Godwin. These programs were collectively known as the Interlocking Curriculum School, the highlights of which were the yearly production of Shakespearean plays and a bi-annual trip to England.
