About Us

Welcome to P.S. 36, The Margaret Douglas School, where our students are our top priority. Our instructional and support staff collaborate in a shared mission that begins and ends with encouragement, enrichment, engagement, and empowerment. As a community of teachers and learners, we strive to build a supportive school environment that nurtures the whole child while inspiring them to become life-long learners to reach their greatest potential.

To support our youngest learners, we endeavor to build community among students that celebrate diversity and supports social emotional readiness for learning. Our progressive approach encourages learning through inquiry and exploration. At our early childhood grades, we strive to strengthen the academic foundation for literacy and mathematics, while also ensuring our students deepen relationships with their peers while learning how to set goals for themselves and self-regulate. Recognizing upper grades are often times when students undergo intellectual, physical, and emotional changes, we encourage academic risk taking and problem solving, while guiding students through social emotional growth and celebrating accomplishments.

Our classrooms, whether remote or in-person, should showcase students working together and engaged in discussion around texts or math problem solving approaches. Texts used in literacy, social studies, and science encourage diverse perspectives. Math discussions encourage the use of models and manipulatives to guide approaches from concrete to abstract. Our faculty design and deliver curricula and programs that use inquiry, engage students in independent thinking, and encourage students to feel empowered to share their findings and interpretations, while listening to and considering those of their peers. We aim to build and strengthen self-esteem and to develop and promote good citizenship in all of our students through restorative justice strategies.

As a community school, we strive to ensure all students and families have access to community partners and resources that help overcome barriers to learning. These include instructional coaching supports for our teachers; expanded learning opportunities that build on classroom learning or address learning gaps in afterschool, lunch, and summer; physical wellness resources to help address illness, vision, or dental needs to strengthen student attendance; mental health supports including a mental health clinic with access to social workers and counselors.

Throughout the school year there will be many activities that include families to strengthen our home-school support model. We encourage you to participate in as many of these activities as you can. We encourage you to help promote healthy attendance habits, and to learn more about physical and mental wellness resources that can help your child come to school prepared to learn.

This website offers a view into our school and I encourage you to explore these pages to see what makes our school so special.

Heather JnBaptist

Principal