The Greenwood School, founded in 1978, is a pre-preparatory boarding school for boys ages nine to fifteen have been diagnosed with: dyslexia; specific language-based learning disabilities / learning differences (LD); receptive language and/or expressive language deficits; executive functioning deficits; attentional difficulties (ADD or ADHD); disorders of written expression; dysgraphia; or speech and language needs. In fact, a combination of these learning disabilities / learning differences (LD) are often clustered together in most Greenwood students’ learning profiles. Despite their learning challenges, our students are highly intelligent and have significant talents in the arts, in woodworking, or in athletics.

Because of an inequity between ability and performance, many children with learning differences/learning disabilities (LD) have been misunderstood by mainstream schools, by their classmates, sometimes by family members, and have been described as lacking in intelligence or motivation. In fact, the motivation, self-esteem and social relationships of these young people have been eroded by a sense of overwhelming failure in school.

Greenwood's small enrollment and non-institutional environment provides parents and students a clear alternative both to larger, clinically-modeled schools and to mainstream schools that have added hours of outside remedial tutoring and support programs to their standard curriculums.

In order to help students with learning disabilities/learning differences (LD) develop the self-discipline necessary for future independent study, our program is highly structured, yet the school's overall atmosphere is familial, understanding, and supportive.

Greenwood's remedial language program provides a full range of language therapies designed to address all levels of achievement. Our teachers are fully trained and certified through the Greenwood Institute in structured language teaching, a multi-sensory approach based on the Orton-Gillingham method, a remedial approach recommended by leading researchers. Also, our teachers are trained in Greenwood’s proprietary techniques developed over years of working with students with language-based learning differences /learning disabilities (LD).

We define Greenwood as an enriched and challenging pre-preparatory school for a specific population, rather than as a clinically-modeled "special school." This distinction is important to us both because it accurately expresses our identity as a comprehensive educational institution in a field of mainstream junior boarding schools and it helps our students to form a positive image of themselves now and in the future.

The breadth and richness of the Greenwood curriculum has set a standard in the profession. Students succeed at Greenwood because the program is designed to address the needs of each student: intellectual, emotional, creative, and physical. A full pre-preparatory academic program, including language tutorials, science, history, literature, mathematics, art, music, drama, public speaking, and athletics assures that our students are intellectually challenged, creatively inspired, and factually informed.

Approximately sixty percent of Greenwood graduates attend mainstream private and public high schools, where they succeed in meeting academic requirements for matriculation. The remaining forty percent continue their secondary studies in specialized remedial schools. Greenwood graduates have enrolled at Blue Ridge School, Cushing Academy, Holderness School, Brewster Academy, Forman School, Gow School, Pine Ridge School, Kents Hill School, Vermont Academy, and West Nottingham Academy.