Many years ago, Dorothy Goodman gazed up the forested hill behind her house on Macomb Street with bold aspirations to start a school of her own. Over 60 years later, her son, Matthew Goodman, looks back and fondly remembers the lifelong dedication and drive that allowed Dorothy’s vision to come true.
“For as long as I can remember, my mother looked up the hill at Tregaron thinking ‘Someday, I’m going to get that property for WIS,’” Matthew Goodman said. “To imagine, 60 years later, that this school is what it is today… I doubt even she would believe it.”
In honor of the school’s 60th anniversary, Matthew Goodman spoke at the Founder’s Day assembly about his mother’s commitment and involvement in the school’s founding. Although Dorothy Goodman herself passed away in 2023, she remained a visionary until the end of her life.
“She was still talking about her vision for ‘the school of the 22nd century,’ when bedridden during the last four years of her life,” Matthew Goodman said. “She was a complete force of nature.”
Matthew Goodman believes his mother’s tenacity first blossomed during her education at the prestigious women’s college, Bryn Mawr, empowering her to chase her dreams in a society that did little to support women.
“Her education was at a school that gave women a sense of their own capability to do anything, which was pretty unusual at the time,” Matthew Goodman said. “Even if you went to college as a young lady back in those days, at most schools, you wouldn’t have been, say, the editor of the newspaper.”
To her merit, she started her studies when she was just 16 and graduated at the age of 19. In her last year at Bryn Mawr, Dorothy Goodman reached out to former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
“I don’t even know how she got the address, but she just wrote to her in a very business-like manner,” Matthew Goodman said. “Shockingly, Roosevelt responded.”
Dorothy Goodman’s sheer determination never faded – the creation of WIS took even more grit than contacting Roosevelt. With limited resources at her disposal, she was forced to get creative with her sourcing.
“It was glue and paste, with everything sort of put together to make things work when they had to work,” Matthew Goodman said. “She would procure supplies from all kinds of sources that were second-hand.”
With this resourceful method, Dorothy Goodman founded Washington International Bilingual Primary School, the first iteration of what is now WIS.
“The original Georgetown property was in the basement of a church on Volta Place,” Matthew Goodman said.
The school grew quickly, initially focusing on primary education before eventually expanding to high school.
“The way she built the school was to add a grade each year,” Matthew Goodman said. “That first group of three to four year olds would just get a year older, and they’d add a class as they went up.”
Eventually, Dorothy Goodman set her sights on moving into a bigger campus to accommodate all the students. The school thus moved into a new location on Olive Street.
“The Olive Street campus was a typical inner-city school with a big tarmac in front and a brick three-story building with a school-like look to it,” Matthew Goodman said.
Acquiring the money for the building was no easy task. It involved fundraising alongside support from her husband, Steve Allen, who leveraged his position at the World Bank to obtain a loan.
“My father, who worked at the World Bank, helped her get a grant from the Ford Foundation, which was around half a million dollars,” Matthew Goodman said. “That was a lot of money in those days.”
In order to secure the loan, WIS agreed to the Ford Foundation’s condition that the school offer a set number of places to inner-city students.
“It came with this great condition attached to it that they had to have a certain percentage of inner-city kids from D.C.,” Matthew Goodman said. “My mother was very proud that she had helped give some inner-city D.C. kids an opportunity they probably wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
A few years later, Dorothy Goodman achieved her dream of running a school on Tregaron grounds. Though it marked a grand accomplishment, there was still much to do before the campus could live up to her vision.
“I sort of had vague memories of walking around the mansion, and it was pretty spooky,” Matthew Goodman said. “It was not in very good shape. When I was 15, this friend of my brother’s and I painted the whole mansion.”
After visiting the new and improved Tregaron campus in January, Matthew Goodman reflects that the school looks completely different today.
“Although it still has the bones of a home, it’s got more school-like features,” Matthew Goodman said. “It didn’t really have any of those things when we were there. It was sort of a dusty old abandoned home.”
Sixty years later, what used to be that run-down house is now WIS – a top-ranked private school in the Washington, D.C. area. Years of commitment and dedication from Dorothy Goodman have made the school what it is today.
“It has really always been a part of our family,” Matthew Goodman said. “In a lot of ways, WIS is like my mother’s fifth child. She would be so proud to see it today.”
By Tindra Jemsby
