North shore country day

How it works

The words look like a feast. They are a school name. Country day is a kind of independent school: students spend the day on a campus outside the dense city and go home at night. The model grew in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an alternative to sending children away to boarding school. North Shore Country Day is one campus in that tradition, not a national day off.

A group of Winnetka families hired Perry Dunlap Smith as the first head of school. The school took form in 1919 on the former Girton School for Girls site, itself preceded by the Rugby School for Boys, which had opened in nearby Kenilworth in 1893. The address is 310 Green Bay Road, Winnetka, Illinois. The motto is “Live and Serve.” Colors are purple and white. Athletics use the Raiders name. The school is coeducational. It is not a church feast and not a federal Monday.

Illinois does not close because this campus has a homecoming. Cook County does not print a red date for it. If you needed a public holiday on the North Shore, you still need the civil calendar: Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and the rest. If you needed this school’s year, you need this school’s calendar.

A country day school, not a feast

The campus includes lower, middle, and upper schools on one site of about sixteen acres. Families come from around the Chicago area. The school has never been a boarding school in the East Coast sense; the point of the country day idea was to keep children at home in the evenings. A visitor looking for a parade will find a school day, a sports Saturday, or a closed campus, depending on the date the school printed.

Traditions belong to the school: Morning Ex, Buddy Day, homecoming, and older service customs such as Dig Day, which the school has described as a historic work-and-service day. Those names are campus language. They do not bind a public library in Evanston. They do not bind a Metra timetable.

What it is: an independent JK–12 day school in Winnetka. What it is not: a U.S. public holiday or a seasonal festival. Where: 310 Green Bay Road, Winnetka, Illinois. When it “happens”: whenever that year’s academic calendar says class, break, or event.

If the calendar you opened has no Winnetka address on it, you are reading the wrong country day.

Finding the real calendar

The school publishes an academic calendar and an events list. Those pages, not a national “today in history” widget, answer whether there is class on a given Monday. In the 2026–2027 listing the school marks Monday 7 September 2026 as no school for Labor Day, and Monday 21 September 2026 as no school for Yom Kippur. Homecoming weekend is listed later that September. Those are campus decisions sitting on top of civil dates. They change when the school changes them.

If you are a family, use the portal the school gave you. If you are a courier, use the day’s office hours. If you typed the name because it sounded like a holiday on the lake, the lake is still Lake Michigan and the holiday is still whatever the state already named. The school will be in session or it will not, according to its own grid.