Named for Grace. Built for the village.
Dawn Wright grew up in west Fort Worth, graduated from Western Hills High School, and went on to Ole Miss. She came home, settled in Aledo, and watched a community grow around her — one without a preschool that felt the way she believed a preschool should feel.
So in July 2019, with the support of her husband Josh and a small six-classroom building, she opened Grace Learning Tree. The school is named for Dawn's great-grandmother Grace — a matriarch from San Angelo who taught generations of children that a place is what you make it, not what's handed to you.
By 2020, Grace had outgrown that first space — nearly 300 families sat on a waitlist with nowhere for their kids to go. Then COVID hit, and the whole world stopped. In the middle of that uncertainty, Dawn's husband Josh took a leap of faith. He found a piece of property fronting historic Bankhead Highway, just down the road from the original school, and told her: build the dream.
By August of 2022, Dawn's dream came to fruition. After two years of patience, blueprints, hard hats, and quiet faith — the students, teachers, and families who'd held tight through every delay finally walked through the doors of their new state-of-the-art campus. The one Dawn had been carrying in her head for years. The one Josh had believed in when she couldn't quite picture it yet. The one this community had patiently waited for.
The new campus is what happens when a mom designs a school. Instead of one big building shared by all ages, Dawn split it into two — a nursery side for the littlest learners and a preschool side for the older ones — each one opening directly onto its own center-courtyard playground. The two playgrounds sit side-by-side, joined by a covered walkway and divided by a single iron fence. On one side, toddlers gaze through the rails and dream of the firetruck and the bigger slides beyond. On the other, the older kids wave back at the smaller versions of themselves they used to be.
And these aren't ordinary playgrounds. Slides, crawl tubes, sound tubes, drums, sensory panels, climbing structures — and yes, a firetruck playpiece that becomes whatever the kids need it to be that day — all from PLAY LSI, the industry-leading playground innovators most daycares simply don't reach for. It's the kind of intentional landscape that weaves play, exercise, instrument-style discovery, and motor development into one whimsical hour outside. Natural light pours into every classroom. Safety is built into every wall. And every detail, from the smallest cubby hook to the tallest slide, came from someone who'd watched her own kids navigate other people's buildings and wanted better.
This is the space Dawn dreamed of — and the space the Grace family had finally arrived at. A place where young minds, and the families who love them, could truly flourish.
"It takes a village. We're trying to build a really good one, every day."
— Dawn Wright
That phrase — it takes a village — sits at the center of everything we do. We are not just a place that cares for your child during work hours. We are a community of teachers, families, and the kids you carpool with, the friends your child will know for years, the village that helps raise the next generation of Aledo.
7 years in, Dawn is still in and out of the school every day — visiting with parents at drop-off and pickup, sitting in on classroom activities, and connecting with families at school events and in the community after hours. Boredom isn't allowed. And every Friday afternoon, she still sends the staff home with a story or two from the week that reminds everyone why we do this.
