Every year, a new group of Wildflower schools peeks through the soil for the first time. But what a year this has been. In the best of times, the challenges, uncertainty, and personal growth of designing and launching a new school are immensely demanding. Yet Wildflower Teacher Leaders rose to meet the storm of challenges this year with resiliency, grounded in purpose, experience, and love for the families they serve.
For the first time, Wildflower is celebrating the achievements of these education entrepreneurs throughout their opening year with the inaugural edition of Wildflower Seedlings – a special publication highlighting the first year of our newest class of Wildflower schools. Please join Wildflower in welcoming the 14 new schools that opened their doors to families this year and their founding Teacher Leaders who transformed their lifetimes of learning and dreaming into their schools in their own communities.
In these pages, you will meet the exceptional Teacher Leaders behind these schools and see what they have to say about what inspires and motivates their work as educators. To read more about their stories, backgrounds, and the beautiful schools they have created, please check out our first edition of Wildflower Seedlings.
Four days went by with no arrests as our city burned. No arrests, after the public murder of George Floyd only a half mile from one of our schools. Words have been hard to come by to describe our anguish. How many black and brown men, women and children sit in jail awaiting justice with far less evidence – for minor infractions, for just living – while the police officers who killed George Floyd sat free, in the comfort of their homes?
And while our city burns, how many of us sit free in the comfort of our homes? Feeling sad, yes, but with the freedom to turn the channel, scroll down the feed. Selective outrage is not enough. We must cry out today and every day until there is justice. Justice for George Floyd and for every Black man, woman, and child that has died at the hands of state-sanctioned police brutality in our country.
Each of us has the responsibility to act. And we know we haven’t done enough. But the shame of having not done enough must not stop us from doing everything we can now and moving forward. Are you a parent of a white child? Talk to your child about the ways racism plagues our country. Are you the parent of a black, brown or bi-racial child? Communities of color are grieving, for our collective loss and for the impact this has on every child. The Wildflower community is here to support you.Are you a teacher? Learn about your own racial identity, build your consciousness of how this impacts your practice, and teach your students to be anti-racist. Are you an organizational leader? Make space for healing in the midst of the constant traumas endured by our black and brown brothers and sisters in this country. Are you an employee? Speak up when you see subtle and not so subtle acts of racism.
Take action today, then set a recurring reminder for yourself to take action again tomorrow, next week, next month, and the month after that. When that reminder goes off, ask yourself if you are doing all you can, and then do more. So many don’t have the choice to opt out. Please don’t.
Get involved and support the work of Reclaim the Block (@reclaimtheblock) and Black Visions Collective (@BlackVisionsCollective), organizations advocating for the City of Minneapolis to divert money from the MPD to sustainable community solutions
If you are a teacher, share information with your families about how to get involved and support their children’s understanding of race and racism.
While the Wildflower network of schools comprises many communities around the U.S., four Wildflower Schools as well as the organization that supports our network are based in Minneapolis. The injustice anguishing our Minneapolis partners is the latest diminishment of Black lives in America. We work and hope for the day when no Wildflower community–or any community–experiences such injustices.
In January of 2014, Wildflower Montessori School opened its doors for the first time. Almost immediately, it was clear that something special had happened. Months later, a second Wildflower school sprouted, followed by a third. Today, there are over 20 schools in five states and Puerto Rico, with more in development each year.
For the 5th anniversary of our first school, we decided to revisit Wildflower’s roots and document the rationale for our model. We have assembled it all together in a new paper we are excited to share with you, “Our Roots in Research: The Ideas and Evidence Behind Wildflower Schools.”
In part, we created this for ourselves, to help our own growing community connect with the founding ideas. In part, we created it to challenge the conventional wisdom that shapes too much of modern education. But most importantly, we created it to help us develop a strong, connected community of peers who would share ideas and feedback with us and conduct research – to help us test our intuition, evaluate new ideas and incorporate external insights.
We’re excited to share with you this recap of our past year and fill you in on where Wildflower is headed. If you’re reading this note, you are likely already a member of our community in some way. As we approach the end of the year and this season of thanks, we want to extend our sincere gratitude to you for believing in authentic, teacher-led Montessori, and for continuing to support our journey to bring Wildflower schools to more children, families and communities.
We hope you enjoy reading about our annualreport. As you’ll see, we’ve been growing. Whether it’s launching new regions or starting new schools, we are heartened by the enthusiastic response from families and communities. With an 82% Net Promoter score from families and a 96% teacher retention rate, we feel we’re onto something special here at Wildflower.
Half a mile from Brown University, in the center of Providence, Rhode Island, sits the first Wildflower school in Rhode Island. Founded by two Montessorians who migrated north from Alabama’s Gulf Coast, Tiger Lily currently enrolls students as young as 6 weeks, and up to 3 years. With its peaceful interior color palette, wide-paneled walls, and natural wooden accents, teacher-leaders Alexandra Theris and Brittney Powell say visitors often tell them the space looks like an “after” from the HGTV series “Fixer Upper.” The pair, who just completed their first year leading Tiger Lily, recently sat down to talk about how they got started on their Wildflower journey.
With a long history of Montessori in her own life, as a student, a teacher, and a parent, Lisa Kuh, director of early education for Somerville Public Schools, was always looking for ways to incorporate Montessori approaches to curriculum into professional development for the teachers she supports.
Two years ago, on her way to give a presentation in Philadelphia on the concept of beauty in Montessori, Lisa ended up on the same airplane flight as a group of teacher-leaders from Wildflower, and a budding partnership began. After hitting it off with the Wildflower team, Lisa observed in several Wildflower schools.
In the heart of the Lake Street corridor in Minneapolis, a micro Montessori school called Lirio has made a temporary home inside the educational wing of Christ Church International. Next door sits the historic Sears building, an economic hub for the city before it closed in 1994. What once was a predominantly affluent neighborhood struggled through the years, but the community is working to turn itself around. Along with a new Midtown Global Market that serves up international food and incubates startup businesses, local leaders, particularly those of color, are working to revitalize the neighborhood. Lirio teacher-leaders Maya Soriano and Susana Rodriguez are thrilled to play a part in that effort, and say the neighborhood is the perfect setting for their two-way Spanish immersion school, one of the first three Wildflower schools in Minneapolis. And with a waiting list only months after their opening, it seems the community agrees.
At Wildflower, teachers lead every aspect of their schools, from instruction to administration. Teacher-leaders collaborate with each other across the Wildflower network, contributing a wide variety of experiences and perspectives to the group’s work. Here, meet Janet Begin, founder and co-teacher-leader at Marigold Montessori in Haverhill, Massachusetts, who is among several Wildflower teacher-leaders who came to Montessori education after a career in another field.
A Montessori teacher for 25 years, Mary Rockett, like many educators before her, had resigned herself to the fact that becoming an administrator was the only way to progress in her career. But five years into the “soul-crushing” administrator life, a chance meeting with a prospective parent changed everything.
Sep Kamvar, a former Google computer scientist who was running the Social Computing Lab at the MIT Media Lab at the time, met Mary during an admissions open house. Several months later, she received an email from Sep saying he wanted to open a Montessori school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wondered if Mary would like to have coffee with him. Eager to help a fellow Montessori believer, she agreed.
Over coffee, Sep started telling Mary about his dreams for a network of Montessori Schools he called Wildflower. He told her about the kind of education that he wanted not only for his son, but for every child.
“He’s a very gentle, disarming, kind, thoughtful person, but in listening to him, I thought, ‘This guy is really grandiose; I hope he’s not out of his mind!’” Mary remembered. “He was talking about changing the world, changing the face of education. I was intrigued. Totally blown away.”Continue Reading
