Every year, a new group of Wildflower schools peeks through the soil for the first time. Each new school is the culmination of a lifetime of learning and dreaming for its founders; collectively, they are a remarkable and diverse group of educators with visions for a more beautiful world. In the following pages, you will read the stories of 11 Teacher Leaders whose skills, passions, and life experiences sparked the creation of beautiful, community-embedded schools. This group includes a Montessori teacher whose experience immigrating to the US as a child inspired her to create a public charter school where children from diverse cultural backgrounds can find a safe and affirming place to belong and grow; teachers whose personal identities and experiences in school led them to design programs that center students from the Black diaspora and students with functional and neurodiversity; intrepid teachers bringing the Wildflower model to three new states; and teachers with a passion for supporting food security and teaching children how to raise healthy foods.
This year’s group of six new schools includes Wildflower’s first schools in Connecticut, Nevada, and Utah, the first site under Wildflower’s Colorado charter, and Wildflower’s first elementary school in California. Two-thirds of these new schools are led by a Founding Teacher Leader who identifies as Black, Indigenous or as a Person of Color.
Together with those who came before them, they are now part of a growing network of 71 Wildflower schools across 17 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. They represent beautiful examples for the hundreds of educators in the early stages of imagining their own Wildflower school in the years ahead. As you read these stories, I hope you’ll be inspired by the visions that led them to create their schools and the way these school models are connecting to children and families who have been searching for a school designed with them in mind. We look forward to watching their unfolding journey and growth into exactly what they are meant to become.
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