So what’s so cool about Montessori schools?
“I was a slow convert,” Meagan Holman answers. It took until she saw her 6-year-old son bloom in first grade at Fernwood Montessori School in Bay View for her to be convinced about the distinctive Montessori approach, built on a child’s choices to pursue learning in a classroom without conventional grades and textbooks.
“They get them where they need to be,” she said of Montessori programs, which, among other things, emphasize hands-on projects for learning and classrooms where students range across three ages (6- to 9-year-olds, for example), with students staying with the same teacher for three years.
Now, Holman, who represents the southeast side on the Milwaukee School Board, has become a key figure in a drive to increase Montessori offerings in the city – and, in her view, improve the prospects for Milwaukee Public Schools to rebound from the buffeting it has taken for years.
The prospects for a Montessori surge were underscored when a School Board committee voted Thursday to support opening a new program on the south side in September. Isn’t this MPS, where the wheels grind slowly? Not in this case.