Photograph by Lightfield Studios via Adobe Stock
It’s a balmy morning in April, and classical music plays softly in a classroom of kids aged 9 through 12. A student uses a tape measure to count the inches of a cinder block in the wall. At a two-seater table, a boy helps a girl with a math problem from a 5-inch by 7-inch card they selected from a nearby stack. He tells her, “The second one is so much easier than the first.” Three pupils sit in a circle on the floor, writing with pencil on graph paper. Another student, squatting with her feet on the seat of her chair, is conferring one-on-one with an assistant teacher. Some of the educational materials on shelves, such as earth-toned wooden boxes, look like they come from a museum gift shop.
Two kids get a little chatty, but teacher Sushannah Hahn doesn’t call them out in front of everyone. She walks over and quietly asks, “Is there something I can help you with?” Later, she explains, “When we redirect, we always do it in a positive way. If someone needs to be redirected, we first ask ourselves why. Often when children start talking like that it’s because one of them is stuck on a work.” Down the hall, in a room for 6- to 9-year-olds, kids are splayed on child-sized fringed mats, engaged in works from a weekly list they manage themselves.
This is the Montessori Lab School at Bramble Nature Campus in Madisonville, Cincinnati’s newest public Montessori school. The pre-K through eighth grade program opened in August.
“Montessori sees children in the light of dignity and respect and independent thinking,” says Aubrey Wallen, a Bramble teacher. “It really comes out in our environments and the language we use.”
The calm inside Bramble belies its cataclysmic birth. It was speedily set up last year after Xavier University suddenly closed its own Montessori Lab School, after almost six decades in operation, converting it into a Catholic/Jesuit model in line with Xavier’s founding ethos. Parents received news of the closing in late 2024. Panic and anger followed.
Lab School parents say they were “blindsided,” “devastated,” and “heartbroken” by a decision they considered “a huge mistake.” (Xavier administration declined to comment on the controversy.) Parents worried about where their kids would go next; many private Montessori schools have waitlists, and the public ones use a lottery system.
Wallen and her husband enrolled their two Lab School children in a traditional school in their neighborhood, but not without reservations. “I was concerned my children wouldn’t be able to follow their true interests,” she says, “and that the teacher would have to either slow them down to help everyone else catch up to their level or not help them as much as they needed if the teacher needed to move on.”
Other Lab School parents organized. They considered trying to change Xavier’s mind and formed a nonprofit exploring the launch of a new charter school to keep the children and their teachers together. Then, surprisingly, Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) emerged as a sort of fairy godmother. The district invited everyone into the Bramble Nature Campus in Madisonville, which was already operating as a preschool, using a hands-on, project-oriented form of schooling known as Constructivism.
“CPS stepped up,” says Marta Hyland, president of Bramble Families Together, the parent-teacher organization of the new Bramble Montessori Lab School. “I cannot overstate how incredibly generous they were. They were fast. One hundred days after we received the letter [about Xavier closing], we were filling out applications for the kids to go to Bramble. At least 60 percent of the kids transferred over.”
It was quite a feat for the behemoth that is CPS to jumpstart a new magnet school in a relative flash, but if any city could do it, it’s Cincinnati. We are the nation’s leaders in Montessori schooling, especially in integrating Montessori into public schools. In this particular case, it helped that the desires of the Lab School parents matched some of CPS’s imperatives. “It fits into our portfolio, what we do,” says CPS Assistant Superintendent Debra Klein. “We’re in the middle of a growth period as a district. We were looking at opening a middle school on the east side.” Increasing Montessori options within CPS helps attract students who might otherwise go to a charter or private school. As it happened, the Bramble building was underused and hungry for students.
Photograph by Sukjai Photo via Adobe Stock
Montessori, the most widely practiced alternative education model in the U.S., was created by Maria Montessori, a scientist and one of Italy’s first female physicians. In the early 1900s, working with poor children dismissed as “uneducable,” she observed that their natural curiosity drove them to teach themselves when they were given thoughtfully designed materials and gentle, mostly hands-off guidance. Children flourished, she found, in environments filled with beautiful objects in natural colors and materials, and in open access to the outdoors. Her success in improving both academic and life skills led to the first Montessori school opening in 1907, in Rome. The concept spread quickly, with America’s first Montessori school opening just four years later, in 1911.
“As Montessorians, we follow the child,” says Amanda Thomas-Castillo, whose own child attends Bramble. “Montessori isn’t just my educational theory; it’s my social theory. Maria Montessori’s radical thought was that kids will save our world if we treat them with love and dignity. The world will be a better place.”
If Thomas-Castillo sounds idealistic, she is not alone. Montessori adherents are known for their passion. “I was a smidge skeptical about it at first,” admits Sheena Steckl, a college English professor. “It seemed mystical.” An essay by one of her undergraduate students piqued her interest. “He felt his Montessori education prepared him for college in writing, self-direction, and critical-thinking skills. That sold me.” Steckl’s two children are now among the estimated 675 students at Sands Montessori School, the nation’s first public Montessori school, which opened in 1975. “I’ve been on a Montessori soapbox ever since,” she says. “One thing that affirmed it for me was seeing how calm and peaceful and engaging the room was. I was most shocked at the behavioral differences. The classroom is quiet. You expect it to be chaos, but they are quietly working, focused, and able to get back on track quickly.”
In a CPS video explaining the district’s Montessori approach, a common misconception is met head-on. “We are not a hippie school,” says Jenny Mauch, a former principal of Pleasant Ridge Montessori. “As a new principal coming in, I looked at kids on their rugs everywhere, and you’re stepping over kids to get to things. But when you look at it, what they’re really doing is higher-level thinking. It’s independent and critical thinking.”
In the U.S., Montessori schools began as private programs, often within Catholic institutions. By the 1960s, as interest grew, a blueprint was needed for adapting the model to public systems. Enter Nancy Rambusch, who founded the American Montessori Society, a national nonprofit, in 1960. (Though not a Cincinnatian, she spent some time teaching at Xavier.) Sands was one result of Rambusch’s push to make the alternative method more accessible and equitable—something the anti-elitist Maria Montessori would have approved of. The timing was auspicious. In the mid-1970s, Cincinnati was ordered to integrate its schools. Montessori magnet programs helped draw together racially and economically diverse student bodies. It was the first but not the only time that Montessori gave CPS a timely boost.
Sands’s reputation as the “mother school” spread. Families from all over the city enrolled their children at its West End digs. (It has since relocated to Mt. Washington.) The school became both a destination and an ambassador for the Montessori philosophy.
For Paisley Starbuck, Sands offered a window into a broader world beyond her sheltered neighborhood. When Starbuck transferred to a traditional school in fourth grade and then on to high school at Hughes, she could easily spot Sands alumni. “Kids I knew from Sands, you could tell who they were,” she says. “They were more self-confident, kinder, and knew social skills, like how to de-escalate. We were used to being around people from different backgrounds.” Starbuck later trained at Xavier and now teaches at Pleasant Ridge Montessori. PRM holds its own “first”: It is Cincinnati’s only neighborhood Montessori school, not a magnet. Any child living nearby can attend.
With 13 public and about 30 private Montessori schools in the tri-state, Cincinnati is the most Montessori-rich city in the nation. An estimated 8,000 students are enrolled in the method here. “A lot of people don’t realize Cincinnati’s role in bringing Montessori to the United States,” says Emily Casey, president of the Cincinnati Montessori Society, a nonprofit that promotes the ideology. “All eyes are on us.” In addition to Sands, the first public Montessori school, Cincinnati also boasts America’s first degreed college programs for Montessori teacher education.
Ten years after PRM was established, and 51 years after Sands, Bramble opened its doors. It is one of just four of this region’s Montessori schools to earn accreditation by the AMS for being “authentic” and “high-fidelity.”
With Bramble as its latest example, the Queen City continues to serve as the model for folding Montessori into public education. “People look at how our schools host Montessori in order to see how to get [it] into their own public schools,” Casey says.
Photograph by New Africa via Adobe Stock
How did Cincinnati become the epicenter of Montessori? In a word: Xavier. In the 1960s, it created the nation’s first university degrees in the method. Turning out top-qualified Montessori teachers for more than half a century, Xavier has been the conduit for staff in the expansion of Montessori across the region and country. Its Montessori Lab School, of which its first students graduated in 1966, put the theory into practice and gave its college students real-time experience. Dozens of those Xavier grads are now local educators, sending their own children and even grandchildren to Montessori schools.
“Xavier has played a significant role in shaping Montessori training, and has been called the Harvard of Montessori,” says Kathy Farfsing, the university’s Montessori Teacher Education program director. In the 1980s, Farfsing studied with the educators who designed that teacher training program in the 1960s. “I want to continue their legacy.” It won’t be easy, as the Montessori teacher education offerings at Xavier have been shifting.
For all of Cincinnati’s preeminence, the shake-up at Xavier represents a seismic shift in the Montessori firmament. Besides the closure of the original Lab School, in 2021 Xavier also ended its bachelor’s degree program for Montessori elementary education (its early childhood education program, for instructing children in preschool and kindergarten, remained). Farfsing is adamant that Xavier remains the lodestar for teacher training in the region: “The program continues to evolve,” she said in an e-mail, “providing new courses for the Montessori graduate program, adding a post-graduate Montessori leadership certificate, and ensuring the continued impact in the field of Montessori education. Xavier offers multiple pathways for students pursuing Montessori education, including undergraduate and graduate options, opportunities to earn state teaching licensure, and specialized Montessori training across age levels 3–12.”
Still, some members of the tight-knit Montessori community sense a contraction.
“There will be a gap, or won’t be as many quality Montessori teachers, and that makes me sad,” says Beth Tracy-Kaliski, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Xavier and taught at the Lab School for several years.
Another Montessori proponent, Marta Hyland, adds, “The message I was receiving from the larger Xavier administration and leadership was not what I was hearing from people on the ground. So many CPS teachers come out of that program, and I worried what that meant for the landscape of Cincinnati as a whole, as a resource.”
New schools like Bramble will need a pipeline of trained teachers. CPS has, as of April 2026, become an unexpected source for that. This June marks the start of its in-house Montessori teacher training program. CPS teachers can now earn American Montessori Society accreditation from the district without paying tuition. (Until now, teachers within CPS only needed an education degree and state certification to lead a Montessori classroom.) The new program raises the bar while also helping the district’s budget.
“We identified that our big goal is to have all of our schools be accredited [by the AMS],” says Klein. “Bramble is the only one in the elementary world [of CPS]. We want the other elementaries accredited, so we need credentialed teachers. [Offering] the teacher training is backwards planning.”
Bringing the certification in house will save the district money, says CPS media relations associate Joe Wessels. “We are being a good steward of taxpayer funds, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in credentialing fees. We don’t have to pay someone to get that outside. We’re hoping eventually to make this a revenue stream for CPS.”
The Montessori methodology is a far cry from traditional education. In most public and private schools, students remain anchored at desks, soaking in verbal instruction. They learn together as a group in predetermined class periods. Administrators and teachers decide what is taught when, and what work is done how. Tests and grades are the routine measurements of achievement.
Montessori flips the script, de-emphasizes testing, grades, and competition. The work is centered around hands-on use of purpose-made materials for kids to choose as they wish, when they wish. After introducing a subject matter, teachers step back and observe, guiding students when they sense it’s needed. Much of the time, however, students drive their own learning and coach one another.
It’s not completely freeform; state education standards must be met. From kindergarten through sixth grade, pupils have a weekly work plan they carry out more or less at their own pace. They might spend hours on a single task, or set it aside to draw, or retreat to a “peace corner” or “calming space” to regroup. There’s freedom of movement. Students don’t need to ask permission to use the bathroom; at Bramble they attach a magnet with their name to a designated whiteboard area so teachers know their whereabouts. Fidget spinners are provided for periodic “brain breaks.” Operating this way, students learn to manage their own time and energy to meet deadlines.
Classrooms span three-year age bands—3 to 6, 6 to 9, and so on—so students stay with the same group of peers for three full years. Socioemotional intelligence, cultural curriculum, and care for the natural world are built into the day. Advocates say the Montessori model develops self-confident, self-directed people with empathy and strong social skills. Its famous alumni list runs from Jeff Bezos and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to Princes William and Harry and our own native son George Clooney.
“A big difference between Montessori and traditional education is that children have ownership of their learning,” says Beth Tracy-Kaliski, a preschool teacher at Sands. “A lot of time adults think they’re doing the child a favor when they do things for them, but that takes away the ownership.” Many materials are self-correcting, designed so that students can see for themselves when they’ve reached the right answer with no red pen required.
In her Bramble classroom, Wallen demonstrates the “stamp game,” a Montessori staple. A student chooses a card with, say, an addition problem on it, then solves it with small wooden squares, each color and number standing in for a particular value. The child can see, feel, and even weigh different combinations in their hands as they work out the solution. “Nerve endings in fingers connect to the brain, so when you connect the hand with the mind, it builds neural pathways,” says Wallen. “When you use something like this repeatedly, it forms pathways in the mind, and it makes [math concepts] more stable when [later] they become abstract.” Montessori introduces children to subjects first in concrete ways, then in more abstract fashion as the child grows older. For language instruction, for instance, sentences aren’t just written down, they are also cut up into pieces and rearranged.
Despite its popularity, Montessori has its critics. Research on the method’s effectiveness compared to traditional schooling is more anecdotal than research-based, in part because there are relatively few large-scale studies, and because factors like income and parental education vary widely between student groups. Some educators and parents worry that giving children so much freedom and downplaying grades leaves them underprepared for a world of deadlines and assessments. Others have more specific, anecdotal concerns.
“Three to 6 age-wise is a wide age span to accommodate different developmental levels,” says Sally Moomaw, author and associate professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Cincinnati. “My biggest concern is classrooms in which materials can only be used in a particular, prescribed way. In Constructivist classrooms, teachers encourage active exploration and favor open-ended materials that can accommodate learning at varying developmental levels. This encourages experimentation, logical reasoning, and initiative.”
A Hyde Park family recently took their young child out of a private Montessori school after observing him on several occasions spending too much time dawdling with “work” they felt wasn’t useful. “It seemed more like babysitting,” says the mother, an academic herself, who asked to remain anonymous. “He was lingering at a wash station and then wandering around. There didn’t seem to be any structure. I was made to feel like I was a nuisance when I asked questions about peer-reviewed research supporting what they were doing.”
A small percentage of Montessori-educated students find it hard to adjust after transferring to a traditional school. Emma Chaney, for instance, is a Montessori kid who struggled after enrolling in Walnut Hills. “The pace and learning style wasn’t a good fit for me, coming from what felt like a way more hands-on experience,” she says. She returned to a Montessori school for high school.
For the moment, Montessori’s momentum continues. When Central Montessori Academy holds open houses, Emily Casey, who teaches there, hears a common refrain from parents. Those who were educated in conventional schools often describe their own experiences as rigid and emotionally insensitive.
“This new generation of parents tell us they were bored in school, and got no help with socio-emotional issues,” Casey says. “They’re also frustrated with the amount of technology used in traditional schools. And they’re done with all the testing.”
No matter what pedagogy a parent chooses for their child, be it Waldorf, Constructivist, or even homeschooling, there has never been more granular analyzing by parents and teachers of what’s best. Some educators allow that Montessori is perhaps not ideal for every child, especially neurodivergent kids who can become overwhelmed when presented with a lot of choices and a classroom in seemingly random motion. CPS, for its part, is finding more and more of its students on the autism spectrum. Necessarily, Montessori education is evolving with the times. And change can be painful.
For local Montessorians, the past few years have been emotionally intense. Melissa Ridley, principal of Gamble Elementary Montessori, tears up thinking about the uncertainty that followed the changes at Xavier.
“It was upsetting: What’s going to happen to our Montessori schools? And what will happen to our children, so many children who have gone through CPS Montessori schools, and how will that change Cincinnati? Our society?” she says. “That’s what was scary when Xavier—” She mimics dropping a ball to the floor.
Then she brightens. Today, Ridley is helping to shape the new CPS teacher training program.
“This will sustain Montessori for years to come,” she says. Julia Farfsing believes Xavier can maintain its reputation as a monument to the Montessori movement. “A little healing needs to happen,” she says, “and we’ll all be working together again.”
Amanda Thomas-Castillo, who called the Xavier Lab School closing a “gut punch,” is now herself pleased as punch. Her child just graduated kindergarten at Bramble and will return for first grade in fall. “In terms of beautiful space,” she says, “I don’t think we could have found something more ideal.”
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