Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Greg Smith and Chris Schell inside the classroom that will be the short-term home of Creative Montessori School’s seventh and eighth grade program, beginning in 2018-2019.
Parents began asking Greg Smith about adding seventh and eighth grade classes to Creative Montessori School as soon as he became executive director three years ago. Now, the plans are being laid to make that happen.
“It was like Day 2,” Smith said of the first time a parent approached him.
CMS, located at 2800 Montessori Way, is planning to introduce the upper middle school grades to its curriculum beginning with the 2018-19 school year, Smith said. A few years of good student enrollment and retention, as well as a feasibility study that showed student demand, prompted the change. The classes will only be open to students who enrolled in the younger grades and age into the program, not students whose first introduction to Montessori education will be at seventh grade.
The school hired Chris Schell, who has a background with starting and teaching in a similar program in Georgia, in July to develop and implement the adolescent program. Schell said this year he is working on special projects with fourth through sixth grade students as well, before the first seventh and eighth graders arrive in their classrooms next school year.
The curriculum will include all the standards of math, science, history and languages, but Schell said they will also include the “practical life” skills that Montessori education emphasizes, such as building and fixing things, community involvement and individualized, self-directed projects based on each student’s interests. Emotional and social skills are as much a part of the education as academics, Schell said.
“The program is that you’re moving, you’re doing stuff, you’re building, you’re experimenting, you’re researching, but you’re definitely on the move,” Schell said.
A major piece of the seventh and eighth grade program is having a building for the new classrooms. This year, CMS is renting the bottom floor of a nearby building to use as working space for Schell and the younger classes’ special projects. It is continuing its fundraising campaign to have a building ready for students within a couple years.
Schell said he envisions the new building having plenty of windows and access to hands-on learning environments and natural space, such as vegetable gardens.
Smith said parents have been asking to add these two grades because they liked both the school and the Montessori education, and they wanted to extend that for two more years.
“Demand’s there, interest’s there,” Smith said.
Tuition for seventh and eighth grade will be higher than it is for students 18 months through sixth grade because of the more complex curriculum and need for more staffing, Smith said.
To learn more about the plans for the seventh and eighth grade program, visit cmskids.org.
