ABSTRACT
When a group of intrepid parent-educators first began to think about writing a charter for a new public Montessori school in the city of Oakland, California I was exhilarated. We were all educators in some form or another, but none of us had discovered Montessori until we were parents of preschoolers. As our kids prepared to enter the K-12 system we asked ourselves why Montessori was not an option, and from an equity perspective we thought the model could bring together a wide range of families, some of whom were not being well served with traditional public school offerings. We were drawn to the way the approach allowed for multi-age classrooms, self-paced learning, and support for the growth of the whole child, attending to his or her physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development. We quickly learned that there were many examples of public Montessori, particularly in the Midwest, in addition to several in California, and we sought to follow their lead to create a public Montessori option for families in Oakland.
