Ozark Education to Open Preschool in Fayetteville

Former public school teacher Christi Silano believes the Montessori teaching and learning method — traditionally reserved for those who could afford private school — is the most effective education model available.

As executive director of the nonprofit Ozark Education Inc., she intends to bring that curriculum to children across Northwest Arkansas, regardless of their economic backgrounds.

Ozark Education’s efforts have been bolstered by supporters that include the Walton Family Foundation, and it is off to a running start.

One semester after classes started at its K–6 charter school — Ozark Montessori Academy in Springdale — Ozark Education is setting its sights on Fayetteville. It has plans to open a Montessori preschool and training center within the next year and is exploring the option of launching a charter school there also, Silano said.

OMA opened in August as the first public Montessori school in Arkansas. Another charter, Rockridge Montessori School in Little Rock, came in a close second, opening just a few days later. (Charter schools receive public funding but operate independently of the public school system.)

OMA initially opened in the Jones Center for Families, while renovations were finished on the new facility, located at the former Decision Point building on Holcomb Street.

The property underwent a $6 million renovation that was funded by an organization that supports school choice but that wants the donation source to remain anonymous, Silano said.

Classes started at the new location this month.

At the Jones Center in 2014, Silano opened Ozark Kids Preschool, which served as a springboard and teacher training center for OMA.

The preschool received $110,000 in startup funding from the Walton Foundation, and OMA received more than $300,000 in 2015.

Luis Gonzalez, senior home region communications director for the foundation, said it gave $1.24 million to form six new charter schools in Arkansas that year, adding to the 62 total charter schools it has backed in the state, rounding out its investment to $13.97 million.

“This grant is helping English language learners, students with learning disabilities and low-income students in the Springdale area,” he said.

However, it’s important to Silano that parents of potential students understand that underserved populations are not the only demographic Ozark Education wants in its schools.

Her previous experience working with at-risk students in an alternative classroom at the high school level has led Silano to believe that students perform better and are better socialized when there is diversity in the classroom. 

“I believe that as a society and as a culture, we need to mix kids, not just based on ethnicity, but also based on economic status,” Silano said, adding that the key is not to have separate classrooms or schools for different skill levels, but to have separate learning tracks.

 

A Montissori Desert

Recently, Ozark Education was awarded another $100,000 Walton grant for its efforts in Fayetteville “to support the enhancement of Montessori training and provide strong school leadership,” Gonzalez said.

Ozark Education is currently enrolling students for the Fayetteville preschool. It will be based in a 19th-century home the nonprofit is leasing-to-own on a 12-acre property — complete with fishing pond and wooded areas — on East Huntsville Avenue.

As she did in Springdale, Silano plans to hire experienced teachers, regardless of previous Montessori training, and put them into an online Montessori teaching program.

“[The Fayetteville preschool] will start out as a hybrid program, which is not ideal for a Montessori school,” she said.

However, all teachers will be under the supervision of a Montessori trainer, and Silano said the system makes sense because the region is, as she puts it, “a Montessori desert.”

Silano believes the most successful Montessori programs are the ones that adhere closely to the original model, and she aims for all of the Ozark Education programs to be American Montessori accredited — an achievement that cannot be reached until a school has been in operation three years and one that has only been met by one educational institution in Arkansas.

“We hope to be the second. We’re working fast and furiously on that,” Silano said.

Teachers at OMA are immersed in training, which includes two summers at the Institute for Montessori Innovation at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and a one-year internship.

Mentors from Westminster check in at the school periodically, and teachers have three-hour refreshers via Skype every other week.

“Teachers must physically demonstrate knowledge of hundreds of hands-on lessons that have to be delivered perfectly,” Silano said. “It’s no accident. It’s nothing like what teachers experience in training colleges.”

 

‘A Better Way’

Before starting Ozark Education, Silano worked for several years with a broad range of students in the Northwest Arkansas public education system, from at-risk youth to some of the highest achieving students in the high school. She determined there was room for major improvement in the system, for students across the board.

In hopes of finding a better way to educate, Silano went back to school. In 2012, she earned a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction, with a focus on dropout prevention, alternative schools and secondary literacy, from the University of Arkansas.

Silano said traditional public schools allow for students to use short-term memory to get an A on the test and forget the information the next day, “but that’s not real learning.”

“Learning is getting something embedded in the long-term memory,” she added. “True education comes through the heart and it comes through the hands.”

She decided to open a school, and the first step was to find a curriculum that favored hands-on learning and other principles her research showed to be effective.

From her perspective, no other curriculum comes close to the quality of the one developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori in the late 19th century. It meets the needs of the whole child, physically, mentally and spiritually — but not in a religious way, she said.

“It shows respect for the spirit of the child. The spirit of the child is to want to move and explore and follow their own interests and own curiosities,” she said.

“The factory-model schools, as they were designed in the United States, do a pretty good job of quenching that spirit from an early age. And that’s why you have so many children who either come to dislike school or hate school, or you have children who have become passive learners, who do what they’re told, and oftentimes do the minimum of what is required of them,” Silano said. “For those of us who are dedicated to the Montessori model, we believe that there’s a better way, that human beings by nature are learners and curious and love to explore.”

Silano said the traditional public school model of shuttling students to different subjects “is potentially disrupting processing that is going on in their little heads and their little hearts.”

OMA utilizes three-hour, uninterrupted work cycles, aiming for two per day. “The morning work period is sacred. Any Montessori school worth its salt has that,” she added.

Another hallmark of Montessori teaching is the prepared environment, “where every student and teacher knows exactly where every little bead, every little pencil and rug goes, creating a sense of order,” she said. 

Montessori enthusiasts believe education is advanced by making school a desirable, comfortable place, “not that institutional feel we’re all so familiar with,” she said.

Finally, Silano pointed to what she says is another beneficial practice of Montessori teaching: mixed-age classrooms.

OMA offers lower-elementary and upper-elementary courses, rather than single-year grades, and Silano said the three-year relationship developed with a teacher prevents clunky transitions.

“Staying with the same teacher, they know that student, inside and out. There’s not that lost learning time,” she said, adding that the students learn from older role models and experience leadership by teaching younger students.

While not speaking specifically on mixed-age classrooms, Silano said public educators know many philosophies behind the Montessori method to be true, but have a difficult time implementing them within the stystem, where instructional methods come and go, and are often market-driven.

She is among a number of individuals, along with organizations like Montessori for Social Justice and the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, who support public Montessori education.

As of 2014, there were 439 public Montessori schools in the U.S., with 14 of those schools opening that year, according to the NCMPS.

The tally does not include OMA, Rockridge and others that opened in 2015.

Silano said Ozark Education programs have received overwhelming response from the community, with 400 applicants for 120 spots at OMA, prompting it to seek approval from the Arkansas Department of Education to offer 20 additional seats in July.

Next fall, OMA will bring in 200 more students, adding additional elementary classes and also seventh grade. The following year, eighth grade will be added.

And if Ozark Education intends to continue expansion of its Montessori charter schools, it will likely find a willing funding partner in the Walton Foundation.

A representative of the foundation told the Associated Press on Jan. 7 it will spend $1 billion in the next five years on backing new and already-running charter schools in the U.S.