Photo courtesy of Melinda Bray.
0813 Stonecreek Montessori
Stonecreek Montessori students participate in a game night this summer to bond before the school year begins.
When it opens this month, Stonecreek Montessori School will bring two missing puzzles piece to Birmingham: a nonreligious school that covers all grades and a Montessori curriculum for high school.
Students of all ages will be taught on an individualized path of learning at the school.
When studying history, they will analyze primary and secondary sources and ask how valid a source is, developing skills to support opinions with evidence. Teachers want them to developing healthy habits, not just memorize facts.
Likewise, math focuses more on understanding number concepts than memorizing multiplication tables.
The school puts emphasis on not just traditional scholastic learning but on application. Fourth through sixth graders will research and plan their own field trips. Younger students will apply their math skills on trips to the grocery store.
Enrollment for the school’s inaugural year is currently at about 60 students, but Director Melinda Bray said it hopes to more than double that number as they grow, capping at around 160 students and always maintaining a 15:1 student-teacher ratio.
For this first year, 11 students enrolled are high-school age, and 14 are middle-school age. Much like Montessori elementary schools, these students will learn in paired groupings of grades seven and eight, grades nine and 10, and grades 11 and 12.
“Teachers can go faster on a topic when they are honed in on where each student is,” Bray said.
The specific vision for the school came from Connie Edwards, a mom who had seen her second grader flourish in a year of Montessori schooling and desired for him to have a similar high school experience.
Since planning for the school got off the ground in the spring, Edwards has served as its volunteer Chief Operating Officer, while fellow mom Ream Shoreibanh heads up marketing for the school and Anne Stanton, who has an MBA from Harvard University, heads up the business end on a volunteer basis.
Students refer to these three and Bray as the “founding mothers.”
“We are moms who dream of creating a healthy community for our children,” Bray said. “Most of our teachers are moms, too.”
Their maternal perspective has influenced much of how they structured the school. For instance, Stonecreek offers “specialized PE” with gymnastics, soccer, karate and other athletic activities during the school day instead of allowing these these sorts of lessons and practices to eat into family time in the evenings.
Bray, who originally planned to attend law school, stumbled into education while teaching in Switzerland after college.
There she found her 10-year-old students asking her questions like, “Why you do things like flip a fraction in math?” These, she discovered, were questions she, a college graduate, could not answer.
It was this experience that sparked a lifelong quest to help students learn better, a quest that brought her to earn a doctorate in education at Vanderbilt and then continue to study how students learn — the fruit of which led her to teach and lead Montessori schools in Birmingham and now start a pioneering journey.
“I always wanted to be a director of a school but never thought I’d start one of my own,” Bray said. “It’s a dream come true to work with these teachers.”
Most Stonecreek students are coming out of other Montessori schools, but some are looking for something new to go at their own pace — generally either because they are ahead in school or have learning disabilities and are looking for a different approach to learning.
All students will also participate in a service project once a week. To start with, they will have three options of nonprofit organizations, but they will be encouraged to develop their own interests from there with the help of a corporate life skills coach turned teacher (who is also a mom of students).
Particularly unique to the school will be learning Spanish in an immersion setting. Students will speak only Spanish with their Spanish teacher and will do so for a full hour each day, though some of that time might be spent playing on the playground with him.
A majority of students who attend existing Montessori schools through middle school go on to enroll at Indian Springs School or The Altamont School, according to Bray, but Stonecreek wants to offer both a more affordable option and one that provides an opportunity to study at a depth appropriate to each individual student.
The “founding mothers” want the school to be more than a school, too. They envision to be a tight-knit community.
And indeed this sense of community has already come to life this summer as they unpacked $200,000 worth of Montessori materials in warehouse together on Tuesday nights and gathered for game nights and pool parties with their families — just as they plan to continue to camp, hike and do more together throughout the year.
As a part of Stonecreek, parents will teach parents and kids what they are learning at “community café” events, and twice a semester where students perform a song, recite a poem or otherwise celebrate what they have learned in a sort of mini talent show called a “Montessori moment.” Parents will also join the school for lunch once a month.
“Research shows that families are healthy when they eat, play and read together,” Bray said. “So we wanted do to that as a school family.”
The school will temporarily be housed in Christ Church United Methodist off Caldwell Mill Road behind Spain Park High School while it looks for a permanent location in the 119/Valleydale area where it can be central to students coming from Ross Bridge, Riverchase, Greystone and other areas.
For more information, visit stonecreekmontessori.org.
