# data[].attributes.body
Mae-Arlene Gadpaille used a $20,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to start the Montessori Family Center in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood - a predominantly black community. She was dedicated to Montessori education, and said "My job is to wake up America, and we can, if we wake up every child under six." Gadpaille's Montessori Family Center was designed for Roxbury's working-class Black families. She used Head Start funding, which allowed half of the students to attend tuition free in a full-day, year-round program. In 1968, she took 20 of her pre-schoolers along with their families to Africa. The purpose of this trip was to connect with the Montessori great lessons: "The children say that everyone in the world is African, because we all came from Africa." Gadpaille wanted to develop the cultural identity of Black children, and envisioned a community of 150 Black-owned homes built around a Montessori for children from birth to age 18. She fundraised tirelessly for this vision, and continued to be inspired throughout her life by the way that Montessori education could transform the lives of Black children living in poverty. Her Montessori Family Center remained open until she retired in 1990 at the age of 85.

# data[].attributes.body
1931-1973
Hakim Jamal started a Montessori School in Compton , CA in 1968.
He compared the plight of the children in the slums of San Lorenzo to the plight of black children in the United States. He saw Montessori Education as path to liberation for black children and their families. He believed in the focus on educating the whole child, including learning about the history of your own culture and to be proud of who they are.
by Stephanie Pullman

# data[].attributes.body
Lenore Briggs, mother of six adult children, founded Lefferts Gardens Montessori School. Her interest in Montessori education began as a young teacher in Grenada, where she was born. Lenore’s energetic, vivacious, can-do, dedicated nature, finds expression in her love for humanity, especially in the enjoyment of teaching young children.

After emigrating to New York City in 1965, many years later in 1973, she opened a home daycare center which grew into a preschool and kindergarten entitled, Mom’s Center for Early Childhood Development Incorporated and located at 559 Rogers Avenue in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood. After graduating from New York University with a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Montessori Education in 1986, she renamed Mom’s Center as Lefferts Gardens Montessori School, LGM.

Her vision for LGM was to serve the Prospect Lefferts Gardens Community with a highly qualitative, moderately priced, early childhood Montessori school. Soon after the school was formed the parents created the Parent Activity Group (PAG) to support their children’s education and to promote fundraising.  PAG operated as an independent group in order to provide an open forum for parents, as well as to create proposals for the school year. Today PAG continues to serve the LGM community of parents and teachers.

Lenore received several awards and was recognized on many occasions for her achievement and contribution to the community, including a citation from the Brooklyn Borough President’s office.

Excerpt from Lefferts Garden Montessori <http://www.mylgm.com/history.html>  © Lefferts Gardens Montessori   |   All Rights Reserved

# data[].attributes.body
Roslyn started the Urban Child Program, which bused 126 Black and White students to racially diverse Montessori preschools in New York City, starting in 1964.  Williams thought that Montessori should go from being "the rich child's right" to "the poor child's opportunity" (Mira Debs: Diverse Families, Desirable Schools).  Roslyn Williams started the first Black-led Montessori teacher training program in the United States.  She worked with the American Montessori Society and a local community college to develop this program. She founded the Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents (CHAMP) which was responsible for the teacher training program as well as schools from the pre-school through elementary ages.  CHAMP provided wrap around services long before these were common, offering an on-site nurse, doctor, and social worker.  CHAMP school classrooms were named after civil rights leaders.  Harlem families were enthusiastic about CHAMP, however fundraising for the schools was onerous, and it was challenging to keep CHAMP running.  Roslyn was even forced to choose between paying a teacher or purchasing the oil needed to heat her home.  She chose to pay the teacher!  CHAMP's pre-school closed in 1995 due to the toll fundraising was taking.  The teacher training program was moved to a Montessori school in Manhattan's Upper
West Side.

# data[].attributes.body
At A Glance - West Side Montessori School (wsmsnyc.org)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1967, Project CHAMP (Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents) was founded by Roslyn D. Williams to prepare parents to become active participants in their child's education and to increase the pool of Montessori teachers in New York City. CHAMP was the first AMS Teacher Education Program affiliated in New York City and the first African American established Montessori TEP in the US. WSMS faculty and administrators, along with faculty from other Montessori schools, taught for Project CHAMP in those early years.

In September 1994, the WSMS Board of Trustees voted to move Project CHAMP under the umbrella of WSMS to ensure the legacy of Montessori teacher preparation in NYC. At that time, the name was changed to West Side Montessori School - Teacher Education Program. For many years, WSMS-TEP offered a program to prepare adults to earn the AMS Early Childhood credential. In 2012, the Infant Toddler level was added in response to local need. Crucially aware of the expanding worldwide need for high-quality Montessori educators over a broader range of ages, WSMS-TEP expanded to add the Elementary I (6-9), I-II (6-12), and II (9-12) levels in partnership with Metropolitan Montessori School. The first cohort of Elementary began in 2016. The Administrator program, which prepares adults for leadership positions in Montessori schools, accepted the inaugural cohort in 2017. WSMS-TEP was one of the first programs in the US to add the Montessori Inclusion Endorsement to prepare credentialed Montessori teachers to serve children with exceptional needs. Additional Locations have been added to support the growth of Montessori teacher preparation in Shanghai, Whitehouse Station, NY, and Buffalo, NY.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
At A Glance - West Side Montessori School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1967, Project CHAMP (Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents) was founded by Roslyn D. Williams to prepare parents to become active participants in their child's education and to increase the pool of Montessori teachers in New York City.

# data[].attributes.body
(above pictured with Elisabeth Caspari)
Feland Meadows was born and raised in Mexico and is bilingual and bicultural. After Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Meadows served as President of the College of the Humanities in Mexico City and as Ford Foundation Consultant for University Reform to five Central American National Universities.  He also is a founder of the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua.

When his five-year-old daughter needed a better education, Dr. Meadows visited a Montessori school in Mexico City.  He sat on the floor in a classroom one whole morning watching 3, 4 and 5 year-old children working independently, at their own initiative, with little or no intervention by the teacher.  He enrolled his daughter in that school and soon decided that he needed to change careers.

In 1970, he resigned his position as college President, employed five teachers trained in Italy and opened Sunny Hill Montessori School in Mexico City. The school served 250 children from six weeks to twelve years of age and they learned to speak Spanish, English, French and Japanese.

In 1972, Dr. Meadows met Elisabeth Caspari, who had studied and worked with Dr. Maria Montessori in India for four years.  He invited her to go to Mexico City to train him and 150 other teachers.  She stayed and helped him train many more teachers for four years.  During the seventies, Dr. Meadows had a great deal to do with improving the quality of Early Childhood Development and Education in Mexico.

As a consultant to two Mexican Presidents, Dr. Meadows researched and documented the devastating effects of malnutrition and the lack of stimulation upon the development and intelligence of millions of children who live in poverty in Mexico.
In response to his study, the Presidents ordered all Government Ministries to increase  food services to children in poverty throughout the country.

Dr. Meadows trained Otomi and Nahuatl Speaking Candidates as Bilingual Teachers. With these teachers, he established 125 Bilingual (Spanish and Otomi or Nahuatl) Montessori Schools under thatched roofs in Indian villages where no schools had ever been before. Dr. Meadows helped to train five hundred Nahuatl Speaking Indian Women. These women mastered skills in community sanitation, childbirth, child development, nutrition, horticulture, raising rabbits and bee keeping. These women became effective change agents in their villages!

Dr. Meadows transformed hundreds of Government Child-Care Centers in Mexico from child storage warehousing facilities, where children became retarded for lack of stimulation, into Child Development Centers, where millions of children have received stimulating, developmentally appropriate experiences and education for the last thirty years.

In 1983, Dr. Meadows moved to California where he served as Coordinator for Montessori Education for the Irvine Unified School District.  He secured $4,600,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Education to fund an Early Intervention Program to Prevent School Failure for one hundred and seventy five at-risk 3-5 year-old children from Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Farsi and Spanish speaking communities in Irvine.

In 1995, Dr. Meadows moved to Georgia to prepare one hundred and fifty teachers for the State Pre-K Program.  He stayed on to prepare many more teachers while serving for seven years as the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation’s Distinguished Chair of Early Childhood Education at Fort Valley Sate University.

Dr. Meadows served on the Georgia State Professional Standards Commission’s Early Childhood Advisory Council from 1997-98 and on its Zero to Five Taskforce in 2003.  He proposed that the PSC create a separate credential, based upon a bachelor’s degree program of preparation, for teachers who serve children from zero to five years of age.  In response to a groundswell of support for this proposal, the Professional Standards Commission established a credential for 0-5 teachers on September 14, 2004!

Dr. Meadows has prepared more than two thousand five hundred teachers to serve children from birth to five years of age in the states of Georgia, Florida and California, and abroad in Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, France and Switzerland.

**Excerpt from the Pan American Montessori Society website <http://www.montessori-pams.org/about/founders/feland-l-meadows/>  Copyright 2020. Pan American Montessori Society, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

# data[].attributes.body
Martha M. Urioste is a pioneer in the field of education. Recognized for her work with Montessori education, she is the first and only principal to pioneer a Montessori elementary school, making Denison Montessori Elementary School a national model in the public sector. Urioste is also the founder and former president of Family Star, a national 0 – 3 Early Head Start Center based on the Montessori research model. She wrote the Foreign Language in Elementary Schools Guide in 1962 and developed 32 lessons on Hispanic culture for Rocky Mountain PBS in 1963. Urioste was among the first Hispanic-American counselors in the Denver Public Schools and was the first secondary bilingual coordinator.

Excerpt from Colorado Women's Hall of Fame <https://www.cogreatwomen.org/project/martha-m-urioste/ >  © 2020 Colorado Women's Hall of Fame. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.body
Luwannia Johnson-Martin was the PTA president of Building Blocks Interdistict Montessori in Hartford, CT in 1992 when she learned that the outgoing superintendent was planning to close her daughter's program at Building Blocks.  The concern from the superintendent was that the school was not enrolling enough white West Hartford students.  Luwannia appealed to the new superintendent who agreed to keep the program provided that the parents and teachers could find the money.  Luwianna, who was a single parent at that time, used her connections through her bar-tending job to raise $50,000 which saved the school.  The Building Blocks school is now the Capitol Region Education Council Montessori Magnet School.

# data[].attributes.body
Ayize is a dynamic social entrepreneur, researcher, author, and twenty-five-year veteran educator.  He has co-founded several non-profits, including an independent school, a White House award-winning non-profit organization, and a Montessori public charter school in Washington, DC. Dr. Ayize is an alumnus of Morehouse College, the Wesley Theological Seminary, and Morgan State University. He has also completed his Montessori primary assistant training at WMI. Dr. Ayize is the Head of School at Willow Oak Montessori, a Board member of WMI, and several other educational organizations.  One of his research article’s is up at MontessoriPublic.org: No More Hidden Figures: Black Montessori History.

# data[].attributes.body
Tiffany Jewell is a Black biracial writer, twin sister, first generation American, cisgender mama, anti-bias antiracist (ABAR) educator, and consultant. She is the author of the #1 New York Times and #1 Indie Best Seller, This Book Is Anti-Racist, a book for young folks [and everyone] to support waking up, taking action, and doing the work of becoming antiracist. Tiffany is currently working on multiple book projects for readers of all ages.

She has been working with children and families for over eighteen years and worked as a Montessori educator for fifteen years. She enjoys exploring social justice with young folks, especially the history of racism and resistance, economic justice, and socially and personally constructed identities. Tiffany enjoys working with educators and supporting them building strong, authentic communities in which every child can be seen and valued. She is the co-founder, alongside Britt Hawthorne, of ABARatHome/ABARAtSchool, an organization that strives to support educators and caregivers in their anti-bias anti-racist journeys. She also served as the president of the founding board of the national organization, Montessori for Social Justice- seeing it through to completing nonprofit status and creating a strong mission to support and amplify Montessorian of the Global Majority across the country.

# data[].attributes.body
Marina Sáenz Luna is a Queer, historically detribalized Indigenous educator and community animator from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, who has been working with young people since 1999. She spent many years dedicated to the struggle for dignity and respect for farmworkers through the Campaign for Fair Food, led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Marina has been teaching lower elementary in a Montessori environment since 2014. She has a Montessori 6-12 certification (lower and upper elementary) as well as a Texas teaching certificate. In the summer of 2020, Marina launched a Social Justice training course for elementary teachers and parents of elementary-aged students that examined Montessori education through the lens of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.

# data[].attributes.body
Judge Johnson was elected to the bench on November 2, 2021. Prior to taking the bench, Judge Johnson served as a sole practitioner focusing on criminal defense, plaintiff's litigation and probate law. Before joining the private bar, Judge Johnson served as a Public Defender and Housing Attorney.

Judge Johnson is a native of Cincinnati. He's a Cincinnati Public Schools graduate from Clark Montessori High School, a Howard University graduate, and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, College of Law.

Judge Johnson is very active in the community. He's a lifetime member of the Cincinnati NAACP and Black Lawyers Association of Cincinnati. He is also very active with the Cincinnati Academy of Leadership for Lawyers (CALL). He is passionate about youth and serves as a mentor to students and young attorneys.