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.

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. 

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.

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.