50 years of public Montessori in Milwaukee
By Phil Dosmann
A flagship district Montessori program celebrates
Milwaukee has a history of Montessori education going back to at least 1961. On February 10, 2024, Milwaukee Public Schools celebrated 50 years of public Montessori. Over 2,000 current and former students and teachers, families, and staff attended the event. Students demonstrated Montessori materials, students from each public Montessori school performed songs and dances, school timelines were displayed, and proclamations were given by the Milwaukee mayor and state superintendent of schools.
Hildegard Solzbacher, AMI teacher trainer, helped establish Montessori education in Milwaukee by training Montessori primary teachers on nights and weekends while she opened Milwaukee Montessori School (1961), the first private AMI Montessori school in the city. Solzbacher also publicly advocated for Montessori, notably through a series of public lectures at Marquette University. Other private programs followed, including Highland Community School in 1968, Penfield’s Via Maci program in 1968 and Downtown Montessori in 1975. These private programs became the grassroots motivation for Montessori education in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
In 1973, Solzbacher worked with Milwaukee Public Schools Early Childhood Specialist Grace Iacolucci to launch a pilot “kindergarten” program with four half-day classes of four- and five-year-olds at two separate schools, the first public Montessori schools in Wisconsin and among the first in the nation. Parents from all areas of Milwaukee came together to lobby and solicit the MPS Board for a Montessori program.
Desegregation and magnet schools
Milwaukee, and its school system, were heavily segregated up through the 1950s and 60s—“a 1960 report concluded that Milwaukee had the most pronounced pattern of racial separation in the nation,” according to Wisconsin Lawyer, the official publication of the State Bar of Wisconsin. Starting in 1958, MPS began a program of “intact bussing” from overcrowded Black schools, in which the district bussed groups of Black students intact with their teachers to white schools with available classrooms. In some cases, the intact class was bussed back to their neighborhood school to eat lunch as they were not allowed to eat in the school cafeteria with the white students.
In 1964, Black attorney, Assemblyman, and Milwaukee NAACP President Lloyd Barbee began a years-long campaign to desegregate and equalize MPS schools through demands, negotiations, boycotts, marches, demonstrations, and ultimately a lawsuit. The case came to trial in 1973, and was decided in 1976, curtailing busing and providing federal funding for specialty “magnet” schools to attract and retain white students in Black neighborhoods.
As a result of this 1976 ruling, the four Montessori satellite classrooms were moved to MacDowell, at 17th and Highland, to become the first city-wide Montessori program. As a city-wide program students received bussing from any place in the city of Milwaukee.
Long wait lists to gain entry to MacDowell resulted in the community lobbying the school board for another Montessori school. Greenfield Montessori on the near south side was opened in the fall of 1983. Greenfield quickly filled the open seats and another popular MPS Montessori program was born.
For the remainder of the 1980s and into the early 90s, MacDowell and Greenfield were the only public Montessori programs in the district. In 1995, new MPS School Board members were elected who were seeking ways to expand quality programs and to stem loss of enrollment to charter and suburban schools. As a result, Craig Montessori was established in 1996. For the first time, a Montessori trained administrator was appointed as the Craig principal. Craig began with 200 PK3 and PK4 students and grew to serve over 550 students by 2010.
Also in the early 1990s, there was a growing movement to provide opportunities for voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee. Highland Community School, a private Montessori school with a parent board since 1968, was granted a charter in 1996. Highland’s charter established the school as the first non-instrumentality MPS charter school.
In the late 1990s, school board members who saw the merits of Montessori education began lobbying for Montessori programs in their districts. Maryland Avenue Montessori on the eastside opened in 2001 as a school within a school while the traditional program was phased out over the next seven years. Maryland‘s location on the east side near University of Wisconsin Milwaukee was a popular program that quickly became oversubscribed. In the early 2000s MPS funded a Neighborhood School Initiative which moved Greenfield to Fernwood Montessori on the southside and established that all future Montessori programs would be PK3 to 8th grade, allowing the schools to keep 6-8th graders. Fernwood quickly became a very popular program serving students from the southeast side of Milwaukee. Over 1000 students were attending Montessori programs by 2003, but demand continued.
In 2006, with the use of funds from the Gates Foundation Teacher-Run Schools’ initiative, the superintendent established the Montessori High School as an International Baccalaureate Montessori capstone program. Grant funds were used for teachers to receive NAMTA Orientation to the Adolescent training. The high school struggled at the original site in a multiplex with three other small school programs, so it lobbied and was moved to Juneau HS, a school that had closed a few years prior. A new superintendent who was not a fan of teacher-run programs closed the program, but allowed it to merge with MacDowell in 2011, establishing the first PK3 to 12th grade Montessori program under the direction of a Montessori trained administrator.
The next MPS program was a small partnership program at a church site in the Garden Holmes neighborhood an impoverished area of Milwaukee. The program was started by two Montessori teachers with the help of a board member who desired additional programs to serve all children in MPS. This program only lasted a few years, but paved the way for a program at a nearby neighborhood MPS school, Garden Holmes. This program was established in 2008 and renamed Lloyd Barbee Montessori in honor of the man that helped desegrate MPS schools.
Fernwood continued to have long wait lists. School board member and a Fernwood parent from the Bayview district, established Howard Avenue in 2012. The program was established at a small building on Howard Ave. on the far south side of Milwaukee. The program flourished and there was need for further expansion. A nearby MPS vacant school was quickly identified as a site for expansion. The small building on Howard Ave became a primary lower campus and the new building became the upper campus, serving students in the lower grades and grew to 8th grade in 2023. Both campuses were renamed Bayview Montessori.
The most recent MPS Montessori program was developed in 2012 when a group of current and retired Montessori teachers began to solicit board members to establish a bilingual Montessori program at Riley School on the near south side serving the Hispanic community. The initial proposal was for a district teacher-run charter Bilingual Montessori program, but that was modified to a district Montessori program at the Riley School location, opening in 2017 with two primary Montessori classrooms as a dual language Montessori school. Riley phased out the traditional program over a few years and is currently 6th grade top growing to 8th grade.
One of the most significant developments for the Montessori programs occurred with the formation of the Montessori Advisory Committee (MAC) in 2014. This group was led by a powerful parent group that was trained in advocacy. The outcome was a draft of a strategic plan that addressed several points that would support the current programs. Large groups of parents and staff attended school board meetings and gave public testimony about the merits of the Montessori experience for their children. Students even testified to how the Montessori program enhanced their love of learning.
The first MPS Montessori strategic plan was adopted and put in place in 2015, establishing outcomes and funding that supported the eight MPS Montessori schools. They included:
- creation of a unified professional development plan
- a mentor/coaching program for all new Montessori teachers
- marketing and branding the programs
- expansion plans for new Montessori schools
- cultivation of Montessori leadership, where all Montessori administrators become trained in the method
- identifying and financing Montessori teacher training, which established the first in-house MPS AMI Montessori training program in 2024
- train all Montessori middle and high school staff
- establish a central office Montessori coordinator to recruit teachers and support all facets of the Montessori programs
The eight Montessori programs in MPS support over 150 Montessori trained teachers and over 4,000 children and families. Montessori education is the only specialty program that was replicated in MPS from the initial magnet funds that were appropriated in the late 70s to stem families leaving MPS and Milwaukee. Montessori education has proven itself to create an opportunity for a high need, at risk population of low-income students to bridge the academic gaps that typically occur in public education. The Milwaukee community is grateful to all who have contributed to the expansion of Montessori education in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Phillip Dosmann
Philip Dosmann is the past Executive Director of the Wisconsin Montessori Association and has served as a teacher, coach, and principal in Milwaukee Public Montessori for more than 30 years.