Membership for your mission
If you are reading this, you likely have some connection to the Public Montessori community. If not, by the time you finish perusing this issue, you will.
When the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS) seated its first Board in 2015, our then Board Chair Jeff Kutash said, “You start a movement by welcoming people in, not by keeping them out.” This is a motto we have lived by since—NCMPS is home to all things and people Public Montessori, no hoops, no barriers.
Coming out of our Public Montessori Conference last spring, it was also clear that people in this
community take enormous pride in being a part of it. Public Montessori is a community that is welcoming and nonjudgmental, where we trust others to be working alongside families and children within contexts that are similar in many ways and different in others. To quote one participant whom we hope speaks for many, “What I love about NCMPS is that I can come with my Montessori self, and my public school self, and I don’t have to code switch. I don’t have to change how I talk—I don’t have to explain myself to anybody.”
This fall we rolled out a membership program that holds both sentiments—a membership that
welcomes people in without keeping anyone out. Our memberships, school and individual, offer great
value and benefits to those who join, and we are already seeing increased access to capacity-building
courses. However, there are no products or services available only through membership. The complete
repertoire of NCMPS’ tools, offerings, and resources are available to everyone, as they were before and,
we hope, always will be.
Importantly, membership supports NCMPS’ ecosystem-building work. Initiatives such as the Montessori
Census, which is widely used by parents and cited by media; work and webinars on community
developments such as the recent Arizona study that got Montessori onto the list of state-approved reading curricula; our array of informal monthly coffees for a variety of roles from public-focused state
organizations to coaches, teachers, and more (check out Professional Learning on our website to join);
Teach Montessori for job postings; and this very publication, MontessoriPublic, for sharing our stories. This work is available to all, strengthens our community, and raises Public Montessori’s visibility and credibility with families, practitioners, policymakers, and advocacy experts.
If you want and are able to support an open community and NCMPS’ work to provide the resources and
tools to keep it growing, I hope you’ll consider joining today: public-montessori.org/ncmps-school-and-individual-memberships
Whether or not you are able to become a member this year, you are an important part of the Public
Montessori community. We can’t do our work without you and appreciate your support in all its forms.
Sara Suchman
Sara leads and directs the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector.
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