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Inside the new Midtown Montessori School and how using green building blocks changed the lesson plan
Give a kid a fish, and his mom or dad can feed him for a day. But teach a classroom of children the progressive principles of sustainable living and whole food nutrition while following a unique methodology of child education, and the youngsters will carry the torch of health, environmental consciousness and responsibility down the long road of life – and perhaps even cook nutritious meals for their own parents along the way.  (L-R) Donna Saffren, Bryan Campbell and some young learners at Midtown Montessori School. Charles Mixson
But today, the building could be the most progressive in town. The school itself is a certified green business. It has been renovated with skylights, a kitchen modified for the use of kid-sized people, basic preschool amenities, and a garden and composting pile in back. Only four children currently attend the school, but the two teachers are streamlining their various programs as they prepare for a steady influx toward the school’s capacity of 26. According to one of its founders, Donna Saffren, Midtown Montessori adheres to the child development techniques developed and promoted by Dr. Maria Montessori, an early 20th-century Italian doctor who summed up her philosophy in her classic book, “The Absorbent Mind.”
“She taught the value of nature and surroundings in how a child pulls in information,” says Saffren. “We’re following those beliefs to teach our students sustainable living and environmentalism. These kids are absorbing everything like a sponge, and if we just surround them with reusable cloth napkins, recycling bins, whole natural foods, a garden, and terms like ‘organic’ and ‘green,’ they’ll pick it up on their own.”
Schools serve as a portal for such transference of information, and in children between 3 and 6 years of age, the brain is especially receptive. Dr. Montessori fully grasped this in her day, when she developed a system of sweeping orphans and urchins off the streets of Rome and putting them to good deeds at her schoolhouse, called the “Casa di Bambini.” She instilled knowledge and skills through engaging exercises and a stimulating environment while allowing the children to set their own pace and direct their own curriculum. The “Montessori Movement” even reached India and the Netherlands before it gained a solid footing in the United States in 1960. Before Montessori’s death in 1952 in the Netherlands, dictator Mussolini exiled the doctor for refusing to use her skills to design tactics for turning children into soldiers and devout servers of the state.
 Today, Midtown Montessori is among a growing number of schools—more than 5,000 nationwide—that model their curricula after Maria Montessori’s principles. There are no grades, the children are of blended ages, they direct their own education, the environment is liberal and collaborative, and the children work together in a bright, spacious, skylit room. Unlike at many public and private educational institutions, the young Midtown students are encouraged to work together and talk, building social skills while scraping the iceberg tips of large mathematical concepts, environmental philosophies, basic standards of nutrition and other subjects that they may explore more deeply several years down the road. For the kids of Midtown Montessori, understanding the virtues of brown rice—one of their daily lunch staples—over white rice or fully appreciating the simple skill of knowing how to cook may be years away, but such abilities and parcels of knowledge are the quiet seeds of self-empowerment and responsibility, says co-founder Bryan Campbell, who teaches alongside Saffren.
“Kids really want to do meaningful work, rather than just mimicking menial tasks or moving things from one place to another and back again. So, everything we do here has a practical purpose, and all the work in the kitchen teaches responsibility and practical everyday skills.”
The children are also engaged in math exercises developed by Dr. Montessori. Blind-folded, the youngest of them can identify cones, spheres and cubes, says Campbell. They also engage in games in which they arrange beads in squares and lines and in the process absorb a faint intuitive understanding of square roots and the Pythagorean theorem.
“They don’t really realize yet what they’re doing, but it’ll give them a basis for things they’ll be learning in a few years.”
Low counters, short tables and child-sized chairs—a concept which Dr. Montessori invented—facilitate kid cooperation in the kitchen, too, as food is a strong focus point at Midtown. Saffren and Campbell know that activity incites interest, and if there is one way to beckon a child to eat vegetables, it’s first having that child prepare them. And so the children make lunch every day, periodically with the help of chef Kevin Koebel, best known for his private chef service, Rogue Chefs. As the official school chef, he directs the children—his own daughter among them—in harvesting herbs and lemons from the garden, kneading whole-grain, gluten-free bread dough and following simple recipes. They make snacks like bananas coated with almond butter and raisins, and they whip up hearty soups and other entrees, all made with good stuff from Staff of Life. The activity gives the children a comprehension of what food really is and how it comes to their plates – which are never disposable and which the children themselves wash afterward.
“There’s no reason not to give kids foods like these,” says Campbell, who points out that buying and preparing healthy, whole foods in bulk is significantly cheaper than purchasing packaged, preservative-laden snacks.
“These are really little beings,” adds Saffren, who has worked at other schools where the trash bins pile high every day with junk food cartons and leftover food that no one wanted to eat and which no one cares s to compost. “Kids are strongly affected by their diet, and the foods that we promote make them calmer than kids at other schools. When kids eat fruit rollups or [those] boxed juices, their energy level shoots through the roof.”
 Saffren and Campbell secured the school’s location 10 months ago and began remodeling and landscaping in the fall. Hired hands removed several of the inside walls, creating an open, well-lit, one-room interior. A garden was planted among several lemon trees, and in February the innovative school came to life. By reducing water consumption, retrofitting lights and other equipment to conserve energy and minimizing solid waste output, the school has received green certification from the Monterey Bay area Green Business Program.
Montessori teaching methods are not commonly incorporated into education levels beyond middle school – but preschool is primetime for learning and social development, says Saffren, and she firmly believes in the Montessori philosophy as the best tool there is for sculpting responsible members of society.
“Look at our economy. In a business, you need negotiation, time-management and decision-making skills, and you need to be able to collaborate in a group and know your own strengths and weaknesses. All of this is happening invisibly in our classroom. The kids are constructing themselves. I’m watching it happen every day.” Learn more at midtownmontessori.com .
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