Where We Stand, and Why We Need Your Help

The Hawk Meadow Montessori School in Poughkeepsie, NY is in its ninth year of existence. A certified Montessori institution, the school employs about two-dozen women, teaching 85 children from toddlers through 9th grade. While running a for-profit, taxpaying business, the school’s two owner/directors, Erin Castle and Barbara Katavolos, have built a reputation for fairness, inclusiveness and generosity in helping families and children who have struggled with public school systems and other private institutions. Children from as far as 50 miles away – many of them with dyslexia or having been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD or other learning disorders – are driven or bused daily to the school, and are flourishing in fully integrated classes with children for whom learning comes more easily. Values are stressed in the effort to mold decent, caring, compassionate, tolerant human beings. These efforts work.

Some families pay the full tuition, while a growing number pay half or less. All children are given tennis and golf lessons, along with skiing, fencing and parkour, with music, art, Spanish and French. Upper elementary and middle school kids are provided an annual opportunity to participate in the Montessori Model United Nations program in New York City, a hugely beneficial – and hugely expensive – endeavor.

This generosity of spirit, while admirable, has not led to what one could call a sustainable business model. Until this year, the business efforts of Castle and Katavolos were quietly underwritten by both their families, to the tune of about $600,000 over an eight-year period, covering shortfalls in what has become a $1 million annual budget. This year, the era of family support is coming to a soft landing.

To help fill the gap, a nonprofit Hawk Meadow Montessori School Foundation has in the past month been formed, to spread the school’s story and to attract donations. Meanwhile the school is paying $15,000 per month to rent a space that no longer meets its needs and is becoming an increasing liability. Hawk Meadow has since its inception nestled uncomfortably in the rear of an industrial-looking office park building, and has been actively seeking to purchase a suitable permanent home for the entire time, the past two years with an increasing sense of urgency. The search has now become critical as the building’s owners, responding to the looming specter of losing their largest tenant, chose the opening week of the 2016/17 school year to launch a massive, disruptive building and property renovation, closing parking lots, hindering electric, heat and Internet service and rendering the school effectively unable to attract its lifeblood: new families with young children to replace those aging out of the toddler-to-middle-school program. Families that have had a long history with the school are saying that, if Hawk Meadow is not occupying a suitable property by next year, they will be leaving. Others have already left for the same reason.

The bottom line is that the school, with many lives entwined in it and banking on its continued success, needs considerable outside help to continue and flourish. Fortunately, there is much reason for optimism already. In researching possibilities for these remarkable women, I found that the Montessori way of teaching, once considered offbeat and decidedly “alternative,” has hit the mainstream nationally, partly because Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin went on Barbara Walters a few years ago and unabashedly blamed all of their fabulous success on their Montessori schooling. What is being dubbed a “Montessori Mafia” of famous entrepreneurial geniuses, including but not limited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, video game legend Will Wright, Wikipedia wizard Jimmy Wales, Julia Child and P. Diddy, also sing the praises of their schooling. And the Montessori firmament was recently lifted into the stratosphere, thanks to a group of Silicon Valley investors trying to, in the words of a Wired magazine article published last year, “save education” in the United States. Wired reported that an organization called AltSchool, founded in 2013 by former Google executive Max Ventilla, had just been infused with $100 million from a fund spearheaded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has been, in the magazine’s words, “emerging as one of the country’s most generous philanthropists and a leading activist for school reform.” The other investors in AltSchool, which calls itself “Montessori 2.0” by reason of its employment of computer technology and a cadre of engineers to provide centralized technical support to teachers and administrators, include eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs.

While all of this sudden buzz about their chosen methodology is welcome, the largesse and attention has thus far failed to trickle down to the hardworking, committed founders of Hawk Meadow, toiling in the trenches on the cutting edge of Montessori 1.0. What AltSchool seeks to be doing by opening up storefront schools in urban areas, the women have a golden opportunity to do right here in the Hudson Valley on a large local scale: create a prototype for a cross-culturally unifying, peace and understanding-oriented, urban/suburban/rural educational blueprint for others to follow, be they public, private, or a hybrid of both.

One of the major thrusts of the Hawk Meadow Montessori School Foundation is reaching out to these forward-thinking individuals and entities for funding and to form partnerships. AltSchool is actively soliciting partners, and Hawk Meadow more than fits the bill.

But local and regional help is also needed. If you are one of those fortunate individuals who have not just the wherewithal but the vision and spirit to try to make the world a better place through our children, I am betting my good name and reputation that you will respond to this missive, and become involved with me in an effort to help the Hawk Meadow Montessori School with its goals, which include forming an alliance with AltSchool, moving to a proper facility, and carrying on its mission to become a shining example of what a 21st century education in the United States of America should be. This vision created and nurtured by Erin and Barbara will take hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a reality. I would love it if you could find a way to help, particularly in the light of what is happening currently to our troubled society. The future starts with how we teach our children.

Thank you for your time and attention, and take care.

Steve Hopkins

Music Teacher, parent of two Hawk Meadow students, and

Vice President of the Hawk Meadow Montessori School Foundation

steve@hawkmeadowmontessori.com

914-388-8670