Kingston’s New Rules

NY District’s Start Up Driven by Principal, Senator’s Support and Distance Teacher Prep

It’s hardly the typical path to opening a public Montessori program.

No parent lobbying. No allure of a state or federal magnet school grant. No large-scale district choice program.

The Kingston, NY, schools began with a superintendent committed to supporting principals and a principal committed to doing a quality Montessori program and finished it off with a well-positioned legislator who assured funding.

As a result, Supt. Gerard Gretzinger has appointed Principal Valerie Hannum to lead George Washington Elementary School beginning this fall in a three-year transition to a preschool-grade 6 Montessori program.
The district did not have the funding—a projected $950,000 over three years—to support the transition, but Gretzinger and Hannum won the support of their state senator, Bill Larkin, chairman of the Senate Majority Steering Committee and of the Senate Committee on Racing, Gaming and Wagering, and he managed to insert the funds into the state budget that was approved in early April.

The program will introduce another wrinkle. Its teachers will be trained via a distance learning course still being developed by the Center for Guided Montessori Studies. It will apparently be the first public school district in recent memory to build a program’s faculty entirely based on a distance-learning model and one of the few to contract with a program that is not accredited by the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education nor affiliated with Association Montessori International. MACTE has only begun to develop a protocol for accrediting distance-learning courses.

The district will get $350,000 for 2008-09 for supplies and for training from the Department of Education for the “development of different and unique programs,” Gretzinger said.

Gretzinger said the effort began a year ago during his annual discussion of goals with Hannum.
Hannum has long had experience as a Montessori parent, teacher, teacher educator and administrator. She had been a Montessori Teacher Educator at Chestnut Hill College and helped write a charter for a Montessori school in Philadelphia. She moved to Kingston a decade ago and is currently principal at Graves Elementary School.

“I told him I’d love to see a Montessori program in Kingston,” she said.

Gretzinger, now in his fourth years as the district’s superintendent, gave her the go-ahead to educate him and others, and over the next year she developed a 200-page document in support of Montessori education, supported in part by visits to public Montessori programs in Springfield, MA, and Albany.

The senator, Gretzinger said, was very excited about it. “He bought into our enthusiasm. He was wanting to do something for the kids in Kingston.”

“Kingston is fortunate to have Larkin,” Hannum added. “It was a real gift that he put his faith and trust in us. It wouldn’t have happened without his support.”

In recent months she has been working closely with the CGMS staff, especially Kitty Bravo, in adapting the course, which will be given to teachers over 18 months.

“We designed the training program with CGMS,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of in-services. I realize we need to build a community, so we ... designed the program based on meeting two times a week for two hours. Our core group will go through together. The cohort piece is the key. They will be together for 18 months.”

It means the first elements of training will not be completed as quickly as in some other courses, but she likes the idea of people having time to build confidence and trust in each other. “The slower the better,” she said.

The Montessori program at Washington will replace the existing traditional program, serving children ages 3 to 5 in its first year, then adding 6-9 and 9-12 program in the next two years.

“I think it’s going to take off.” Gretzinger said. “Anytime I visit a Montessori school or classroom I come away very excited about what children are learning. We have full support of the board and a lot of teachers are applying for positions. Teachers are excited about change and a new challenge.”

Hannum describes growing community support. “I’m getting calls everyday from parents who want to get kids in.”