Restore our Montessori Program NOW!

There are no seats being made available to parents interested in placing their child in Langdon's Montessori program next year. Langdon parents happened to stumble upon this information when they viewed the lottery application and discovered that our Montessori program was not listed as an option. The only seats being made available at Langdon are those in a preschool classroom and a mixed-age three and four-year old combination classroom.

DCPS has taken the position that Langdon does not currently offer a primary Montessori program because Langdon's program blends a traditional curriculum with Montessori methods. This change in designation from Montessori to Montessori-inspired allows DCPS to treat it as a traditional classroom which means it must comply with DCPS early childhood class size requirements.

Parents have been told if Langdon maintains its progam as Montessori-inspired next year, the Montessori-inspired classrooms will not participate in the Head Start School-wide Model. The students currently enrolled in the Montessori-inspired classroom will remain with their current teacher during the SY 11-12 school year. However, there will be no new three-year old seats in the Montessori-inspired classrooms so DCPS can reduce the class size back to a traditional level. DCPS says they are doing this based on research which shows that smaller class sizes for early childhood students are associated with improved academic outcomes.

This not a minor programmatic change. An essential element of Montessori is that classes must be made up of children representing a three-year age range (i.e. Primary: 3-6 years, Elementary: 6-9 years, and 9-12 years). To ensure social development, each class must include a well-balanced division of ages. Three year olds are essential for the Montessori method to work in the primary class.

The decision parents made to place their child in a Montessori classroom at Langdon was also based on research. Studies show that by the end of kindergarten, Montessori children perform better on standardized tests of reading and math, engage in more positive interaction on the playground, and show more advanced social cognition and executive control than their non-Montessori peers. 

When parents found out that our program was at risk, we began to question what could be done to save our program. DCPS said in order to transition to a primary Montessori program, Langdon's administration and teachers will need to make changes to instructional methods and the classroom environment to meet Association Montessori International (AMI) standards. If this programmatic change is made there will be three-year-old seats available in the two primary Montessori classes.

We want to know why these options were not presented to the Langdon community before the decision was made not to offer Montessori seats in the lottery? The out of boundary lottery ends on February 28th so it is urgent that our program be put back on the out of boundary lottery immediately. Furthermore, all parents who have already submitted applications must be notified that they are welcome to change their applications to include Langdon Montessori.

As parents, we want to know why DCPS is spending all of this Head Start money hiring Community Parent Outreach Coordinators for each school yet nobody bothered to do any outreach to inform Langdon parents that a decision had been made to eliminate the program? There was absolutely no parent engagement on this issue.

Finally, we want to know why we're being singled out. None of the four DCPS Montessori programs listed on the lottery have AMI/USA Recognized School Status. In fact, DCPS' own website refers to all of their Montessori programs as "Montessori Inspired." So we want to know why we're being singled out? 

They claim it's to ensure we have a high quality program. Well, we have higher DC-CAS scores than any of the four DCPS Montessori programs listed on the lottery. So are parents are left to wonder why we are being singled out?