Hurricane Relief: Re-Opening St. Croix Montessori

Thank you Global Giving community for supporting our educational journey!

Our 2019 at St. Croix Montessori (STXM) began by launching a revision to our parent education series. Our school leaders and teachers engaged parents in small focus group and one-on-one interviews throughout the fall semester. As a result, we prioritized (with our parents’ input) parents’ feedback and made revisions for more meaningful classroom engagements, monthly opportunities for parents to discuss relevant parenting topics with the school and other parents, and created a communication platform to receive more consistent snapshots of what their children are experiencing in the classroom. You can see one of our classroom videos, which was created to give busy working parents a chance to see their student and their peers having Montessori Moments!

While our community did experience the tragic death of a parent, we banded together to support the family and our St. Croix Montessori (STXM) community in processing our grief and learning techniques for mindfulness. Everyone – students, STXM team, and families – learned the St. Croix Montessori Heart High-Five – a slower version of a high five, it is a simple way of asking for connection and support. We found ourselves having a range of experiences after – from peacefulness to laughing, crying, or hugging! Our STXM community regularly practices various techniques for calming our brains and positive thinking, which provides a solid foundation for executive functioning skills.

For the first time, St. Croix Montessori has been able to introduce a “State of the School” report to our families – capturing data from our past and present, sharing progress on our 5-year strategic plan, and reporting back on a series of consultations between our families, our STXM team, stakeholders, Board and a Montessori school accreditor, which also highlighted our growing school’s strengths and opportunities. Families responded immediately: “This is great!”; “We should do this more often!” The result of this event was that several parents stepped forward to help organize and lead some of the key opportunities for our school, such as workshops with the students on positive self-esteem, arts classes, wood working, and capital planning.

A major highlight of this semester was the annual Elementary student visit aboard the Roseway, the nautical education sailing boat that is part of the World Ocean School. The students practice leadership and community building, as well as see how their physics, geography, and math lessons become a necessary reality for marine science. Students designed tinfoil boats to determine which would be most buoyant, even as nuts, bolts, and pennies were added. Students reviewed longitude and latitude, and then mapped the Christiansted harbor they were in. We even had an opportunity to practice our knot tying skills – with several students from our summer bush skills classes teaching their peers a square knot, figure eight, and the difference between a bowline and granny knot!

Currently, our students are working on their research projects for Teach Your Parent day. This event is an opportunity for our parents to become students – and our students to practice leadership, confidence building, academic, and presentation skills. All of our students – from 2 ½ years of age to 12 – participate in teaching parents a favorite lesson or, in the case of our more mature Elementary students, presenting their research projects.

Our STXM community is continuing our efforts to purchase our long-term home, in expectation for the quickly approaching 2019 academic year. With our island continuing its recovery, the need for schools focused on executive functioning is crucial. We have prospects and are excited for the future!