Sandhills Magazine
By Ray Owens
Life is stirring at the old Southern Pines Elementary on May Street as it transitions to the new home of Moore Montessori Community School (MMCS). Founded in 2018 as our region’s first and only public Montessori, MMCS recently acquired the campus after the former elementary school moved to a larger facility.
MMCS is a vibrant learning community, its method of teaching developed in the early 1900s by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori. The program utilizes hands-on learning, collaborative work and self-directed activity, with individualized curriculum supporting the needs of each child.
“There are four elements to our mission,” says Katie Rucker, MMCS Founder and Head of School. “We build strong academic foundations, executive function skills and teach children to trust in their abilities, in preparation for lives of joy and purpose in the 21st century.”
Rucker, a Southern Pines native, describes Montessori classrooms as beautiful, ordered and inviting. From child-sized chairs to brightly colored materials arranged on low shelves, classroom elements are designed to build a sense of independence. Working within a peaceful environment, students practice concentration, self-discipline and respect for others.
“It is a rich and dynamic model,” explains Rucker. “You won’t find a teacher at a desk commanding the attention of 30 students at the same time. Children are given one-on-one or small group lessons and then they’re invited to work with material until they master it – learning by doing.”
When Rucker’s oldest son got into a public Montessori program in Washington, D.C., she became intrigued by this comprehensive form of education. She encountered children doing different things with focus and purpose – calm, happy, hard at work. It felt more like a science lab than a traditional classroom.
“My sister and I wrote a charter application to open the school,” says Rucker. “The state unanimously approved it, and we were able to open it in just a few years. My family came back to Southern Pines, my husband and two children, and we live in downtown. I am so excited to move into this campus and see what we can do with it.”
As a public school, it’s free to attend MMCS, which serves an economically diverse student body, grades K-5. The school offers free and reduced lunch to families that qualify as well as transportation to school.
Families interested in enrolling their children sign them up through an online lottery registration that opens every January 1st to 31st. Demand for the school is high and there are usually 100 families on the waitlist at the end of the enrollment period.
“This is a monumental moment,” says Rucker. “We’re moving out of our first campus into a big beautiful 12-acre location in downtown Southern Pines. It’s opening so many opportunities for us to serve students and families in this community.”
“We have an incredible staff and that is what makes it. The founding staff and those we’ve added are what make this a special place – we built this school together. I’m proud of our diversity and how our teachers reflect the students that we’re serving.”
The new MMCS campus is an important community landmark, significant for its educational legacy. The site was first occupied by a structure designed by architect Aymar Embury II, completed during the 1922-23 school year. This first building was replaced in the 1950s to accommodate the growing student body.
At the back of the property is a full athletic field. Coming down the campus, there is a one-story building constructed in the 1940s with a slate roof and incredible architectural details. There’s also a 500-seat auditorium and a full-size gymnasium built in the late 40s, early 50s. The main building on May Street is the largest, built in the 1950s.
“I really want to be able to restore the campus,” says Rucker. “I believe that within five years, we’ll be able to bring this to its full potential. We are in the early stages of our capital campaign. As we get into the buildings and understand the need – the bones and structures of the campus are incredible but there are things that need to be updated.”
“I would love to have a Montessori teacher training center on the campus. I do think we’ll be a regional hub for Montessori and within five years we will be a leading public program in the South. I also want to be a space for the community and wrap-around services for our students – there are so many possibilities.”
“Learning is fun,” says Rucker. “Children are designed to understand the world around them, and we’re preparing an environment that allows them to do just that. Montessori allows children to come to that ‘aha moment’ on their own and to get that sense of accomplishment when they figured it out. That’s really what makes all the hard work worth it.”
For more information, visit mooremontessori.org.
A Dream Come True: Moore Montessori Settles Into New Campus
Children use ‘racks and tubes’ to master long division.
The pilot By MARY KATE MURPHY Sep 18, 2021
After a move across town to the former Southern Pines Elementary campus, the school known as Moore Montessori Community School is settling into a fuller embrace of the third word in its name.
School founder and Head of School Katherine Rucker and her staff built a community of families and teachers right off the mark when they first welcomed students in the fall of 2018. Micro-communities of learning soon formed in each classroom, with each student following individual paths of discovery in the Montessori style of cooperation and collaboration with their classmates.
Now, among May Street churches and the stately homes of Weymouth Heights, Moore Montessori — the newest public charter school in the county — is growing into a physical sense of community as well.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would be on this campus. I think it is the most beautiful campus in the county. I really do,” Rucker said.
“It has distinctive architectural features, it has incredible bones, it has a really thoughtful layout. We’re working with different experts in the state and we are finding out more and more about the architects who originally built this space.”
If that sounds like an effusive description for a property that the Moore County Board of Education declared surplus in favor of an entirely new campus on Carlisle Street, compare it to the place Moore Montessori started.
The school was first established in leased premises on West Pennsylvania Avenue. That facility offered about 10 classrooms and 25 parking spaces’ worth of blacktop that served for a playground, basketball court and picnic area.
Rucker attended the old Southern Pines school, as did several members of Moore Montessori’s staff, in grades four through eight. So in April 2020, a few months after the school board voted to move toward selling the campus, Moore Montessori offered to buy it.
A year of negotiations later, the charter school had a new home — complete with two historic classroom buildings, an auditorium, gymnasium and athletic field — for the price of $1.6 million. That isn’t to say that the buildings don’t need work. Renovations on the L-shaped classroom building to the rear of the campus will get underway this fall with restoration of the slate roof.
Moore Montessori Community School Head of School Katherine Rucker with students. Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot
Moore Montessori, as a charter school, qualified as a government entity to buy the old campus in a noncompetitive process. The school board ultimately agreed to that sale instead of allowing the school to potentially be sold for residential development to the highest bidder.
“When we started, the first step was to open a public Montessori school. As soon as we got in, the board said ‘okay we’re in, we can only be in this building for three years, we need to find a permanent campus.’ That aligned beautifully the surplus sale of the four campuses,” Rucker said.
“Once everyone saw that it was a win-win for everyone we got incredible support from the community.”
Getting the school’s materials and furniture across town took another community effort: accomplished between teachers, families, volunteers and borrowed horse trailers.
In the main building, the school found large classrooms already well-suited for the multiple learning activities that take place in them — usually all at the same time.
One goal of Montessori education in early childhood is to develop students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. Cultivating and following individual interests rarely looks the same from child to child, so a classroom of 25 students or so can appear chaotic at first glance. But so can accessing the world of knowledge and making sense of it, as students are encouraged to do on their own terms.
A lead teacher, referred to in the Montessori world as a guide, might be helping four or five children to deconstruct a long division problem using math beads that model units of tens, hundreds and thousands. At the same time, under the loose supervision of an assistant teacher, another student will be pinning national flags into an unlabeled map of Africa or Asia or feeding the class pet while three other children discuss a book on marine life.
“The children are doing something different, there’s not a teacher standing in front of the class teaching one thing,” said Markisha Young, Moore Montessori’s assistant head of school.
“Everyone is focused on their own learning, and I think there are opportunities for the community to bring what they want here and for us to build something special and really incredible.”
Scenes from a recent tour of the Moore Montessori Community School in Southern Pines. Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot
Classes are organized in three-year age groups, with 3-year-old preschoolers in the same room as kindergarten students and first grade through third comprising a Lower Elementary class. That structure offers students the continuity of keeping the same teacher for three years, assuming there isn’t much staff turnover. So far, Rucker says there hasn’t been.
Instead, Montessori-trained educators with connections to Southern Pines have come out of the woodwork to take on teaching roles at Moore Montessori. Rucker said that 80 percent of her lead teachers relocated to work there.
“What is so thrilling is that we have families and students who love our school and we are also able to recruit, nationally, Montessori teacher talent,” she said. “ We’ve had two people move from overseas to return home. They were U.S. citizens but they came from Saipan and Mexico to Southern Pines to help open the school.”
Currently the school has approval from the state to teach through sixth grade, which it will add next year. The board is now considering applying to extend that to eighth grade.
As a charter school, Moore Montessori is one of about 16 tuition-free Montessori schools in North Carolina. Of those, six are charter schools and 10 are traditional public schools scattered between the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Guilford, Durham and Cumberland districts. Only about 10 percent of the 5,000 Montessori schools open nationwide are public.
This year Moore Montessori enrolls 185 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, along with 30 paying preschool students.
It’s now working toward several partnerships with community organizations for the use of its “new” facilities beyond immediate school activities. Reintroducing residents to the old school ties in with the early stages of a planned capital campaign to fund campus-wide renovations.
“I believe that this community and this town love this campus as much as we do,” said Rucker. “It’s going to take a community effort to restore this campus to its full potential, but I really believe that within five years we can accomplish that.”
https://www.thepilot.com/news/a-dream-come-true-moore-montessori-settles-into-new-campus/article_aea3e52c-18b3-11ec-9851-73d997371aca.html
The PILOT COLUMN: Public Montessori School Would Preserve Downtown Gem
BY BENJAMIN GREENE
Special to The Pilot
Oct 27, 2020
Moore County Schools will soon decide whether to hand off the Southern Pines Elementary School campus to another public school or to developers, who will privately profit from this ideal location at the expense of our community.
Moore Montessori Community School is prepared and willing to preserve the campus as a community asset for generations, as an excellent public school and as a community space.
The board of directors at Moore Montessori, a K-4 public charter school in Southern Pines, has made a purchase offer to buy the Southern Pines Elementary School campus on May Street for the appraised value of $1.08 million.
North Carolina’s general statutes provide a pathway for a nonprofit, public charter school such as Moore Montessori, as a steward of public resources, to purchase surplus public property at appraised value through a private sale.
We are nationally recognized for our mission to expand access to Montessori education through an equitable, effective public school model. Since our founding in 2018, Moore Montessori has developed its track record as a trustworthy financial steward of public resources by turning tax dollars into an exceptional public education for a diverse group of children in Moore County. In addition, we have raised over $1 million in federal grants, competitive grants and private donations.
We are at capacity in our current facility and have a long waitlist of families that want a public Montessori education for their children. That’s because our students are thriving and love learning at school, reading growth is strong, and family satisfaction is high.
The Southern Pines Elementary School campus has served the community well for many years, and is an integral part of the charm and distinct character of downtown Southern Pines. It provides the ideal space for Moore Montessori to grow and expand our program: We need this space to open access for publicly funded children to join our school as early as 3- and-4 year-olds when brain development is at a critical stage and to add 7th and 8th grades, so our students can continue to build the solid academic foundations and executive function skills needed to thrive in high school, college and professionally.
This project presents additional benefits to the community: We have committed to providing a space for the Southern Pines chapter of the Boys and Girls Club; we will maintain the large auditorium as space for community events; and we will partner with other government agencies and nonprofits to ensure the space is maintained as an education hub and community asset.
While the buildings on the 11-acre site are old, they are in good condition. We’ve done our homework. Over the past seven months we have had multiple contractors on-site and we have a clear understanding of the work needed to renovate the buildings, which includes upgrades for single-pane windows, repairs to the slate roof, and energy-efficient updates to the electrical system that will reduce ongoing operating costs.
To support our growth, we have a sustainable, fiscally responsible 15-year plan, which projects $25 million in per pupil funding to educate thousands of students.
This campus presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Moore Montessori to set down roots and expand on our mission of providing a unique public education opportunity to Moore County families. The board of directors at Moore Montessori is prepared to be good stewards of this public resource and community asset.
There has been discussion about selling the property to the highest bidder. Such a sale would provide short-sighted gains, depriving the community of this asset and irrevocably changing the character of downtown Southern Pines.
We need the urgent support of the community. Please direct any questions about our school and its future to Katherine Rucker, head of school, or me at (910) 636-1325.
Benjamin Greene, board chair at Moore Montessori Community School, had a 47-year career in public education as a teacher, school administrator and college professor. He served as principal of Pinecrest High School from 1989 to 1999.
Moore MonTessori Featured on All Things Moore County Radio Show
Moore Montessori is looking for a new home. Head of School Katherine Rucker and Board Member Taylor Clement join Bill Sahadi to discuss the possibility of moving to the soon-to-be vacant Southern Pines Elementary School Campus on May Street. This deal would present a unique opportunity to preserve the beautiful brick campus that has become a landmark of Southern Pines, maintain the campus as downtown public school and bring exciting educational opportunities and wrap-around services to Southern Pines families.
The Pilot: Charter School Takes Alternative Approach to Discipline
It all begins with an idea.
Feature Article in The Pilot Newspaper, January 22, 2020
By Mary Kate Murphy, Staff Writer
From their first days of preschool or kindergarten, children have a lot to learn: not just reading, writing and math, but how to be good students in the first place.
Increasingly, schools are reconsidering discipline: both how they address students’ behavioral lapses in the classroom and how generally to encourage good conduct before issues even arise.
This year, Moore Montessori Community School is testing out a new “non-punitive” program devised to give students a productive role in what happens after an emotional outburst or conflict with another student.
Designed by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, it’s called a “system of justness” that ultimately keeps students in the classroom. Traditional approaches to discipline usually involve consequences like repeated trips to the principal’s office, not to mention suspensions, that add up to hours of missed teaching.
“We’re doing the complete opposite. It’s about coaching teachers on how to deal with behavior in the classroom, versus sending them out when they’re having a hard time,” said Markisha Young, Moore Montessori’s director of student support.
“At the end of the day, that’s what we want students here doing: we want them here, working and learning. We don’t want any distractions from that.”
To read complete article: https://www.thepilot.com/news/charter-school-takes-alternative-approach-to-discipline/article_9630a09a-3d52-11ea-b29f-6b6e14422831.html
The Pilot: At New Montessori School, Creating a Community of Learners
It all begins with an idea.
Feature Article in The Pilot Newspaper, October 19, 2018
By Mary Kate Murphy, Staff Writer
There are no desks in the classrooms, fewer chairs at the tables than there are children — and there’s not an iPad or Chromebook in sight.
In a class at Moore Montessori Community School, students might be sprawled on the floor fitting puzzle pieces — a knob representing each state’s capital — into a map of the United States. But there are only a few of those puzzles to go around, so another student might be slicing apples or cheese for snack time while someone else uses 3-D letters to spell out words, or works with an abacus-like tool to learn decimals and place value.
Who does what at any given time is generally up to the students.
Students’ executive function skills — their ability to set goals and work through multi-step processes to attain them — are tested at the start of each year. Throughout the day, the teacher and assistant in each classroom monitor them accordingly.
“The idea is that the children are making choices all day long, and making good choices is something you have to practice,” said Katherine Rucker, Moore Montessori’s founder and head of school.
“Some children get to choose where to sit to do the work, and some children can map out their whole day. All the children will someday be able to independently follow a weekly work plan they developed with their teacher.”
To read complete article: https://www.thepilot.com/news/at-new-montessori-school-creating-a-community-of-learners/article_1e33490e-d3d5-11e8-b662-035deaca8223.html
Moore Montessori Awarded National Grant for Community Reading Group
It all begins with an idea.
Moore Montessori Community School (MMCS) has been awarded a grant to start a community reading group to explore how public Montessori supports diversity among students and families. The discussion will be based on the findings of a new book, “Diverse Families Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice” by Mira Debs, executive director of Education Studies at Yale University. The national competition selected five public Montessori schools for the grant, valued at $3,000. The grant is from WEND Ventures and The Brady Education Foundation. MMCS will receive 20 copies of the book, as well as a webinar discussion with author Mira Debs and Montessori educator and equity trainer Britt Hawthorne. Lead MMCS teachers Kamweli Wilson and Keanna Artis submitted the grant application on behalf of MMCS ‘because the mission of the book and our school are so closely aligned.’ The book offers recommendations for creating and sustaining racially diverse schools and parent communities. Wilson said, “I think our book club will help open up an important dialogue in our school and our larger community.” If you are interested in participating in this community-wide conversation, please contact MMCS at 910-636-1325.
Moore Montessori Wins National Education Award
It all begins with an idea.
September 25, 2018
PRESS RELEASE Moore Montessori Wins National Education Award
MOORE COUNTY, NC – Moore Montessori Community School (MMCS) has been awarded $400,000 over two years in a federal grant competition. Funded through the Charter School National Dissemination Competition Program within the US Department of Education, the grant will provide support to MMCS to fully implement its public Montessori program.
Katherine Rucker, founder and Head of School, said,“Our community persevered for two years to make our school a reality. This national recognition underscores the promise of our school community, and the funding ensures we will be able to provide the very best in public Montessori for our students in the years to come.”
Dr. Benjamin Greene, Chairman of the MMCS Board, said, “MMCS has had a great opening this year. It is a major undertaking to open a new school, especially one with a unique approach to education. I am thankful for the hard work and dedication of our founding board, the MMCS faculty and staff, and the support we have received from our parents and community. We are eager to move to the next step in providing a quality Montessori education program to our community. The grant from the US Department of Education will allow us to do just that.”
MMCS is a publicly funded, tuition-free charter school currently serving children in Kindergarten through second grade. The school will expand to serve children up to sixth grade over the next four years. MMCS’s mission is to be a vibrant learning community, where diverse students build strong academic foundations, executive function skills, and trust in their abilities, in preparation for lives of joy and purpose in the 21st century. For more information, please visit www.mooremontessori.org.