My husband and I were called back into the office during COVID and needed to find a place for our then 3 year old son. We wanted to take him back to his initial school (INIC off Manchaca/Wm Cannon) but despite the extremely cautious actions they took, they lost two teachers to COVID and a lot of the parents there were first responders and we just felt there was a much higher risk for exposure there. So we were looking for another place when my in-laws suggested Lady Bird. We toured, we loved that they had a huge covered outside play area that was used a lot and we were quite impressed with their masking and other COVID protocols - we also really liked their child centered approach to teaching and learning as we both believe that each child learns at their own pace (...to an extent).
All was well for about 6 months.
Then we started getting incident reports spanning from "your son bumped into a friend and knocked over their work and the friend was sad...", to "your son threw a kid on the ground..." Woah! That last one isn't proper behavior ever, we'll be sure to discuss this with him as soon as we get home. Well, in talking with our son about how we don't throw people on the ground, it was discovered that sand had been thrown in our son's face by another kid and our son pushed that kid down. Still not excellent behavior (on either side), but still an understandable reaction for a four year old. Then the phone calls started about our son's bad behavior - mind you, this is behavior we've never witnessed in our house or out in public, or at fellow Lady Bird friend's birthday parties. It was suggested that we get an occupational therapist involved because his teacher said our son was a classic case of autistic (of which my MIL, a licensed psychologist, laughed at). There were meetings and conferences between his teacher, us, and the occupational therapist to which, the only expert in the (zoom) room explicitly stated she saw no signs of autism or behavioral disorders in either her observations or her evaluations. We paid close to $2k out of pocket for many weeks worth of occupational therapy and evaluations because his teacher had us worried that our son may have autism or a behavioral disorder.
By May our son's anxiety would go up when we got in the car to go to school. He would beg me to stay home. My in-laws stepped in and kept him for two days a week so he could get a break - he seemed happier with that.
We initially considered committing to the Montessori way of teaching and keeping him a Montessori school - Lady Bird was the only one near us and my in-laws. We went to their open house for elementary school to determine if we should go the private school route. We found it refreshing at first but after asking a few questions we learned that they really do let the child guide the curriculum to (what we thought) an alarming rate. While I mentioned that we were concerned that our son was way behind on basic drawing and writing skills/capabilities, the lower grade level teacher blurts out that kids follow their own path on their own time and not to worry because they have 2nd graders who don't read or write yet, either. Once we popped our eyes back in their sockets, we asked why that was and were told (to paraphrase), "they'll read and write when they're ready." I agree with this mindset to an extent and certainly on other activities like learning to ride a bike, or learning to walk, or potty training - but not reading or writing by 2nd grade.
We went home and submitted our son's AISD pre-k 4 application that night.
Moving our son from Lady Bird to AISD has made a huge difference - and guess what, ZERO behavioral issues - weird! His current teacher spent years teaching special education and when I mentioned the concerns we'd gotten from his teacher at Lady Bird, our son's teacher stated that they'd never seen anything remotely like that coming from our son. Our son has thrived in pre-k through AISD far more than he would have at Lady Bird. He went from not really knowing what hand he prefers to write with or the letters in the alphabet to reading basic sight words (cat, dog, mom, dad...), writing the alphabet in lower and upper cases, and counting to 30 within 3 months in pre-k. He's also happy that he can wear his Spiderman and Batman t-shirts to school - I'm sorry, but banning superheroes is a bizarre policy that no other Montessori follows.
In closing, I have nothing against the Montessori approach. We have lots of friends who have their kids in Montessori programs and their kids are thriving. However, it seems those programs are more structured than Lady Bird in that they recognize that a kiddo should be reading and writing by 2nd grade so they're not going to wait on a child to 'be ready' to read and write - they're going to tell the child 'hey, it's time to learn how to read and write...'. The lack of classroom structure was mentioned to us by our son's occupational therapist. read more