Jesse Williams felt betrayed when he found out his campus, Como Montessori School, will close its doors in May.
The seventh-grader has long dreamed about following his big brother in being promoted to high school from Como Montessori. Now, he has to look elsewhere to complete his final year of middle school.
What is Montessori education?
The Montessori approach is a method of teaching children. It’s named after Maria Montessori, an Italian physician who studied child development and education.
Montessori education emphasizes independent learning and more interaction between children of different ages so they can learn from each other.
The approach is centered on children and gives them ownership of their learning. Sometimes that means a student progresses ahead in a lesson and the teacher pushes them forward. Other times that means a student gets more attention to ensure they are understanding a concept.
Regardless of the situation, each student gets the learning they need without holding back either the child or the entire class.
“His world’s been turned upside down,” his mother, Sonya Warren-Williams, said.
Fort Worth ISD is closing the campus, 4001 Littlepage St., because of low enrollment and poor student performance, administrators told the Fort Worth Report.
David Saenz, chief innovation officer, said the decision was difficult. The district plans to work with the Lake Como community to use the school as a center of education, he said.
“A small campus with declining enrollment creates a cycle that reduces resources and options for students at the campus that would otherwise be present in a larger setting,” Saenz said.
Parents feel as if the district sprung the shutter on them at the last minute. Enrollment declines and student performance should have been more clearly communicated to them. If a closure has been in the cards for months, parents said, they would have rather learned about it last semester so they could enroll their children in another school, like Fort Worth ISD’s Daggett Montessori.
Fort Worth ISD held six meetings in February for parents to talk about the school’s future so that administrators could decide Como Montessori’s fate by spring break. Parents heard about other schools where they could send their children. It was clear to parents a decision had been made before their gathering.
“Pretty much it was just come here so you can know what can happen to your child in the future because Como Montessori is definitely closing,” said parent Lela Comb-Jones, whose son, Zacchaeus, is in the seventh grade. “I’m very disappointed my child will not be able to finish out his final year at Como Montessori.”
Kim Collum, whose son Gabe is in the seventh grade at Como Montessori, is angry.
“You throw this at us in February when you could’ve given us a chance in December to get our kids into Daggett,” Collum said. “Fort Worth ISD’s administration did not do our children right.”
Next school year, Como Montessori students in kindergarten through fifth grade can attend Daggett Montessori, and sixth- to eighth-grade students can attend Applied Learning Academy. Parents also can choose to send their children to any other Fort Worth ISD neighborhood campus, if they decide to stay in the district.
Declining enrollment, increasing costs
Enrollment has dropped since the school’s peak of 407 students in the 2005-06 academic year. Currently, 186 students attend classes at Como Montessori, according to district figures.
Fort Worth ISD examines whether campuses will remain open every year. Administrators started weighing a Como Montessori closure in January. One of the biggest red flags for administrators was that the school only had five students in kindergarten and the prospects for the next class of kindergarteners were even worse, Saenz said.
While enrollment has declined, the cost of operating the campus has ballooned.
In the 2005-06 school year, Fort Worth ISD spent $2.4 million to operate Como Montessori. That averages out to $5,936 per student who attended that year.
Fifteen years later, the district spent $4 million to run the school. That means it cost the district $16,595 for each Como Montessori student.
On average, Fort Worth ISD last year spent $12,673 on each student in the district.
Low student performance
The school’s performance is another factor pushing administrators to shutter it. Campus performance was not the driving force behind closing the school, Saenz said.
In 2019, Texas gave the school an F, the lowest grade a campus can earn. The rating is based on several factors, including students’ performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests, their annual academic growth and how well certain student populations performed.
Texas did not issue ratings in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, students were tested last year.
The number of third-graders at Como Montessori who failed the reading and math STAAR exams increased from 2019 to 2021. Three years ago, 30 third-grade students took both tests. On the reading test, 23% did not meet grade level. On the math exam, 33% failed.
In 2021, 21 students in the third grade took both tests. This time, though, 52% of students failed the reading test and 71% did not meet grade level on the math exam.
Third grade is an important milestone. This is the first time students take the state standardized test. It also gives teachers and administrators a good indication of how children are progressing in their education.
‘Give them time to rebuild’
Warren-Williams and Collum don’t view Como Montessori as an F-rated school. The school has tailored lessons for both of their boys. For Warren-Williams’ son, Jesse, he was able to progress further on his lessons than he would have in a traditional classroom. Collum’s son, Gabe, has gone from not being able to read because of his dyslexia and autism to being exactly where he should be.
Both mothers said their children would not be where they are academically without Como Montessori.
Still, they recognized performance has suffered for multiple reasons, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Warren-Williams attributed another reason for poor outcomes: change in campus leadership. The previous principal was too data driven and strayed away from the school’s Montessori system, she said. However, the current principal has made adjustments and is more student focused, she said.
Fort Worth ISD left a bad impression on all three parents. Combs-Jones suggested parents could have rallied together and found a way to get more people enrolled at their school — if only they had more time. Warren-Williams agreed.
“If they would wait it out with the changing of the principals and the pandemic and give them time to rebuild, they could have regained some enrollment,” Warren-Williams said.
Combs-Jones noted the closure won’t just affect families — it will affect the teachers and other staff who work at the school. She described the sudden closing as blindsiding everyone with a connection to the school.
“It was just thrown on everyone,” Combs-Jones said.
All three mothers are sending their sons to Applied Learning Academy for eighth grade. They would have preferred to send their students to another school of choice, but it was too late. Their only other option would have been sending their children to their neighborhood schools.
Neither option is ideal, Collum said. Some parents have agreed to send their students to the same school to keep them together.
“These are very formative years,” Collum said. “I’m 49 now, and I’m still running around with my same girlfriends I had when I was in sixth grade.”
Gabe is heartbroken that the school he has attended since kindergarten will close at the end of the academic year. But his mother, Collum, knows he will be able to get through this because his friends will be joining him. Together, they will navigate this massive shift.
Jacob Sanchez is an enterprise journalist for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or via Twitter. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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