Post updated at 4:14 p.m. Friday, July 12:
Almost every traditional classroom teacher at New York Elementary has left the district this year as the school phases in the Montessori method, leaving teachers who can’t afford the time or cost of training without a job at the school.
When New York Elementary was considered for closure three years ago, the Lawrence school district came up with a plan to turn New York into the first public Montessori school in the state. By some metrics, that transition has been a success: capacity enrollment and positive family feedback.
But there’s been a cost: the school’s teachers.
Teaching in a Montessori classroom requires training that is both extensive and expensive. The district is phasing in the Montessori approach each year, starting with pre-K classrooms and moving up to fifth grade. For most of New York’s traditional teachers, reality has set in: without the means to get Montessori training, they no longer have a future at the school they had grown to call home.
Of the six traditional elementary classroom teachers at New York, all but one one have left, according to district personnel reports. New York’s principal Sunny Halsted resigned at the end of the school year to take a principal position in the Seaman school district. She directed a request for comment on this story to district spokesperson Julie Boyle.
“We all left, and then the principal left,” said one New York teacher who asked to remain anonymous to protect chances at a job in the future. “There wasn’t a plan. I still don’t think there’s a plan. What are they doing with these kids?”
Boyle said the district anticipated challenges when opening the first public Montessori in the state. The district has been supported by key partnerships with local Montessori institutions.
“We continue to navigate these challenges as we grow the program,” she said.
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‘I didn’t want to leave’
Teachers say they were never given a plan from the district and were left with a slew of questions: Will the district pay for Montessori training? If teachers leave to get trained, will they be offered their jobs back when they return? If they can’t get trained, where are they supposed to go?
“There wasn’t a clear plan for us,” said the New York teacher. “I think we finally all figured out we had to take it into our own hands. All of a sudden we’re like, ‘If we don’t start looking for our own jobs, what are they going to do with us?’”
The district is continuing to explore other funding options for teacher training, Boyle said.
During the 2022-23 school year, the first year New York used the Montessori method, only students ages 6 and younger were in Montessori rooms. The district hired three already-trained Montessori teachers to handle those classes.
Those three teachers are all on emergency substitute licenses, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. Since most Montessori schools are private and don’t require state teaching licenses, many Montessori teachers have specific Montessori certification. Boyle said KSDE has been supportive of the Montessori program and the district continues to work towards helping New York teachers, who are Montessori-certified, acquire state licenses.
During that school year, two New York teachers received Montessori training funded through an $80,000 grant from the Lawrence Schools Foundation. They were still employed by the district that year and listed as “Montessori teachers in training” on personnel reports.
Superintendent Anthony Lewis said the foundation would pay for the training, and that one teacher is in Montessori training this summer. But that wasn’t clear to all of the traditional New York teachers.
During the 2023-2024 school year, the two trained teachers returned to teach lower elementary Montessori classes.
Now, the next step of the phased approach calls for middle- and upper-elementary classrooms to make the switch. However, those teachers have not been offered funding or the ability to receive Montessori training, they said. That left them with no idea of their future at the school or in the district.
“The traditional elementary educators are essentially being pushed out,” current New York music teacher Emily Boedeker said. “Which is very sad, because we lost some very qualified educators.”
Many teachers knew they had some time before they would be faced with the dilemma of either getting Montessori training or leaving New York.
Boyle said that New York teachers who are not interested in Montessori have the option of transferring to one of the district’s other schools. But the teachers interviewed for this article felt they had no job security and no plan communicated from the district, so they made the jump to other districts and jobs.
Lewis said that in their exit interviews, New York teachers who left cited higher salaries elsewhere, as well as shorter commutes or moving closer to family. Two of them mentioned Montessori among their reasons for leaving, he said.
To fill the gaps, the district instead is hiring new, already Montessori-trained teachers. As of Friday, the district had two Montessori teaching positions posted on its hiring website.
Brittany Sullivan started as a first-grade teacher at New York, but switched to fourth grade as the lower-grade classes started the Montessori approach.
After the switch, she saw coworkers start to look elsewhere as the knowledge that they would end up without jobs began to set in. Sullivan took a teaching job in McLouth, where she said she is excited to start teaching third graders.
“I didn’t want to leave,” Sullivan said. “But essentially, I didn’t have a choice when the right job became available, because it wasn’t going to happen again. I wouldn’t have even looked at other jobs if I could have stayed at New York. But, I’m not trained for Montessori.”
She raved about her time at New York and loved her coworkers and students, especially this past year’s fourth graders.
“I was so conflicted,” Sullivan said. “I really didn’t want to leave, but I knew I had to take this new job. The last day with kids I was a wreck. My final day, I had to go in and get out quick, because I was going to be tearing up again.”
‘Why are we always the experiment?’
The phasing of Montessori classrooms has presented challenges across the school.
Because the traditional classrooms and Montessori rooms run on entirely different schedules, it can be difficult to line up schedules while honoring teacher union contracts. Boedeker described the situation as trying to run two schools under one building.
Boyle said students have taken to the Montessori philosophy “like ducks to water” but it has been challenging to merge traditional class schedules with the Montessori schedule.
“Montessori instruction is usually scheduled in three-hour blocks of continuous, uninterrupted time,” Boyle said. “Ideally, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; however, within a traditional school schedule, this is a challenge. Students in our Montessori program participate in art, music, P.E, library, and computer time as much as possible. The traditional morning and afternoon recess is replaced by a longer recess before or after lunch.”
With Liberty Memorial Central Middle School transitioning into a STEAM magnet school, some teachers expressed concerns over how the district might handle that transition, after feeling like there was a lack of foresight at New York.
Lewis announced last month he took a new job in North Carolina. The school board is searching for an interim replacement.
“We have wonderful ideas, and we really want what’s best for our kids,” Boedeker said. “But we have a hard time with long-term planning.”
The challenges at New York and the changes at Central add to a trend of shifts to east-side schools in Lawrence.
Lewis said he saw the Montessori program at New York and STEAM program at LMCMS as investments in the east-side schools.
But the district has discussed closing multiple schools on the east side of town in recent years. In 2021, the school board voted to close Kennedy to grades K-5 and repurposed the building into an early childhood center. In 2023, the district closed both Broken Arrow and Pinckney elementary schools.
Boyle said the decisions were made with equity consideration and based on declining enrollment, committee recommendations and school board goals to raise staff wages and keep a balanced budget.
Both closed schools and all three repurposed schools are east of Iowa Street.
“I think that’s part of the frustration, the families that I know are feeling like, ‘Why are we always the experiment?’” Boedeker said. “And I think that all kids deserve the best, and we should maybe try a little bit harder to think of the long term.”
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Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.
