Orcas Montessori School, along with San Juan County, has received a HUD Community Block Development Grant for a major building expansion. With these funds, the school will continue its tradition of growing with the needs of the Orcas Island community — a very fitting and appropriate way to celebrate Orcas Montessori School’s 30th birthday.

“The grant will allow Orcas Montessori School to … better meet the needs of our island’s families,” explained director Teresa Chocano. “We plan to expand the classroom to accommodate more students and provide space for younger students to rest so they may attend a full school day.”

Over 100 years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori developed a new method of educating young children. Montessori opened her first school in a tenement building in a low-income area of Rome as part of an urban renewal project. Her technique spread across Europe, and within a decade there were Montessori schools on five continents.

With similarly humble beginnings, Moriah Armstrong founded Orcas Montessori School in 1987 in the basement of a Westsound home, serving a handful of students. Demand was high and the school quickly outgrew several locations before settling in its current home on North Beach Road in 1998.

Throughout the past 30 years, Orcas Montessori School has wholeheartedly pursued its commitment to nurturing the whole child. In 2000, the school installed a kitchen to provide hot organic meals through the Federal Food Program, ensuring each child receives quality nutrition to foster better learning. The school built a hands-on organic garden so children can participate in small-scale food production. Orcas Montessori has upgraded its current building with a high-efficiency heat pump and extensive weatherization and was the first facility on Orcas to install solar panels through the solar4schools grants project.

Though based on an established method with 100 years of success, Orcas Montessori School is innovative, always striving to meet the unique needs of a rural island community. The mission of the school is to provide a creative learning community for preschool and kindergarten children that nurture each child’s unique gifts, love of learning, independence, and compassion for others.

“In order to serve as many island children as possible, the school has found many creative ways of bridging the socio-economic and cultural needs of Orcas families,” said Chocano. The school is the only Montessori program participating in Washington state’s Early Childhood Education Assistance Program (ECEAP), which has helped make quality education accessible to all our island children. And for nearly 20 years OMS provided a dual language summer program for Spanish- and English-speaking children to learn together.

Though Maria Montessori likely didn’t realize how her ideas would affect the world when she developed her methods over 100 years ago, and Moriah Armstrong couldn’t have known that her little basement school would eventually serve over 500 island children, it is clear that Orcas Montessori School has a foundation of vision and innovation. With the creative leadership of Chocano, the enthusiastic guidance of “Teacher Tom,” a very capable support staff, parents and board, the school has provided a wonderful haven of learning, growth, and community for many of our island children.

“I remember walking into Orcas Montessori when I was three or four, and I fell in love with the atmosphere,” recalled OMS alum Melanie Flint of her formative years at the school. “I remember learning how to do things for myself and by myself, and my curiosity was constantly fueled … They built a community of functioning individuals, and I felt highly capable of being myself at the age of four. The Montessori community inspired and instilled a desire to keep learning about the world in the visual way that I needed. I figured out my own style of learning, and that has transcended through to my hardest university courses. The community creates a mindset that allows for children to grow into themselves, and I am grateful for that to this very day.”

The upcoming expansion will only improve the quality of care received by many of our youngest islanders. The next 30 years at Orcas Montessori School are sure to be bright, full, and rich ones, indeed.