Dear CRMS Community,

I wanted talk a little bit about the decision to relocate by the CRMS Board of Directors, which has been a long time in the making. I have toured over a dozen locations over the past few years, and have seen so many different types of properties. We needed to find a place that was suited to help us serve our mission well into the future and work toward eliminating barriers to high-quality Montessori education, while still maintaining our close-knit community. It’s been a unique challenge to find the right kind of space (larger than a church basement-type space, but smaller than a traditional school building with 30,000+ square feet), reasonably convenient for our current families and staff, with affordable build-out costs and sufficient outdoor space, but without requiring us to grow too large, too fast. 

The story of our move, of course, is not quite as simple as just wanting more space to achieve traditional Montessori classrooms. There have been many contributing factors and influences that made the CRMS Board know that this was an eventuality. We have looked for a place that would allow us to deepen our work toward our mission by allowing for many strategic actions related to our ten-year plan created in May 2020. I’m happy to say that we’ve made significant progress toward many of our short and long term goals in the last three years, and that this move will provide further opportunities for that growth. 

We love this neighborhood, we love Boyd Park and Vivie’s Playground across the street (many of us actually helped to rebuild it!), and it’s going to be bittersweet to leave our home of the last 12 years. However, we are looking forward to collaborating on a vision to prepare authentic Montessori environments and design the space to fit our community’s needs. It’s an incredible opportunity to consider our values and the culture of belonging that we are always working to cultivate, each step of the way.

Our buildout plan will include converting a large section of the adjacent parking lot into an outdoor play space. In the end, the outdoor space in the new location will be larger than what we have now, and we will be able to design it to be as lovely and multi-functional as our current yards. We will also be a short walk’s distance from Great River School, a grade 1-12 public charter Montessori with the greatest concentration of CRMS alumni of any other school in the area. We are looking forward to partnering with Great River and other community members in the neighborhood!

As we progress through working with architects and all other parties involved, we will be able to provide more detailed information and photos that will give a better idea of what everything will look like.

Change is hard, but we can do hard things together! We truly believe that it is the staff, children, families, and board that make our community what it is, and we are confident that we will be able to continue serving our mission and families far into the future in this new location. I am so grateful for every member of this community, and honored to collaborate with each of you on behalf of the children of CRMS!

Maya