Montessori School of Downtown in Houston, Texas

Short Review: We absolutely love it and highly recommend it to all. Longer Review: My wife and I are both high school teachers. We understand how difficult it is to operate and maintain a safe, compassionate and effective learning environment. The dynamics between proper staffing, variability in a child's needs and parental relations, coupled with local/state/federal regulation can be a quagmire to navigate. We are also parents to two little girls. Our eldest daughter is almost three years old and has been at the school for about a year. Our newborn is four months old and has been there a little over a month. Our eldest has been in two other schools prior to this one. One of those we loved but had to leave due to a move, the other was slowly destroying the love our daughter had for education (She would come home with bites all the time... to quote "School is owee." Very sad to witness this as a parent.) I can honestly say that the Montessori School of Downtown has done an amazing job with our oldest. She is fluent with her alphabet in English (listening, speaking and reading). She can count to 50 in English, 20 in Spanish and I believe she counted in Chinese one time though I forgot to verify this. She can identify quantities and recognize numeric symbols. Aside from the academics though, our daughter is learning how to organize her time and environment. We have modeled our home after the school so all of her toys are in bins. She knows to only take one toy out at a time and put it away before taking out more. She is great at helping to clean up any mess that is made and speaks politely. Yes, a lot of this comes from home but the Montessori School of Downtown reinforces this behavior we desire from our children. We are not spending time fighting uphill against a school that is doing more damage than good. Our newborn hasn't spent much time there so it is hard to definitively say if there was any specific trait she has learned from the school. She is definitely more chatty since going to school there which is great. She is also actively rolling around more than she used to. Perhaps she learned this from her little friends. One big thing we look for as parents is diaper rash. We have not had one incident of this yet. This tells me the staff is vigilant in taking care of any diaper changes. Our daughter also comes home in clean clothes (we provide the extra clothes) no matter when I pick her up so this tells me they actively change her clothes as she spits up on them (and she can spit up quite a bit!). It breaks my heart that we are again leaving a school we love. We know how hard it is to find a good school as we had a really rough experience with the previous school we were at. Unfortunately we are moving again! Hopefully this will be the last move for a while and we will find a place as wonderful as the Montessori School of Downtown. I truly thank all of her teachers and the staff that work hard to serve our children (and us parents too!).