Celebrating Wildflower Seedlings 2025-26
- Wildflower Schools
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Sharing our annual Seedlings yearbook is one of our favorite traditions because it illuminates
something we find hard to put into words: the special quality of schools that know who they are and
where they are, and take shape in ways that reflect both. The schools are linked by shared principles
and beliefs, and there is clearly a model—all are authentic Montessori, all are small, and all are
teacher-led. But they are not stamped out from a common mold. Each school reflects the passions
and experiences of its founding educators and the hopes and dreams of its community.
This way of spreading and growing is a hallmark of living things, and the pattern is unmistakable in
these tiny schools: they share a common DNA, yet grow into forms that seem to make sense only in
their particular place and time. The result is a network of schools that are unmistakably Wildflower
and unmistakably themselves.
Eight schools emerged across the network during the 2025-26 school year—including two as
charters, two in states with ESA laws, three in new-to-Wildflower states, and six with elementary
programs (which is itself a major shift from just a few years ago).
They include:
• Grove Montessori, the first Wildflower charter school in Michigan, situated in the Garfield
Park community of Grand Rapids. Teacher Leaders Anisa and Alexandra went door to
door with Spanish and Kinyarwandan—the national language of Rwanda—translators to
ensure that families throughout this diverse community knew they would have access to
the new program.
• Elderflower, co-located in a church in Houston’s East End, is the first Wildflower school in
Texas. Teacher Leaders Ikuko and Melina are already charting a course for future Wildflower
schools to make immediate use of the state’s new Education Savings Account program and
serve families across income levels from the start.
• In rural Hollister, California, Little Tree Community grew out of a homeschool cooperative
started by Teacher Leader (and recently chosen San Benito County Woman of the Year)
Sandie after a longstanding local Montessori school closed its doors. Sandie, whose family
immigrated from Mexico, was joined by co-Teacher Leader Makenzie—who is also her
daughter—to bring the full Little Tree Montessori vision to life.
• Mountain Laurel in Philadelphia was founded by Alli and Caitlin, who met while teaching
at a charter school in Chicago and later returned to their hometown to create a program
centered on the dignity of children, featuring an unhurried pace and greater connection
to nature. In their first year, families have organically formed a system of mutual aid, while
students prepare meals to help stock a community refrigerator.
The other four schools are just as distinctive: Indigo in Baltimore, where students are already
demonstrating impressive literacy progress; Sunflower, the newest site of the Aurora, Colorado
Wildflower charter; Protea, outside Miami; and Moving Mountains, a pre-K program that partners
with and feeds into Grove.
We hope you’ll make time to learn about each of these Wildflower stories. Together, they demonstrate how a shared set of ideas becomes something particular and alive in the hands of educators, families, and communities.
None of these schools comes into being through the work of educators alone. Each is the product
of a community choosing to believe in what might be possible for its children—and of donors,
families, community leaders, landlords, charter authorizers, and other Wildflower champions
helping Teacher Leaders move an idea from possibility to reality.
At a time when our country is yearning for greater cohesion and a stronger sense of shared
purpose, these schools offer a hopeful example of both. They bring families together across lines of
difference, create places where children learn to know and care for one another, and build respect
for and commitment to our shared humanity.
We look forward to watching each school continue to unfold—becoming, over time, exactly what
its children, families, educators, and community need it to be.
