Celebrating Wildflower Seedlings 2024-25

This year’s schools are our 12th cohort and the largest one yet—14 new schools in a single year. We thank you—as champions, funders, community members and thought partners for the part you’ve played in helping these beautiful little schools flourish and spread.

This group of schools embodies the grassroots, teacher-led, community-embedded, and authentic Montessori approach that makes Wildflower schools special. It includes the first Wildflower school serving middle school students—The School of Harvest, created in collaboration with Washington, D.C. Parks & People and the urban farms of Marvin Gaye Greening Center. Founding Teacher Leader Tova Wilson drew on her previous work with young adolescent mothers in order to design a program and space where middle school students can anchor themselves in their community, their friendships, and their emerging sense of self at an especially critical developmental moment. Orchid Montessori also opened this year in Rhode Island as a pre-k and lower elementary school centering neurodiversity that integrates authentic Montessori and onsite individualized therapies to provide a seamless learning experience for children and working families. We also welcomed Cactus Bloom Community School— Wildflower’s first rural public charter school in Grand Junction, Colorado, The Girasol School, a bilingual Spanish and English school in Puerto Rico and the first Wildflower schools in Arkansas and Tennessee.

We invite you to explore the stories behind each school—the experiences and convictions that inspired teachers and communities to design these models together, and the distinctive ways each school is meeting the needs and hopes local families hold for their children.

Together with those who came before them, this group is now part of a growing network of 77 Wildflower schools (and counting!) across 20 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. We look forward to following as their journeys unfold and they grow into exactly what they are meant to be—and hope you’ll join us in the shared work ahead of reimagining what school can be.

Download the Seedlings Report 2024-25