1700 miles, connected by Montessori

Happy Friday, everyone.

For personal and professional reasons, my wife and I decided to move our family from Austin to San Francisco for two months this summer. Our family includes two small children: Adam, a 17-month-old who is right between Nido and Toddler programming, and Alice, a 4-year-old.

At the outset, this summer trip would not have been feasible for us were it not for the simple fact that there are Guidepost schools in the Bay Area. Our children have both attended Guidepost schools since they were three months old, they both adore school and benefit greatly from it, and this trip wouldn’t make sense if we had to make other parenting or childcare arrangements.

Believe it or not, Guidepost enabled this trip in another way. For various logistical reasons, I wanted to drive the 1700 miles from Austin to San Francisco. With my 1-year-old son. In two days. (We needed our car in SF, and my wife and daughter were already in California.)

My cockamamie plan was to drive for two long nights while he slept in the car. On the day between, I would… enroll him, for a single day, at Guidepost Peoria, in Phoenix. I would sleep during the day, while he was at school, then I would do the second night of driving.

It may have occurred to you that this is an insane thing to do. The age between 12 and 24 months is one of the hardest times to travel with a child. They need to move, they can’t communicate that well, and their sense of order is keyed to routines that are, by the nature of travel, disrupted or even dispensed with entirely. To take a child who has been (hopefully?) sleeping in the car for the last 12 hours, who woke up confused and without his mother or sister, who ate breakfast at IHOP with his bleary-eyed father—to take this child and drop him off at an unfamiliar daycare—is to double (or triple) down on what is already a questionable idea.

But we did it. And it was amazing.

The team at Peoria was preternaturally accommodating. Never once did they second-guess the idea. They just committed to making it work. Alysa, the Head of School, coordinated everything beforehand, including state paperwork and a call between me and the Nido guide. That guide, Nancy, was beyond competent, both in talking to me and in giving a very confused baby a very good day.

I dropped him off crying, and I was reluctant to leave while he was so upset; I was formulating alternative plans in my head if he didn’t adjust fairly quickly. The Assistant Head of School, Alex, wouldn’t have it. She told me: “Go sleep. Nancy is great. All our guides are great. He’s going to be fine.” I’ve since wondered if I, in the same situation, would have had the confidence and nuanced (and correct) judgment to tell a worried parent to go away. I don’t think I would have.

Within half an hour, I had texts of my son settled into concentration. I got updates of his happy face throughout the day.

I slept during the day, and when I picked him up, he was happily working on a puzzle, smiling even before he saw me. As planned, we drove all night, met up with the rest of our family in the morning, and started at Guidepost Mill Valley the next day.

The Guidepost Mill Valley team has been just as organized and wonderful in welcoming my children to their campus. My son is thriving in the Nido and will start transitioning to the Toddler program in a couple of weeks. My daughter is loving her Children’s House classroom—the timing worked out such that she could join the same week that it opened. My children are normally enrolled at Guidepost Brushy Creek, and the leaders and guides there also helped make the transition smooth.

Beyond the remarkable individuals involved, this was possible because Guidepost, uniquely, offers a consistent Montessori educational program and customer experience for well over a hundred schools across the country (and beyond). Guidepost is, uniquely, a network of Montessori schools.

The existence of this network is remarkable. It enables a kind of flexibility for families that is so novel that it is often not considered, not even by us. And it is not widely known, even by our parents. (I recently spoke to the parents of one of Alice’s friends at Brushy, and they were shocked to learn they could temporarily enroll their children in other Guidepost schools as they traveled. I imagine that the vast majority of our parents, network-wide, would be surprised to learn this.)

Most of our families, most of the time, don’t need a whole network of schools. They just need one great school. But for some families, some of the time, having a network is an immense value. My story is just one story; there are many others. A consistent school network opens up opportunities for traveling or moving with small children—small children typically being a family’s most critical bottleneck to traveling and moving.

Because of Guidepost, not only can I spend the summer enjoying the Bay Area with my entire family, I could also get mid-roadtrip Montessori care. How cool is that?

In a sense, everyone reading this helped. Perhaps not with the specifics of our travel, but in creating opportunities. In instancing nodes in an integrated network of programming that I knew I could count on.

You should be as proud of this network as I and my family are grateful for it.

Have a great weekend,

Matt Bateman
Board of Directors