The Dearborn Press & Guide wrote up a feature about my mom’s Montessori schools. Dearborn Heights Montessori Center turns 40 this year. In paragraph seven, you’ll see that I can take credit for the entire thing.
“At the time there were very few options available,” said Neff, who first enrolled her son in an area day care program. “He cried more and more each day.”
I still cry every day, but nobody seems to be founding Montessori schools in response.
An artist's conception of my mom, my brother and me circa early 1970s (I was blonde back then, which my blonde daughters disbelieve) with a woefully incomplete pink tower. Background puggle was not involved in the founding of Dearborn Heights Montessori Center.
I’m proud of her. The scale of the operation amazes me still. More than 100 teachers, many of whom have been around for decades. The main branch is a former elementary school On John Daly just north of Cherry Hill in Dearborn Heights. I’ve kind of lost track of the others, though it’s in the article.
One of my early jobs (my first job was selling fruit/candy from a hand-pushed cart with giant red wooden wheels at Greenfield Village, now known as The Henry Ford. As an aside, had Henry Ford been a rapper instead of an industrialist, he would have called himself “The Henry Ford,” I think, as in “The Henry Ford is in the House, yo.” Note that The Henry Ford remains a world-class place to visit, though I will not be there trying to sell you apples for 50c each or three for a dollar) was as a daycare instructor. There I learned that small children are just like adults — there are angsty ones and sweet ones, funny ones (albeit with poorly refined wit still — but you can see where it’s going) and, of course, budding assholes. I also learned how to make ants on a log for snack, and frozen grapes, a clutch of which shiver away in my Denver freezer as I type.
I also drove moving trucks as the school bounced from leased building to leased building in the western suburbs of Detroit during the late 1980s and early 1990s, recruiting friends as movers. If you think moving a house is good exercise, try a school sometime. You come out looking like Lou Ferrigno.
People don’t think of nonprofits as being the fruits of entrepreneurship, but my mom was a high-school English teacher until I came along. She developed into an appropriately miserable mother of two insane boys born 16 months apart (one of us was a ‘whoops,’ though I will not divulge which).
Then I started being miserable in what I actually remember to be an incredibly unwelcoming daycare environment. Rather than just whacking me with a yardstick or whatever parents in the early 1970s did, she took note and decided there was an opportunity to a) shut me up and b) focus her ample energies and creativity on something besides watercolors and needlepoint and wondering when it’s OK to take the next valium (the last of these speculation on my part).
And boom, a school, with thousands of kids and, now, kids-kids. My kids would go there, too, but the 1,256-mile one-way commute would wear me down. I do wish they could.
