Our School
Milwaukee Montessori School attends to your child’s strengths and challenges in a learning community that embraces diversity in thought and experience.
“What makes Milwaukee Montessori School stand apart from other schools?”
The answer is simple: we are experts in mastery learning.
In mastery learning, students do not move on to new material until they have mastered the previous lesson. At MMS, students progress through a variety of lessons and projects at their own pace. Teachers track student progress, identify gaps, and give students one-on-one attention to help them succeed. This allows most of our students to begin reading in their K4 year and matriculate into honors and advanced-placement courses in their freshman years in high school.
The truth is that mastery-based learning is the key to transforming the educational experience of your child. If you want your child to be in a diverse school where they can learn the skills they need to succeed in higher education and can continuously apply that knowledge to real-life projects, then this is a perfect school for you!
Our Vision
Educating children to graduate as informed, engaged, ethically minded citizens of the world that they inherit.
Our Mission
Educating youngsters to become an informed, committed and difference-making generation.
Our Purpose
Milwaukee Montessori School is a private independent day school dedicated to expanding the human potential of all children for the purpose of educating them for a freer, safer, world. The work of our faculty and staff advances our ideas rooted in our belief in democracy, personal freedom, solidarity with those at the periphery of society, the well-being of our planet, and educating children to become informed, engaged, ethically minded citizens for the world that they will inherit.
Head of School Welcome
Welcome to Milwaukee Montessori School, the oldest continuous Montessori school in the nation.
At our fifty-year mark, we reinvigorated our mission by focusing on two guiding queries:
- How can we expand the potential of all children to advance a freer, safer world?
- What would schooling look like if truly rooted in a belief in democracy, personal freedom, solidarity with the marginalized, and the well being of our planet?
Fifteen years ago we knew that while most schools were attending to “business as usual,” technology was entirely changing our economy and our civilization. At a leadership level, as educators, we took responsibility for facing that reality squarely, and we made the decision to do what we had to do to prepare young children for the vastly different world they would enter as young adults.
We made painstaking and revolutionary changes to our technology infrastructure and curriculum, and by 2012, we were already deemed a “School of the Future” by the National Association of Independent Schools.
The innovation investment works!
Our stellar student outcomes speak for themselves: graduates receive generous financial awards to attend independent high schools across the region and nation. They test into honors and AP-level classes in their freshman years and remain on honor rolls throughout high school. They play varsity sports, establish service clubs and environmental stewardship programs, earn leading roles in their high school musicals, and exercise their gifts in fine arts. As they go on to work in the world, they prove themselves to be the creative, flexible, and level-headed people we desperately need, asking and answering the much-needed imaginative, practical, and moral questions of our time.
This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. Our extraordinary school truly provides students with the learning experiences they need to face the challenges of a diverse, global environment. We hear again and again that our students are informed, engaged, cooperative, ethically-minded citizens who are confidently confronting and improving the complex world that they have inherited. They also love coming to school; they tell us every day.
We hope you will visit our school to see for yourself! We would love to welcome your family into our warm and life-changing learning community as visitors, and then welcome you back as partners in the crucial early years of your children’s education.
Monica Van Aken, Ed.D.
Head of School