Our Story · Redbud Montessori, Davis, California
A school built by hand.
22 families and 3 teachers opened this school on September 4, 1984. They even made the furniture themselves.
1984 22 families who wanted something specific.
They already knew each other. The founding families and teachers had come from Montessori schools around Davis and Woodland, and in the spring of 1984 they started meeting to talk about building their own — one that would do a few particular things the others didn't.
They incorporated that June as a nonprofit. They raised more than $8,000 from parents, relatives, and friends. Then they spent the summer building child-sized furniture by hand, making some of the learning materials themselves, and putting in a playground that would pass state inspection.
The school opened that September.
the three promises What the founders agreed on at the start.
01 / Decisions get made together.
Redbud is governed by a board of 6 parents and 2 staff members. The belief that the board was built on hasn’t changed — that parents can be genuinely involved in a school's life even when they work full time.
02 / Teachers are looked after, so they stay.
The founders committed to giving staff the best working conditions and support a small school could manage. One of our teachers arrived in 1985 and is still here.
03 / The doors stay open.
They wanted a school involved in the life of Davis, and open to anyone curious about how Montessori actually works. That's still true, and it's why a tour is never a sales pitch.
the nameThe tree is real.
The property came with its own trees — oaks, buckeye, toyon, as well as eastern and western redbuds scattered around the grounds, all native to this part of California.
One redbud grows right outside the front door. Every spring it covers itself in pink flowers, and every spring the children notice. The founders named the school after it.
The setting wasn't decoration. They chose six and a half acres of wooded property on purpose, because they believed a child's connection to the natural world was part of the education rather than a break from it. Children here have run of the grounds, with a teacher alongside. The sounds are horses, sheep, roosters, frogs, and wild birds — not traffic.
maria montessoriThe woman who figured it out.
Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in a small town on the eastern side of Italy, and became one of the first women in the country to qualify as a physician. She came to education through medicine, and she came to her method through watching.
That's the part worth knowing. She didn't design a curriculum and try it on children. She observed children closely — what absorbed them, what they returned to, what they could do unassisted — and built everything around what she saw. A century later, the materials in our classrooms are still the ones her observations produced.
She also believed, unfashionably for her time, that children needed the outdoors. In her words, “A child needs not only to know nature but to live in nature.” The founders had that line in mind when they went looking for a property.
More about the method →
“Within the child lies the fate of the future.”
— Maria Montessori
come visitOver forty years later.
Most of the furniture has been replaced. Almost everything else the founders set up is still running — the board, the co-op, the trees, the same teachers.
Come walk around.