9/29/16 • Dallas, TX, and Okemos, MI • Two Public Montessori Schools Named National Blue Ribbon School

9/29/16 • Dallas, Texas • Okemos, Michigan • Two Montessori schools, George Bannerman Dealey Montessori Academy in the Dallas Unified School District and Okemos Public Montessori at Central, in Okemos, Michigan, have been named 2016 National Blue Ribbon Schools in the “Exemplary High Performing”category.

The National Blue Ribbon Schools Award Program is a U.S. government program developed in 1982 by Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell in response to a broad study of American education which also produced the influential 1983 reportA Nation at Risk. Two to three hundred awards have been given every year since then for academic excellence or for closing achievement gaps—over 8,000 since the program began.  The Blue Ribbon Award is widely regarded as a high honor for schools.

The award has gone to a Montessori school eleven times, honoring ten schools (George Bannerman Dealey, which received an award this year, was also honored in 2002). All of the awards have been for high performance except Drachman Montessori Magnet School, a public magnet school in Tucson, Arizona, which was recognized as an “Exemplary Achievement Gap Closing” school in 2015.

Montessori National Blue Ribbon Award recipients, by year:

David Ayer

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David worked in private Montessori for more than twenty years as a parent, three-to-six year-old and adolescent teacher, administrator, writer, speaker, and advocate. In 2016 he began working with the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector. David lives in Portland, Oregon.