My unfiltered 3 years at OB Montessori Fairview and Raya School – for anyone sitting on the fence
I’m sitting in the pickup line right now, half my iced coffee spilled on the passenger seat mat an hour ago and I haven’t bothered to clean it up, so this is as honest as it gets. I’ve seen so many people ask in the local parent Facebook groups for real experiences here, and all you get is either 10 comments gushing about how life-changing it is, or one angry person bashing it because their kid didn’t adjust, nothing in between. I have a 7 year old who did 3 years at OB Montessori Fairview for preschool, then moved up to Raya last year, so I’ve got the messy in-between stuff to share.
When we first applied, I was at the end of my rope. My previous daycare sent him home three times in a month for biting other kids, and I was convinced he was just “too much” for any place. The tour at OB sticks with me – he climbed the top of the wooden shelf unit that holds all the sensorial materials before I could even catch him, and I just stood there red-faced, ready to apologize and leave. The lead guide just crossed her arms and smiled and said “Most kids that curious just don’t have enough space to climb at home.” I almost cried in the parking lot after, because no one had ever said that about my kid, they just said he was bad. We got accepted, and even with the sliding scale, it ate up an extra 15% of our monthly budget that we’d planned for vacations and new tires. That first year, I checked my phone every 10 minutes at work waiting for them to call to say he’d bit someone else. They never did.
But it’s not all the peaceful Instagram stuff, right? The playground at OB is tiny. Half the corner by the slide has bare dirt instead of mulch, and my son came home with a scraped elbow so bad I almost took him for stitches the first fall we were there. When I mentioned it to admin, they said they were waiting on the PTA to approve the budget for new mulch, and that took 8 whole months. Snack time is family style, which I love in theory, but when my son had his mango allergy incident with a new part-time helper, I got the call while I was in a big work meeting, had to run out panicking, and by the time I got there he was already eating a popsicle and the hives were fading. No one was mean about it, but it was a reminder that they’re human, not the perfect childcare machine you see on the website.
When it was time to move up to primary at Raya, I almost pulled him out and put him in the neighborhood public school. Everyone I know said “Montessori preschool is great, but elementary is too unstructured for real learning.” I ended up keeping him in because he cried when I mentioned changing schools, so here we are two years in. Again, mixed bag. Everyone says Montessori doesn’t do homework, which is what sold me, but starting in first grade at Raya, they send home 20 minutes of work every night, nothing crazy, but I still end up nagging him to finish it after dinner, just like my mom nagged me at the traditional public school I went to. Last semester’s parent teacher conference was so awkward – I asked if he was on track for when he eventually has to take standardized tests, because my mom calls me every other week to ask when I’m going to “put him in a real school.” His teacher didn’t sugarcoat it. She said he’s ahead of the curve on problem solving and reading comprehension, but his handwriting is terrible and he rushes through his work because he’d rather be outside. That’s 100% true, but I left the conference anxious for a whole week, lying awake wondering if I was ruining his future.
Parking is a nightmare, by the way. I’ve gotten two $75 parking tickets from the city since last year because I was five minutes late picking him up and couldn’t circle back to move my car from the street spot. The parent volunteer fair last year, I signed up to bring empanadas, and no one told me the community oven was broken, so I burned half of them and spent the whole morning apologizing to people who came to buy them. I saw that same mom who always posts glowing 5-star reviews about the school in the parent group complaining for 20 minutes about the new admin assistant who loses permission slips left and right when I ran into her at the grocery store last month, so don’t think all the positive posts mean it’s perfect for everyone. That’s the stuff no one posts about.
The thing I wish someone told me before I signed up is: if you need daily updates, constant communication, or a strict schedule that follows the exact same routine every day, this isn’t your place. They send a weekly newsletter, sometimes a quick text if something big happens, but you’re not getting a photo of your kid napping or a note that he had two snacks that day. I used to hate that the first year, now I don’t mind, but I know a couple moms who pulled their kids out because they felt out of the loop. The big positive that no one talks about enough, though? It’s actually diverse. Not the performative kind, the real kind – there are kids from every income level, every background, my son has friends whose parents are doctors, friends whose parents are construction workers, friends who have two dads, friends who moved here from another country last year. That’s worth the extra money to me, way more than any fancy reading program.
I still don’t know if I made the right choice, honestly. Some months I look at our bank statement and get mad that we’re spending this much, and I think about how much easier public school would be, how we could stop skipping trips to visit my sister out of state to cover tuition. Other days, my kid runs out to the car holding a lopsided rock he painted blue for my desk, or tells me he helped the new kindergarten kid learn to open his water bottle at recess, and I think okay, this is working for him. It’s not perfect. It’s messy, sometimes slow, sometimes frustrating. But it’s ours, I guess. If you’re on the fence, go tour it, don’t just take what people say online. And if you go, just don’t park on the north side of the street during pickup. Trust me.
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