About the Atlas
The Montessori Atlas is a Montessori Makers Group project.
We built it because the field deserved a complete map and did not have one. Membership directories show you their members. Voluntary databases show you who volunteered. Families, educators, schools, and researchers were left assembling the picture from fragments, and the schools most likely to fall through the cracks were small, independent, and public programs, the very corners of the field where the work is often bravest.
Stewarding a commons comes with obligations, so we name ours plainly.
Every listing is free, forever. No school will ever pay to appear in the Atlas, to claim its listing, or to correct its information. A map with a toll booth is not a map.
Schools own their information. A claimed listing belongs to the school that claimed it. Schools decide what they share, they can correct the record at any time, and every piece of data carries its source in the open.
Search results cannot be bought. No commercial relationship with Montessori Makers Group, past, present, or future, influences where any school appears or how it is displayed. The Atlas does not adjudicate who is really Montessori. It shows verifiable attributes and trusts you to judge.
Montessori Makers Group carries the cost of building and maintaining the Atlas because a field this good at preparing environments for children deserves one prepared for itself.
Questions, corrections, and challenges are welcome at info@montessorimakers.org.
How listings work
Every listing shows its trust state honestly: built from public records, claimed and managed by the school, or verified with documentation. Each fact carries its source and date, so you always know how fresh the information is and where it came from.
Who built it
Hannah Richardson is the founder of Montessori Makers Group, which stewards the Atlas. She has worked across nearly every layer of the field, as a guide, coach, coordinator, consultant, director of curriculum and instruction, and Head of School, in independent, public, charter, and justice-centered Montessori communities, from infancy through middle school.
She built the Atlas out of a simple conviction: the field deserved a complete, honest map of itself, and no one had made one. Her work is grounded in anti-bias, anti-racist practice and in the belief that Montessori only works fully when everything works together, people, practice, systems, and purpose. She has completed doctoral coursework in Early Childhood Education (ABD) and serves on the boards of Indigo Montessori, Breakthrough Montessori PCS in Washington, D.C., and The Peace Rebellion.
