The story of LePort Montessori Schools starts with our founder, Dr. Peter LePort. It is an all-American story: a surgeon, businessman and parent, who became interested in education, experienced its ups and downs with his own children—and decided to do something about it by starting his own school.
Dr. LePort first became interested in childhood education while in medical school, over thirty years ago. As a result of his interest, he discovered and began studying the ideas of Dr. Maria Montessori. He was intrigued by Montessori’s unique approach to developing the cognitive and moral needs of the individual child.
Years later, when his own young children were ready for preschool, Dr. LePort chose to educate them on the basis of Montessori principles. He sent them to the best Montessori schools in the area, trying several over the course of a few years. While his observations of his children’s experience confirmed his earlier appreciation of the Montessori method, he found most schools to be poorly managed. Often, administrators failed to hold themselves accountable to high standards, and teachers were regularly demoralized by a lack of support and guidance. Dr. LePort’s experiences managing his own business made him acutely sensitive to the ways in which poor administrators can undercut the expertise of motivated specialists—whether doctors or teachers.
As his older child approached fifth grade, Dr. LePort became increasingly dissatisfied with the schooling his children were receiving. Most of the local Montessori schools did not extend into the upper grades, and those that did failed to stress the academic rigor and conceptual thinking skills he wanted for his children. Dr. LePort turned to traditional private schools, and was again disappointed with what he found. Some schools focused primarily on social conformity, others politicized learning, others stressed rote memorization at the expense of understanding, and yet others pushed “creativity” at the expense of learning actual content. The biggest problem was that schools either did not teach knowledge, or taught it as blind dogma—they did not teach an evidence-based approach to knowledge.
Not satisfied with any of his alternatives, Dr. LePort decided to hire a teacher to homeschool his children, and helped her develop an innovative, new upper elementary program. Both of Dr. LePort’s children went on to finish that homeschool program, and gained entrance into PhD programs at top California universities.
Dr. LePort had been thinking about the field of education for decades; he had been involved in the process of educating his kids from start to finish; and he had the business acumen to see that most schools were very shoddily managed. Starting a school seemed like the next logical step. He began to envision a brand new approach to teaching children, an approach that would draw together the best aspects of Montessori and Classical education, taught through an evidence-based, scientific method—that is, an approach that offered Knowledge for Life. This school would hire the absolute best teachers and administrators it could find—and then hold them firmly accountable to high standards as only a private business could.
LePort Montessori Schools is the culmination of Dr. LePort’s efforts to provide children with a superior education, one in which they develop strong basic skills, master challenging content, and learn to think independently. Dr. LePort’s dedicated team of administrators, teachers, and educational experts have worked together for over a decade to develop and deliver an exceptional curriculum in a stimulating, nurturing environment, earning LePort Montessori Schools its reputation as a superior place of learning.
