The church for which the school was named had been a victim of diocese construction plans. In the 1950's, two parishes merged and a new church was built only six blocks away. Madonna of the Balancing Snow became a preschool in the hands of an order of nuns with socio-political tastes similar to the Jesuits.
In the late fifties, the sisters became enamored of Montessori Education and sent three of their order to Italy to study at the feet of Dr. Maria Montessori's heir. They returned with sandpaper letters, pink towers, red and blue rods and a new fire in their eyes.
In the seventies, Montessori education gained popularity with a new generation of parents. These new moms and dads were in the process of cutting their hair, putting on bras, getting real jobs, starting businesses, and generally selling out the righteous principles they had spent the sixties ramming down their own parents' throats.
More and more of these new rich counterculture types, (like me) started sending their children to St. Maddy's. The conservative local Catholic diocese, beset by financial woes, wasn't exactly enamored with its little "experimental" school and put a cap on funding in 1972. Then as more hippies and yippies became yuppies, able to pay the substantial new tuition rates, fewer and fewer of the "socially disadvantaged" children who had been the original focus of the school were able to gain admittance.
By the early eighties, Madonna of the Balancing Snow Montessori School had no neighborhood children attending and a budget from the diocese that made sure it would stay that way. The Catholic sisters had a crisis of conscience. They rightly felt they hadn't become chaste just to serve the needs of children who arrived in BMW's driven by the maid.
So in 1986, the sisters made a deal with the only source of funding they could find to bring "truly needy children" back into the school population, good ol' Uncle Sam.
They got a grant to be a dayschool for "wards of the state". That meant abuse victims, crack babies, children of chronic offenders, children taken away from unfit parents, etc. In other words, outcasts from the breeding pens of the penitenturies.
These were tough kids. I had to take a four inch blade away from a seven year old...and he knew how to use it. They had been on their own from the time they were born and the ones that came to us were the ones that had survived. They knew how to get through. The white bread yuppy kids either got tough or got gone. The conflict this change caused between the sisters and the parents was covertly called the "Wardy Wars" by the staff.
Despite the odds, St. Maddy's is a story with a happy ending. Turned out that a reasonably large group of the parents at the school decided it was a good time to find their ideals. Instead of running in "white flight", we manned the battlements and came to the aid of the teachers, providing the extra manpower as volunteers that was needed to manage the new school population. By 1989, fully thirty percent of the children in the school were "wardies" and there wasn't a finer place to put your children in the city of Houston.
St. Maddy's was the first Houston school and one of the first in the South to put into practice the ideas of that colorful Italian unwed mother and contemporary of Freud, Dr. Maria Montessori.
Dr. Montessori's system is based on respect for the child. She had the wierd idea that if the world was going to work, people were going to have to learn to nurture and respect one another. She also noticed that children learned more effectively when they discovered concepts on their own. So she developed an entire system of curriculum and didactic materials designed to allow young people to "internalize" concepts through experience rather than memorize facts associated with them.
A Montessori classroom is a wierd place. For one thing, there aren't rows of desks full of squirming children like the ones at good ol' Sweetwater Elementary. The kids choose their own projects and work on their own timetable. The teachers (usually more than one) wander around the classroom calmly observing the work and being as unobtrusive as possible. They only intrude when asked or to arbitrate a dispute. It's a busy place. That's just the way kids are when you leave them alone...busy.
Funny isn't it? When I was a kid the only time I was busy was when I got out of school. The rest of my educational experience consisted of avoiding as much work as possible.