Super Under Pressure

A few days after school started, our art teacher presented me with a t-shirt. She'd made it herself, on her own weekend time. It was green, my favorite color, and it had a red cape, the felted words "Super Under."...and a hand sewn pressure cooker. She told me it was my hero shirt. I am Super Under Pressure Woman.

I smiled so big when I opened it. When I got home that night, I sat with it, and my heart felt so full. The kind of feeling where you feel so grateful you sort of want to cry...because she was right, and even more importantly, because she'd noticed me. She saw me keeping my head up when it was hard. She didn't have to make that shirt on her weekend off. She chose to, because that's who she is, and it's who we are here at Mi Escuela Montessori.

But here's the thing I want every family to know: I am not the only Super Under Pressure hero on this campus. Not even close.

How We Got Here

For five years, I have known almost every child's name on our campus, not by accident, but because I made it a practice. I'd stop kids in the hallway just to hold onto a name a little longer. We were smaller when we began, in 2021. Eighteen staff members. One hundred and sixty-eight students in K-4. No school transportation. A handful of gifted learners and one exceptional education teacher working part-time between other roles.

Today we have 80 staff members. Over four hundred and fifty students in toddler through eighth grade programs. A thriving afterschool program. Two buses. Our exceptional education program, both ESE and Gifted together, has grown into a team of nine. We're training the next generation of Montessori guides, with 13 trainees learning alongside our veteran teachers. And we're building a new building, while running two temporary campuses at once, one of them fifteen minutes away from the other.

That kind of growth doesn't happen quietly, and it doesn't happen without strain. Right now, no lie, our strain is visible almost everywhere you look. It's also proof of something: five years ago, none of this existed. We built it together, on purpose, one decision at a time, and we're still building it.

What Under Pressure Actually Looks Like

It looks like upper elementary teachers building community in a gymnasium with 1970s pod-style walls, for three more months, and not one day longer than the construction timeline requires.

It looks like our middle school team, physically separated from the rest of campus, working without internet while we finalize the filters that keep their students safe online. No copier yet, but traveling to our main campus to copy. Shortened planning time because specialists can't easily reach them, something our schedule team is actively re-mapping to fix by next week.

It looks like our food service team figuring out how to deliver meals not just across a campus, but across two locations, and doing it without a single missed meal so far.

It looks like our art teacher welcoming preschoolers at drop-off and holding aftercare in her room in the afternoon, resetting the classroom in whatever space is left in between.

It looks like our ESE team supervising the loud, tired energy of bus kids waiting for a late shuttle, so a route that meets the needs of all of our K-8 students can run.

It looks like primary teachers keeping their heads up when their planning time is shortened by earlier dismissal the first few weeks of school.

It looks like our music teacher becoming a traveling show, and our lower elementary teachers handing over their classrooms to the upper elementary students so music can happen at all, sometimes with children singing while they try to plan for the week.

It looks like collaborative planning time decreasing, and everyone feeling just a little less connected, which is exactly why we're protecting it as one of the first things to restore once we're back on one campus.

It looks like a phone system we discovered was quietly routing every call to one unmanned line. We caught it, and we fixed it. But it was frustrating for parents and staff in the meantime.

It looks like responding to last-minute staffing challenges with grace, making sure we have the right new people to fill our roles.

None of this is because anyone dropped the ball. It's because it's the beginning of the year, a season that is, by its very nature, a restart. New staff, new students, new norms, new rapport, new academic footing, all while trying to read where each child is really starting from. Layer that on top of two extra campuses and a construction project, and you get exactly what you're seeing: a school full of people stretching further than they thought they could, and still showing up, and still getting the job done.

Why I'm Telling You This

I could write you a blog post about all the exciting things happening this year, and there are so many. But I think what our families deserve more than polish right now is honesty.

Right now, I'm personally holding roles that most schools our size split across several people: food service, HR, finance, transportation, grant writing, our website, and the leadership of two of our programs, on top of directing every decision on our new building. That's not because we lack a plan for it. It's because five years ago, this school didn't need separate people in those seats, and as we've grown from 18 staff to 80, building out that structure is work I'm doing in real time, alongside everything else.

I hold a high bar for how smoothly I want things to run and how clearly I want to communicate with every one of you, especially our newest families. Right now, I'm not always moving at the pace I'd like to build those relationships as fast as I want to, and closing that gap is one of my top priorities this fall, not something I'm letting slide. That's a hard thing to admit as a founder. It's also just true, and I'd rather tell you the truth than perform a calm I don't feel.

And I am watching my staff do the exact same thing, in their own ways, every single day. Veteran teachers mentoring brand-new ones in how to bring a dual-language Montessori classroom to life with real fidelity, not just on paper. Teachers giving up their own space and time so someone else's need gets met first. People solving problems nobody warned them they'd have to solve, then showing up the next morning and doing it again. Teachers coming in on their weekend off so they can feel like they have their space together. Staff working overtime so that we have supervision in all of our wraparound programs.

Our students are flexing through it too, new rooms, new routines, new routes to get from one place to another, and they are doing it with more grace than we probably realize.

Raising Super Under Pressure Kids, Too

Here's what I keep coming back to: we don't just want our adults to be able to weather a hard season. We want that for our children, too. Not because we want their lives to be hard, but because their lives will be hard sometimes, and we want them to already have the tools in hand when that day comes.

Resilience looks different depending on how old you are and what you're facing. For one child, it's staying with a passage that's harder than their normal reading level, reading it a second time, annotating it line by line until the meaning finally unravels. For another, it's working up the courage to tell a friend how they really feel, even with the fear that the friend might not feel the same way back. For another, it's trying one approach to a math problem, watching it fail, and trying another, and another, until something clicks.

None of that grit shows up by accident. It gets built, in small moments, over and over, with adults nearby who believe the child can get there.

And it can't be built alone. Resilience needs community to grow in. Our school is that community, and honestly, it's part of how we're surviving this season ourselves. We lean on each other, and you see it in the children every day, too:

A child walks in upset about something that happened at home. A small disagreement between two friends turns into what feels, to them, like the biggest thing in the world. A whole group is restless and everyone can tell, before a single word is said, that they aren't ready to focus yet.

These are the moments our teachers are trained to see. Not interruptions to the "real" learning, but the real learning itself, because a child who knows how to move through a hard moment with a friend, or name what they're feeling before it takes over, is building the exact same muscle they'll need later for a hard passage or a hard problem or a hard year. In these moments, our teachers coach children to develop optimism, self-regulation and conflict resolution skills.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing more of this with you directly, the small, ordinary moments where resilience actually gets built, so you can see what we see every day and maybe borrow a few of these tools at home, too.

What I Know to Be True

This is temporary. Knowing that doesn't make it easier in the moment, but it does mean something. The gymnasium walls will come down. The middle schoolers will come home to join us on one campus. The new building will stand where the strain is right now, and one day we'll walk past it and remember this season the way you remember something you can't quite believe you got through: You can't make this stuff up, and we still don't believe we made it.

Until then, I want to say thank you. To the families who've extended patience when a call didn't come through, when a schedule shifted, when things felt a little more chaotic than usual. To the ones who lift us up simply by staying, by sending that positive thank you note, by trusting that what we're building, literally and otherwise, is worth this hard season.

We see you. We see each other. And every single one of us here is a Super Under Pressure hero, holding our heads up, one day at a time, together and still building something real.