Articles

Charlottesville High Senior Wins Scholarship

The Charlottesville Woman - powered by The Daily Progress - March 15, 2011, by Terry Beigie - original article

The Emily Couric Leadership Forum (ECLF) is pleased to announce that Logan Coleman, a senior at Charlottesville High School, has won the 11th annual Emily Couric Leadership Scholarship. Logan will receive a $25,000 scholarship, the most ever given by the ECLF. Logan and her fellow nominees will be recognized at the ECLF’s annual luncheon on March 24.

The scholarships are awarded annually and recognize and encourage young women in leadership roles. Each public or private high school in the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County may nominate one senior girl who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in her school and community. Each nominee receives a $3,000 scholarship. These scholarships will be available to be used within 18 months after high school graduation and are intended to be used to offset some of the costs of the recipient’s college education or another approved leadership endeavor. The nominees stand out as an initiators, implementers and problem solvers. A committee of community leaders makes the selection. This year the ECLF is awarding a record total of $52,000.

Logan has demonstrated a great potential for future leadership and influence or impact on society. The following criteria were important in the selection: sense of initiative, problem-solving ability, creativity, motivational effectiveness, communication skills, listening capacity, team building style, proven follow-through performance, and effective interpersonal skills.

Logan, 17, has lived in Charlottesville all her life. She attended University Montessori through kindergarten and it is there she developed her passion for different cultures, especially that of Africa. She created a nonprofit organization to combat genocide in Darfur when she was 13, learned to speak Kiswahili and has been active throughout her years at Charlottesville High School as a leader of the International Club, the Culture-2-Culture Club and the CHS Darfur Club. In summer 2009 she traveled alone to Kenya to live with the Maasai, and in 2010 to Lesotho, where she worked with an HIV/AIDS program.

Additionally, Logan is an award-winning photographer, loves Zumba and is perfecting her skills as a baker. She is the daughter of author Jonathan Coleman and Eileen Mosher Webb, an organizational development consultant and the head of Falls River Conference Center, and she has four older sisters. She has not yet decided where she will attend college in the fall, but plans to major in international relations and cultural anthropology in order to help prepare herself for a career of global policy-making and foreign service.

All nominees will be recognized at the ECLF’s spring luncheon at the Omni Hotel. This year’s featured speaker and recipient of the Emily Couric Women’s Leadership Award will be Melanne Verveer, United States Ambassador at Large for Global Women’s Issues. The Woman of the Year Award acknowledges an exceptional woman who exemplifies leadership in her profession and her community, with Emily Couric herself receiving the first honor in 2001.

Verveer was appointed by President Barack Obama for her term that began April 6, 2009. The president’s decision to create a position of Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues is unprecedented, and reflects the elevated importance of these issues to the president and his entire administration. In her capacity as director of the Department of State’s new office on Global Women’s Issues, Verveer coordinates foreign policy issues and activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women around the world. She mobilizes concrete support for women’s rights and political and economic empowerment through initiatives and programs designed to increase women’s and girls’ access to education and health care, to combat violence against women and girls in all its forms, and to ensure that women’s rights are fully integrated with human rights in the development of U.S. foreign policy.

Verveer most recently served as chair and co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international nonprofit she co-founded. Vital Voices invests in emerging women leaders and works to expand women’s roles in generating economic opportunity, promoting political participation and safeguarding human rights. Prior to her work with Vital Voices, Verveer served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady in the Clinton Administration and was chief assistant to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in all her wide-ranging international activities to advance women’s rights and further social development, democracy and peace-building initiatives. She also led the effort to establish the President’s Interagency Council on Women. Prior to her time in the White House, Verveer served in a number of leadership roles in public policy organizations and as legislative staff.

She received a B.A. and M.A. from Georgetown University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Women’s Foreign Policy Group, and numerous other organizations.

Honored speakers in the past have included Emily Couric, Katie Couric, Rita Dove, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Caroline Kennedy, Donna Brazile, Leslie Visser, Erin Gruwell, Kimberly Dozier and Anna Quindlen.

Tree of giving: Area Montessori students learn lessons from lumber

The Daily Progress - February 25, 2009 - original article

Preschoolers at the University Montessori School stood outside Tuesday, bundled in coats, and watched as workers cut down a silver maple long a fixture on their playground.

Students at the University Montessori School watch workers chop down a large, old tree on the school’s grounds. The school hopes to reuse the wood for class projects — which may include building a bridge.

However, in the vein of Shel Silverstein’s "The Giving Tree," the Montessori's maple will be reused as a local company cuts it into lumber for projects at the school.

Students have suggested using the tree — diseased and needing to come down — to build a wooden computer, dollhouse and a bridge, among other things, said Janet Ray, the school’s director.

Ray doesn’t see the computer getting built, but said the bridge is an extremely popular idea even if there is no real need for one at the school.

"A bridge is a reoccurring theme for preschool children. ... They just think they’re very cool," Ray said. "And I think that they don't care if [bridges] don’t go anywhere. ... We have to teach them about that before they go to Congress."

Students also asked for blocks, and wood to make sculpture with, Ray said. Cutting down the tree and having the wood milled will cost the nonprofit school about $3,000, she said.

She said the school, unaffiliated with the University of Virginia and located off Reservoir Road, called the tree project "part of our philosophy," saying the school’s curriculum focuses on reuse and conservation.

"When this happens, you don’t just put it in the landfill," Louisa Wimberger, assistant director at the school, said.

Rick Miller, owner of Logs to Lumber in Faber, said he’ll have to count the rings first, but that he figures the tree is roughly 40 years old. In years past Miller’s company salvaged, sawed and dried ash trees that were removed from UVa's historic Lawn.

Schaeffer Somers, an architect and parent of a Montessori student, is working on a plan with another parent, Jeff Aten, a landscape architect, that replaces the maple with possibly a dozen smaller trees. Somers said renderings envision the space as perhaps being used as an outdoor classroom.

Montessori Better, Science Journal Reports

Montessori-Science.org - September 28, 2006 - orginal article

According to a study reported in the September 29th issue of Science, Montessori educated children have better social and academic skills than children who attend traditional schools.

The authors, Virginia University psychology professor Dr Angeline Lillard and former Wisconsin University graduate student Dr Nicole Else-Quest compared the outcomes of children at a public inner-city Montessori school with children at traditional schools.

Children came from families of similar incomes and were evaluated at the end of the two most widely implemented levels of Montessori education: preschool (3-6 year-olds) and primary (6-12 year- olds). The children who attended the Montessori school, and the children who did not, were tested for their cognitive and academic skills, and for their social and behavioral skills.

“We found significant advantages for the Montessori students in these tests for both age groups,” Lillard said. “Particularly remarkable are the positive social effects of Montessori education. Typically the home environment overwhelms all other influences in that area.”

Among the 5-year-olds, Montessori students proved to be significantly better prepared for primary school in reading and math skills than the non-Montessori children. They also tested better on “executive function”, the ability to adapt to changing and more complex problems, an indicator of future school and life success.

Montessori children also displayed better abilities on the social and behavioral tests, demonstrating a greater sense of justice and fairness. And on the playground they were much more likely to engage in emotionally positive play with peers, and less likely to engage in rough play.

Among the 12-year-olds from both groups, the Montessori children, in cognitive and academic measures, produced essays that were rated as “significantly more creative” and using “significantly more sophisticated sentence structures”. The Montessori and non-Montessori students scored similarly on spelling, punctuation and grammar, and there was not much difference in academic skills related to reading and math. This parity occurred despite the Montessori children not being regularly tested and graded.

In social and behavioral measures, 12-year-old Montessori students were more likely to choose “positive assertive responses” for dealing with unpleasant social situations, such as having someone cut into a queue. They also indicated a “greater sense of community” at their school and felt that students there respected, helped and cared about each other.

“When strictly implemented, Montessori education fosters social and academic skills that are equal or superior to those fostered by a pool of other types of schools,” the authors concluded.

Lillard plans to continue her research by tracking the students from both groups over a longer period of time to determine the long-term benefits of Montessori versus traditional education.

Montessori education is characterized by multi-age classrooms, a special set of educational materials, student-chosen work in long time blocks, a collaborative environment with student mentors, absence of grades and tests, and individual and small group instruction in academic and social skills. Montessori is the single largest pedagogy in the world with more than 8000 schools worldwide.

Japanese Help Montessori Program Expand its World

The Charlottesville Observer - Gary Grant, Observer Staff Writer

Yasuko Kawasaki's children are living half a world away from their native culture, but a Charlottesville area school is helping them double up on their education. Her children are among 15 enrolled in the Charlottesville Japanese Program for Children at the University Montessori School on Fontaine Avenue Extended.

The new program was born of necessity in April. “There is a Japanese school in Richmond and one or two in D.C.,” says the part-time biology technician. “That's too far to drive. A couple of us were complaining about it until one day someone said, 'why don't we start a school of our own?'” Now every Thursday afternoon Charlottesville-based Japanese students from four to 12 years of age huddle around five teachers to study and practice their native language and do mathematics. "The teachers speak only Japanese and use Japanese textbooks and the children usually learn the language while they play," says Kawasaki.

Michele Mattioli is the director of the University Montessori School and has welcomed the opportunity to host the Japanese program. "We're thrilled to have them. Their activities are certainly developmentally appropriate and their presence has been a real plus for our children." Montessori students and Japanese children have been able to play with each other, share uncommon snacks and do origami together. "The jumping frog was a big hit," says Kawasaki. "Our teachers' babysitters have had to make a lot of origami frogs for the Montessori children."

The school's connection to the local Japanese community did not just begin this year. "A few summers ago," says Mattioli, "our summer camp was one-third Japanese children. Internationals have a very good grapevine for figuring out how to function in new places. If you get a Brazilian family, then you have this little Brazilian trail. If you get one Japanese family, then that trail begins. We've been very happy with the way international families have come to think of us."

The success of the Japanese program at University Montessori has brought inquiries from non-Japanese families who want their children in language and cultural classes. "There's going to be a Japanese culture class here in January," says Kawasaki, "There will be a small fee and it will be taught in English." Mattioli, who speaks Portuguese, says her school's global orientation may expand even further. "We have some folks interested in starting a German group and also a Chinese program, and my interest is in Spanish. "We are thinking about programs for both parents and children by having a conversation group for adults whose children are in another classroom."

The school will host its first Japanese Program party and potluck this Friday afternoon at 4:30. University Montessori families and parents and children from the Japanese program will get together. "It's a chance to get to know each other better," says Mattioli. "A Japanese lady is going to play traditional harp music for us, and we'll probably teach them the Hokey-Pokey."

Sounds like meeting someone halfway around the world for double the education.