Member Spotlight

Honeypot Montessori

Honeypot Montessori was founded in Fall 2022 in the Greater Newark area. The program serves children ages 3-5 following a Montessori pedagogy with an emphasis on nature- and place-based methods. Children spend about 30% of their day outside during the week. Currently, enrollment comprises 100% Black and Brown children from different economic backgrounds within the community. The school operates on a 3-3-3 tuition equity model where ⅓ of families pay full tuition, ⅓ are eligible for reduced tuition rate, and ⅓ qualify for state subsidies and voucher programs.

To increase outdoor engagement and expand its reach, Honeypot implemented a tuition free, 100% outdoor Saturday school for all children in the Greater Newark area, in partnership with Apiary In the Sky, a beekeeping and honey-making urban farming space.

Natural Start spoke with Honeypot’s co-founder, Deja Jones, to learn more about the preschool.

When you founded the school, what inspired you to focus on a nature-based approach to learning, and how did you know it would fill a need within the community?

When I founded Honeypot Montessori, I was already in my final year as a doctoral candidate at Saybrook University. I was researching environmental racism’s impact on children’s development in early childhood and how Black children still have nature experiences despite deficit narratives. I had also just finished my service year with FoodCorps. In this AmeriCorps entity, I was stationed in Newark Public Schools to teach nutrition education, school gardening, and environmental education to K-8th graders. We had gotten a lot of interest from early childhood programs to install a FoodCorps program; however, we did not have a curriculum for that age group.

During my service year, I invited several pre-K classes to spend time with me in the school gardens and would find my own books and resources to do lessons and food demonstrations with them. We planted and harvested a pea garden that year. The excitement and sense of wonder the children experienced while having outdoor experiences and how free and liberating those experiences were for them. To witness the surprise of finding an earthworm in the soil, a spider, or a centipede and how those moments impacted them or introducing them to a new fruit or vegetable made me wonder why these experiences aren’t the norm for our children.

One of Honeypot’s core values is educating “Black and Brown children for life and liberation.” Tell us about what that looks like in practice.

When children come into the Montessori children’s house in the morning, they are greeted with music, dance, and hugs, and know that they are going to have a joyous day of learning at their own pace and about the subjects they’re interested in learning when their brains are ready. We know that life isn’t all about academics and that children should have space to develop their whole selves.

We offer a liberating space for our children to grow, learn, make mistakes, socialize, and develop self-discipline and independence so they can understand real success comes from feelings of self-satisfaction and self-mastery. Our approach to nature education follows this same sentiment. Children learn patience and appreciate the slowness of nature through planting seeds and watching them sprout and grow into plants. They discover trial and error when plants aren’t nurtured enough and die or when seeds planted don’t sprout. They know to see nature wherever they are. They learn responsibility and duty by taking care of our learning environment so that everyone in it can access what we all need.

Honeypot is involved in environmental justice work in the Greater Newark area. Can you share a bit about how you approach this at the preschool level?

Honeypot came into existence with the acknowledgment that many interventions for children in the city left out early childhood-age youth. Many STEM, STEAM, and climate justice programming began with school-aged children, leaving our little ones out. Unlike any other, we believed there needed to be a preschool in the city that focused on stewardship and environmental education, taught children the basics of taking care of nature, and allowed space for Black and Brown children to reconnect with nature in their most innocent way. Nature should be a huge part of childhood; we just didn’t see children getting outside enough or understanding the value of nature.

Bonus Question!

Honeypot Montessori is part of the Wildflower Schools Network, a Montessori micro-school network. Can you tell us more about that relationship? What are the benefits of being involved with that network?

Honeypot Montessori is a sub-affiliate of the Wildflower Schools Network and Wildflower Foundation. It provides resources and assistance to teachers interested in opening Montessori micro-schools in their communities. Wildflower Schools operates as a decentralized network that allows teachers the autonomy to design and lead schools that meet the needs of their communities, children, and families. Honeypot’s relationship with Wildflower has been invaluable from an entrepreneurial point of view because if it had not been for the funding and business coaching support from foundation partners, the process of opening would have been much more difficult on our own.

Wildflower Schools Network currently has about 64 schools across the country and in Puerto Rico that are affiliated and based on region; we form hubs where we can connect with other teacher leaders or attend affinity group meetings and share resources and ideas about any topic from recruitment tactics, social media marketing support, pedagogy support, etc.