A Santa Monica institution that taught small children the same way for more than six decades has closed, and what is taking its place is a sharp turn in the other direction, LAist reports.
The closure
Santa Monica Montessori School had operated since 1960, serving children from preschool through elementary. It closed on July 18. Families got the news in a letter dated July 5, roughly a week's warning that the school their children attended was shutting for good. The school's longtime director, Pamela Crisman, who has led it since 2003, did not respond to LAist's requests for comment.
For parents, the speed was the insult on top of the injury. "You don't just kick kids, toddlers, out on the street with a week's notice," one parent, Alex Mulvaney, told LAist. Another, Jocelyn Ranne, praised the Montessori teachers and was left scrambling to place a 3-year-old. "We were surprised," said a third, Michael Ho. "It was a pretty established place."
What is moving in
The replacement is Alpha School, a private school with a very different philosophy. Alpha is Texas-based and built around artificial intelligence: students spend about two hours a day on AI-powered software, most prominently for math, which the school says tailors instruction to each child. The rest of the day is given over to workshops, life skills, outdoor time and, the company stresses, human interaction. In Alpha's vocabulary, the adults in the room are not teachers but "guides."
Tuition is $65,000 a year for kindergarten through eighth grade. The Santa Monica campus is not a one-off: Alpha says it is opening eight California locations this fall, in Malibu, Palo Alto and Piedmont among them, adding to programs it already runs in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Orange County. It opens for the fall 2026 term.
What the swap represents
It would be easy to make this a simple morality tale, warm old Montessori out, cold AI machine in, and the abruptness of the closure invites that reading. But the more useful framing is what the substitution says about a slice of private education in wealthy parts of California.
Two very different theories of how young children learn best are being exchanged on the same piece of Santa Monica real estate. Montessori is a century-old method built on tactile materials, mixed-age classrooms and child-led pace. Alpha's pitch is that software can individualize the academic core more efficiently than a teacher managing a full room, freeing the human adults for everything else. Both claim to serve the individual child; they disagree profoundly about the role of the screen and the teacher in doing it.
Whether Alpha's model delivers is an open question, and a $65,000 price tag means the experiment is being run, at least here, on the children of families who can afford it. What is not in question is that a beloved neighborhood school closed quickly and painfully, and that its families did not choose the thing replacing it. The Herald will follow how Alpha's Santa Monica campus fares, and whether the AI-heavy model spreads further into the region's schools.
