How this site works

The record on every NYC Montessori school is public. Almost nobody has ever read it.

It lives in three city and state systems that don’t talk to each other, written in Health Code section numbers, and it rewrites itself after the fact — one school’s inspection summary has changed four times since August. We assemble it per school, keep every version with its date, say what it means in plain English, and publish the tribunal’s verdict whichever way it goes. No ads, no trackers, no school-supplied copy, no exceptions.

Nobody reads a school’s city record. We read all of them — continuously.

A tour shows you a classroom. A school’s website shows you what it chose to say. The public record shows you what inspectors found, what the tribunal decided, whether the permit is current, and whether the staff behind the Montessori name hold the credentials the name implies. Finding that record for one school takes an afternoon and a working knowledge of Article 47 of the Health Code. Finding it for every school, and noticing when it changes, is a job. It’s this one.

What we check, and how often

  • The city’s live child-care register — every permit, re-read within days of any change. Inspection results, open and corrected citations, permit status and expiry, drinking-water lead results, for every permitted programme behind the schools in this guide (33 register blocks covering 58 permits). Summary strings on this register change retroactively; we log every version with the date we saw it.
  • The tribunal docket. Every summons heard at the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, matched to the inspection that produced it: section cited, result, penalty — benchmarked against all 18,161 child-care cases on record, so you can tell routine from serious.
  • State filings. NYSED enrollment and registration records, the only reliable signal that a school has quietly ceased to exist. A closure publishes here only on two independent sources, one of them positive evidence — never on an absence alone.
  • Accreditation registers, monthly. Every “AMS” or “AMI” claim is checked against the associations’ own registers — member, verified, accredited and “Montessori-inspired” are different things, and the labels drift. We’ve corrected our own.
  • Each school’s own published staff page and job postings, weekly. Who teaches your child and what credential the school requires to put an adult in front of children — the sharpest authenticity test there is, and the basis of our transparency rating.
  • Tuition and leadership against primary sources only. Never aggregators; never a figure we couldn’t trace to the school itself.

How we publish

Every enforcement notice carries two headings. What the Health Department’s record says gives the section number, the Department’s verbatim wording in quotation marks, the recorded status and the hearing date or outcome — so a parent, or the school, can check it against the register in a minute. What this means & what parents should know is ours: what the category means, what each citation actually describes, what happens next, and what to ask on the tour. The line between the two is the line between record and editorial, and we keep it visible.

Everything is dated. Citations are presented as allegations until the tribunal rules, and we publish the ruling whichever way it goes — a dismissal as prominently as a sustained finding. No individual is ever named in enforcement material. Our transparency rating measures what a school discloses, not its compliance record, and the two are kept apart on every page.

Rules we hold ourselves to

  • A school closure needs two independent sources, one of them positive evidence of cessation. Two absences are never corroboration.
  • Register wording is quoted, never characterised. Where a code section points at a person rather than a condition, we print the section and a neutral gloss and nothing more.
  • Anything we publish is re-verified against the live record the same day it goes up. Revisions are rewritten cleanly to current facts, with dated observations, and the history is kept.
  • Corrections run the same day. Schools get a correction line, not a veto — and a documented correction is published alongside the original claim.
  • Reader comments are moderated and kept visibly separate from the editorial profile. We never author, seed or post a comment.

What we don’t do

No advertising. No trackers or analytics. No affiliate or referral links. No paid placement, sponsored listings or school-supplied copy. No test scores or prestige rankings — our tiers reward verified accreditation, honest tuition and open disclosure of staff, nothing else. We are independent of every school listed and of the Montessori associations whose registers we check.

By the numbers

  • 50 school profiles across all five boroughs, including 11 documented closures that other directories still list as open.
  • 33 live-register blocks covering 58 city permits, re-checked continuously since August 2026.
  • 18,161 tribunal cases as the benchmark behind every school’s health-and-safety record.
  • 26 dated, sourced events on the News & Data timeline; 76 pages in all.

Who makes this

An independent editorial project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any school, association or vendor. It is published without bylines by design; the method, the sources and the dates are on every page so that the work can be checked instead of trusted. Questions, corrections and updates: contact & corrections.