In the early 1970s, Montessori education was largely unheard of in Montana and completely nonexistent in institutional form. But a group of parents in the Flathead Valley had come across the educational method elsewhere and wondered whether they could bring it to Northwest Montana.

Not much pointed to Kalispell as an obvious launching point for this pedagogical movement, but the parents banded together and worked with community leaders to launch the Flathead Montessori Society in 1972, long believed to be Montana’s first Montessori school, although an educator in Billings has said she started a program the same year.