Wildflower Charter School Founding Team Opportunity

Build a public Montessori school from the ground up — as a Founding Administrative Partner or a Founding Teacher Leader.

Wildflower is seeking entrepreneurial school leaders and experienced Montessori educators to join founding teams that will design, launch, and eventually lead teacher-led public charter Montessori schools. Founding teams are built around two co-founder roles working side by side:

• Founding Administrative Partner — builds and coordinates the charter-wide systems (governance, authorizer relations, finance, HR, compliance, data, enrollment, communications, technology) that let the school operate as a compliant, sustainable public institution. The Administrative Partner serves as the Charter Leader, while the Teacher Leader stewards the school site and its educational program.
  
  
• Founding Teacher Leader — an experienced Montessori educator who co-develops the educational vision, school culture, and learning environment, and will lead their own classroom in the school they built.

As a Founding Administrative Partner and/or Founding Teacher Leader, you will participate in the Wildflower Charter Incubator, a structured program combining coaching, practical work, and individualized support to prepare you for charter application, authorization, and school opening.

These founder pathways will have a paid teaching and leadership role at the end of it, but are not immediate employment positions.

About the Opportunity

Administrative Partners and Teacher Leaders share leadership, making decisions collaboratively. Both move through the Wildflower Charter Incubator and complete its readiness milestones, and both contribute to charter application development and authorization. Beyond that shared foundation, each partner brings distinct work:

Founding Administrative Partners:

• Co-create the operational, governance, and financial foundation of a future Wildflower charter school.
• Build relationships with communities, authorizers, and founding board members.
• Develop systems for enrollment, finance, compliance, governance, and operations.
• Help assemble the partnerships, fundraising, and organizational infrastructure needed to launch a sustainable public Montessori school.

Founding Teacher Leaders:

• Co-develop the educational vision, school culture, and learning environment.
• Build relationships with families, community organizations, and local partners.
• Help recruit founding board members and future Teacher Leaders.
• Develop enrollment strategies that make Montessori available to more families.
• Create systems that allow educators to lead together through shared governance.
• Prepare to launch and lead their own Montessori classroom as a co-founder.

During the Incubator

The Incubator begins with six weeks of structured work alongside a small group of founding teams, followed by four weeks of individual coaching and integration sessions with your team. Support continues as teams move toward application and launch, and includes:

• Readiness reviews and milestone feedback
• Charter application development and authorization preparation
• Governance and board development / shared leadership
• Financial modeling, fundraising planning, and financial sustainability
• Community engagement, family engagement, and enrollment strategy
• Montessori program design and community-rooted school design
• Team development
• Long-term school startup planning

Who We're Looking For

For the Administrative Partner role, strong candidates may have experience in school leadership, charter schools, nonprofit management, business operations, finance, project management, public administration, or community organizing. No single background is required; what matters is you're ready to build.

For the Teacher Leader role, we're seeking experienced Montessori educators who don't want to choose between the classroom and leadership. Founding Teacher Leaders do both, guiding children every day while creating an entirely new public school around them. Strong candidates typically have:

• MACTE-accredited Montessori certification (AMI, AMS, or equivalent)
• Several years of Montessori classroom experience
• Deep respect for child-centered learning
• Strong relationships in the community they hope to serve
• A desire to expand access to public Montessori education

For both roles, you believe in the teacher-leader school model, that schools should be deeply rooted in the communities they serve, that public Montessori should be open to every family, and that leadership is shared and relational. Successful founders are builders and systems thinkers: comfortable with ambiguity, energized by creating something that doesn't yet exist, curious, collaborative, resilient, and motivated by long-term impact, always keeping the mission at the center.

Compensation

Participation in the Wildflower Charter Incubator is unpaid. This is a founding journey, and like most founding journeys, the compensation comes when the organization you build comes to life.

Founding teams typically spend 6 to 12 months developing a charter application and securing authorization, then another 6 to 12 months preparing for launch. Once a school is authorized and moves into implementation, founders transition into paid leadership positions within the school they have created, with Teacher Leaders leading their own classrooms. Post-launch salaries typically range from $70,000 to $100,000, depending on the school's location and state funding levels.

Commitment

Launching a Wildflower charter school is comparable to starting a mission-driven social enterprise: it calls for persistence, collaboration, and sustained effort over several years. You won't do it alone. Throughout the process, you'll have coaching, practical tools, and the broader Wildflower network behind you, while retaining full ownership of building a school that reflects your community and vision.

Geographic Consideration

Where you build matters. Charter law, authorizer relationships, and funding conditions vary widely by state, so Wildflower is focused on places where a new charter school can realistically succeed: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and parts of Upstate New York.

New Wildflower charter schools are not currently viable in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, or Washington state. If you're in one of these locations and this work speaks to you, Wildflower's independent school pathway and openings at existing Wildflower charter schools may be a better fit.