An open house Wednesday evening in Memphis will tout a new Catholic school under the patronage of Servant of God Thea Bowman, an African American on the path to sainthood.
Sr Thea Bowman Montessori School will open this summer with a class of preschool students under the unique model pioneered by Dr. Maria Montessori, a 20th-century Italian Catholic physician whose educational insights have since spread worldwide.
They center around hands-on activities for students of various grade levels, often in a blended classroom context that encourages intergenerational learning and innovative teaching methods.
“There's work for all ages,” Marilyn Jenkins told The Commercial Appeal last fall, in her role as lead teacher of Sr Thea Bowman School.
“Then the really beautiful aspect of having that mixed age group is that the 6-year-old can teach the 3-year-old. There's that peer teaching, peer support aspect.”
Exciting news! 🌟A new Sister Thea Bowman school is coming to Memphis, Tennessee in 2025!https://t.co/VDyzx3JQ6B
— Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (@FSPAtweets) August 30, 2024
The new school, housed next to St. Patrick Catholic Church, is only the latest of several around the country named after Bowman. She is buried at Elmwood Cemetery, just under two miles from the downtown Memphis campus.
The project is the brainchild of parish advocates who have longed for such an institution to again occupy its halls after a six-year absence. The original parochial school, founded more than 150 years ago to serve Irish immigrants, closed in 1950 after parishioners moved away from the inner city during White Flight.
It was revived in 2003 by Bishop J. Terry Steib, SVD and former Catholic schools superintendent Dr. Mary McDonald, who inaugurated the Memphis Jubilee Schools to bring Catholic education back to urban areas. That initiative, which involved a new St. Patrick School edifice built from the ground up, ended with the shutdown of the network in 2019.
That same year, Bowman’s sainthood cause was opened in the Diocese of Jackson, where she served as a Catholic school teacher and intercultural ministry coordinator. She had gained international fame as an itinerant preacher, Black Catholic liturgist, and social justice advocate before her death from breast cancer in 1990 at the age of 52.
After the closure of St. Patrick’s School in Memphis, the parish—then run by the Paulist Fathers—retained the building, which passed to the diocese after the religious community left in 2013. A charter school renovation plan fell through in 2018, leading to the Montessori plan just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the resulting delay, major changes hit the Catholic school scene in Memphis, with the historic Immaculate Conception Cathedral School closing its high school in 2020, and its elementary and middle school in 2024.
Now, five years after its announcement, Sr Thea Bowman School is ready for action. It will honor both Bowman’s legacy and the Paulists’ 60-year history of activism and racial justice work at St. Patrick’s, located in the heart of what is now the nation’s largest majority-Black city.
“Under their leadership, the parish made a commitment to work towards the eradication of racism. When the sanitation workers went on strike [in 1968], the St. Patrick community set up a triage center, caring for the victims of racial violence,” reads the website of the new school.
“In the recent past, the church launched a program to build affordable housing in the neighborhood. They purchased and remodeled two older houses… Moreover, St. Patrick built five new homes, the first ones built in this area in almost 50 years.”
The parish’s investment in the neighborhood, which remains predominantly Black, will continue with the Sr Thea Bowman School, which has received generous external support. An $80,000 launch grant was announced last year, with an additional $100,000 in December from the Sisters of Mercy. A $46,000 grant came in April 2025 from the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, who administered the former St. Patrick School.
In recent months, the Sr Thea Bowman School ramped up its outreach with “playgroup” sessions on campus, involving samples of the Montessori model in a parent-student setting. Those ended in May, with the school regularly posting updates throughout the process.
Though Black Montessori schools are not common, their history goes back many decades. Dr. Montessori founded the method in 1907, and by 1950 Dr. James Anderson had founded an African-American Montessori school in Washington. Another pioneer in the method, who with Anderson attended the first U.S. Montessori course in 1947, was the Black Catholic former nun Mae-Arlene Gadpaille.
The grand opening of the Sr Thea Bowman School this July is to be a taste of things to come for the Memphis project. For now, it is enrolling ages two and a half to five, with plans for a full elementary school in the near future. The school is also currently hiring for an assistant guide (teacher), who will assist Jenkins with the first class of students.
The school’s board members include St. Patrick’s parishioners Jenkins, local attorney and civil rights veteran Debra Brittenum, and Montessori expert Rebekah Rojcewicz, who also specializes in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a parish-based use of the method that will be integrated at Sr Thea Bowman School. Also serving are Sister of Charity of Nazareth Trudy Foster and Mercy Sister Joan Byrne.
The new Montessori school, a registered nonprofit in the state of Tennessee, is also fundraising for its operations and planned expansion, with donation options available on its website.
Wednesday’s open house will begin at 5pm CT, and questions can be directed to the school at (901) 606-1970 or info@stbms.org.
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
