The Ross Montessori School will undergo a massive change after the 2024-25 school year comes to an end. 

Long time principal and Head of School Sonya Hemmen will put down the pencil at the end of the school year for one last time. She will hand the pencil sharpener to experienced RMS teacher and educator Mandi Franz after the end of the school year.

The 2024-25 school year serves as a transition year at RMS, with Franz and Hemmen working closely to ensure a smooth transition.

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“I decided in May,” Hemmen said. “This year has been really gratifying. Meeting with Mandi every day has been very gratifying and there has been a healthy push and pull between us all year. Mandi has been taking the reins on a lot of really big topics this year and it has been really fun to watch her.”

Franz and Hemmen have been in the education sphere for over two decades. Their parents saw their career paths coming long before they did.

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“My mom would tell you I was teaching teddy bears and dolls in my bedroom,” Hemmen joked. “When I got my first teaching position, that didn’t surprise her at all, and when I got my first principalship, she went, ‘Of course you did, you have been running our family for years.'”

Hemmen has been a staple of Garfield County’s education system since the early 2000’s. She spent three years as the assistant principal at Glenwood Springs High School before becoming principal at Glenwood Springs Elementary School. She spent the better part of a decade as the principal of GSES before taking the job at Ross in 2011.

“The difference between GSES and RMS was night and day,” Hemmen said. “I had to learn a lot in those first few years. I learned a lot from Mandi and the rest of the staff. Being a principal at a conventional school is more middle-management, but at a charter school, it’s more like superintendency. The biggest difference was listening a lot and learning even more. There is a real opportunity to grow from within at charter schools. I think that may be true of other schools but we certainly have it here.”

After joining the RMS family, Hemmen decided she wanted to spend the rest of her career in the community. That remains true, but after working hard to achieve her doctorate, new opportunities are calling.

“I would like to move into higher ed, and I would like to help other charter leaders and Montessori leaders. I just think it’s time for a new challenge,” Hemmen said. 

Hemmen had to lean on Franz during her initial years as principal of RMS. The two developed a close relationship over the past decade, so when it came time to name a predecessor, Hemmen knew who she would hand the torch to. 

Franz, the daughter of a Montessori teacher, fell in love with learning at a young age. The obsession stuck with her throughout her life and after witnessing disengagement in traditional public schools, she wanted to share the Montessori message.

“I grew up loving school and being really engaged with learning,” she said. “So when I moved to conventional public school in seventh grade and I saw my own peers who had already given up on learning. That’s when I realized my love of learning isn’t as mainstream as I thought it was. That’s when I decided ‘I want to be a Montessori teacher when I grow up.'”

Franz moved to the Roaring Fork Valley before Ross Montessori had even been built. The dirt lot where the future school would soon sit perfectly encapsulates the way Franz has helped build the Montessori community from the ground up over the past 20 years. 

“It was just a dirt lot when I moved here,” she said. “I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I moved here for a job that doesn’t even have a building, what am I doing?’ We were a scrappy group of founders who did whatever needed to be done—it was an all hands on deck type thing. Over the years we’ve become more systematic as we’ve grown in size.”

Franz spent her formative years learning at a Montessori school and has spent every second since then learning more about the student-directed learning system. Her first 11 years at Ross were spent teaching first, second, and third graders, but her desire to help pushed her into the Associate Head of School role in 2016. 

Despite receiving a bachelor’s degree from Xavier University in Montessori education and her masters from Endicott College with a thesis in Leadership for Public Montessori Education in Rural and Remote Settings, Franz was unsure where the road that is her career would take her. If you had told her that one day she would be principal of the school she watched grow from its beginnings, she wouldn’t have believed you.

“Years ago, I would have said I never wanted to be principal,” Franz started. “But then I started noticing things bigger than just what was happening in my classroom and outside of my 20 students. I wanted to support the whole school. So I became a teaching coach and then started to look at the whole school, and look at the educational philosophy. Then during COVID, I started to learn even more about leading a school and taking on other responsibilities.”

Franz is both nervous and excited to take on her new responsibilities when the 2025-26 school year rolls around.

“I’m excited to continue to watch the school grow, develop, and share leadership with different folks. This is a place for teacher and adult development and I’m excited to support other teachers along that path. I’m kind of nervous for the more business type jobs that I’m less familiar with; finances, hiring, Human Resources, those bigger picture type jobs.”

The pair of Montessori administrative moguls will keep working together through the end of the 2024-25 school year before Franz fully takes over as Head of School.